Why Saving the Amazon is Saving Ourselves | Paul Rosolie DSH #1286

Speaker 1 are awesome. Snakes are so cool.
They're so good. They're magic.
You put a snake down and they'll just vanish into a forest. They're just gone.
Or the fact that anacondas that are way, you know,

Speaker 1 the length of double this table, even anaconda that's, you know, huge and they can live their entire life without ever being detected.

Speaker 1 They're just moving through streams and they're taking down big prey and then they go hide again.

Speaker 1 Okay, guys, flew in from the Amazon jungle. Let's go.
We got Paul here. There we go.
How long you been out there now?

Speaker 1 This year, this is like one of the first times I've been in civilization. So like, wow.
Yeah, cold water,

Speaker 1 all that stuff. It's very, it's very cool.
So it's a big change for you. It's a big change for me.
I can wear, I have not, I mean, I'm wearing a shirt. I'm wearing two shirts.
I have shoes on.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, it's a different reality. Thanks.
You spent a lot of years out there then. I mean, yeah, I went down there first when I was 19 years old.

Speaker 1 18 or 19? No, it's been 19 years. I went down there when I was 18 years old.
Jeez. And I've, I mean, the last couple of years, I've been spending seven months out of the year in the jungle.

Speaker 1 So, so really, that's, that's become home. Wow.
Yeah. So coming back to society is weird as hell for me.
Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm like, you know, like, like, you ever see like a dog get scared of traffic? Like at this point, like, I'm used to falling asleep to the sound of frogs. Wow.

Speaker 1 So, like, I come back and, and I just like the sound of air conditioning, the sound of motors. I'm like, you know, it freaks me out.
It must be pretty soothing to fall asleep to nature sounds.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's the best. You sleep so good.
Yeah. Everybody tells me that.

Speaker 1 I play rain sometimes when I can't sleep yeah dude my favorite my favorite is like rainforest thunder tracks we when we record our own we make our own oh you do oh yeah oh that's yeah you just like leave a recorder out in a swamp for all night yeah and just get the get the get the thunder and the and the water dripping off the leaves it's fantastic it's such good sleep we should actually we should put that up yeah we should we should share that with people that would do well yeah when i was a kid i used to catch frogs in my local river but yeah i don't know what i don't know what happened though

Speaker 1 just slide it back on yeah we'll edit that out

Speaker 1 You have to twist it a little bit. There we go.
There we go. Yeah.
But when I was a kid, I used to go to my local river and catch frogs. Yeah.
And then they just disappeared randomly. Really?

Speaker 1 Where'd you grow up? Bridgewater, New Jersey. Really? Yeah.
Okay. So my family's from Brooklyn, and I grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey for a lot of years.
Yeah, yeah. Let's go.
There you go. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't know what's going on with frogs, though, man. Well, chytrid fungus, habitat destructs like everything else.
You know, that's why I do what I do.

Speaker 1 We've lost 50% of the life on Earth in the last since 1970. Damn.
So we're in this major cataclysmic moment in history where we're losing our ecosystems.

Speaker 1 And what's crazy for me is coming back to cities and realizing that 50% of the people on earth live in cities.

Speaker 1 And most people at this point are pretty cut off from the fact that like farmers still know it, outdoorsmen still know it, but that's where our rain comes from, you know, clean air, clean water.

Speaker 1 Forests protect us against, you know, mangroves prevent hurricanes. And it's like you,

Speaker 1 we need these ecosystems. And the things that make the ecosystems are the animals.
The birds are carrying seeds. The bats are carrying seeds.

Speaker 1 Frogs or tadpoles are the reason that mosquito populations are kept in check. And so you kill all the frogs and then all of a sudden you have worse mosquito populations.

Speaker 1 And then all of a sudden you have higher incidences of diseases. You have malaria skyrocket.
And so nature keeps us safe. And so as we lose it, we're losing the

Speaker 1 security systems that have always kept life on earth healthy. Right.
Wow. So it all kind of connects.
Every single species. It all connects, not just locally, river to river, habitat to habitat.

Speaker 1 It's international. You know, like the weather system created by the Amazon is influenced by what's happening in Africa.
And it's so connected. Yes.
I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 I just assumed the weather that happened in your local area, that was it. Yeah, that's what I grew up thinking of animals as living in the forest.

Speaker 1 And then working in the forest, you realize that they're creating it.

Speaker 1 by carrying those seeds. And so like in habitats where you have elephants, elephants are huge seed dispersers.

Speaker 1 So they're carrying the seeds through the forest and depositing them all over the ecosystem. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then in the Amazon's case, you have nutrient-rich sands from the Sahara flying over the Atlantic Ocean and being deposited down in the Amazon. So there's this exchange between the continents.

Speaker 1 Everything is so connected. And that's why watching people destroy ecosystems, it's just, that's become my whole job is just telling people, like, you've got to stop.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't matter whether you like animals or if you like nature.

Speaker 1 If you're, if you can't, Carl Sagan said this, if you can't breathe the air and drink the water, then nothing else you're interested in is going to happen. Yeah.
We need these things.

Speaker 1 And we're at this point in history where we still can protect it. We don't have to lose these things.
And so that's, that's what's so interesting about our moment in time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because we still have that option of saving it. Yeah, we still have so much good stuff.
There's still so much to protect. What would happen if the Amazon was completely destroyed?

Speaker 1 If the, so that's the thing. If the Amazon was destroyed, I mean, you're talking about one of the greatest physical features on our planet.

Speaker 1 the most essential forests on our planet where there's so much wildlife. So if you lost the Amazon.
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Speaker 1 You would have, that's where then you start to see post-apocalyptic future start now. Wow.

Speaker 1 Where you start seeing changes in global weather patterns, droughts, more severe hurricanes, that's stabilizing our global climate and keeping the whole system running.

Speaker 1 And so to me, there's nothing, the reason I do this work is because as far as I can tell, there's nothing more important than protecting these areas. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What's the rate of destruction right now? Is it still pretty high? Right now, we've lost 50%. Damn.
No, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. That's, that's incorrect.

Speaker 1 So we have, right now, we've lost 20% of the Amazon rainforest. Okay.

Speaker 1 And then what we're, what they're warning us about, what scientists are warning is that if we keep hurting the Amazon rainforest, the Amazon produces its own moisture, right?

Speaker 1 So the trees every day are pumping, I think it's like 20 trillion tons of moisture into the air. And that's creating the weather system that makes it a rainforest.

Speaker 1 So if you cut too much of the trees, then across the continent, you start to see drying. And then when there's fires, they're worse.

Speaker 1 And then if we cross this tipping point, you may cross a threshold where there's no going back. And the moisture cycle is broken.
And then we actually lose the Amazon rainforest.

Speaker 1 And so we're at this incredibly important moment in history that we, this generation, us, have to protect this before it's too late. And it can be protected.

Speaker 1 That's the good news, but it's, it's, it's, it's a very serious line that we're coming up against right now. Yeah.
What are the steps to protect it?

Speaker 1 Because they're basically just cutting the trees down, right? They're cutting the trees down. And the, the, the bad news is that it's very serious and it's hard to stop.

Speaker 1 The good news is that the reason that we're cutting the trees down is pretty pointless.

Speaker 1 Like in my region, what we see is that farmers come in and a lot of these people, you know, they're, they're either narco-traffickers or illegal loggers or gold miners.

Speaker 1 And a lot of what my organization does is we work with local people, Indigenous leaders, to provide better opportunities for the loggers and gold miners so they don't have to be loggers or gold miners.

Speaker 1 And so people coming down, people, ecotourism, boat drivers, chefs, cooks, guides, scientists, empowering the local people and really elevating them out of that poverty that forces them to do the destruction.

Speaker 1 Half the time, they love the forest.

Speaker 1 Nobody, if you ask, if you went on the street and did like a, you know, like you just went out on the street with a a mic and asked people and you said like, you know, do you want polar bears to be gone?

Speaker 1 Most people wouldn't be like, hell yeah. No, people want animals to be safe theoretically.
Like everybody loves elephants. Everybody loves the Amazon rainforest, but it's just disorganization.

Speaker 1 You know, we're scattered. Everyone's, everyone's hectic thinking about global politics and the economy and their own lives.
And down there, people need help in order to.

Speaker 1 elevate them, their lives to a point where they don't have to destroy the forest. That's what we're working on.
They're doing it just for money.

Speaker 1 They don't actually want to destroy the forest yeah so we're seeing football fields and football fields of forests get destroyed every day damn so that people can farm papayas that's not even a good way of making a living it's not even a good plan and so if you go to these people like i went to one of these gold miners i was with the illegal gold miners we were on this river and they were destroying the forest they cut the forest they burned the forest And then they use these motors to suck up the earth and they use mercury to bind the gold out of the sediments.

Speaker 1 And then this tiny little bit of gold and they've destroyed acres and acres of forest

Speaker 1 and they're working as illegal gold miners so their health is horrendous because of the mercury they're destroying the forest they're being chased by law enforcement and i said to these guys it's like why don't you just you know i showed them on my phone i showed them pictures and i went why don't you just do ecotourism you know like why don't you transition out of this and they the guy looked at me and he goes my dad was a miner i know how to mine he goes it's all i know how to do and they actually this guy changed his life, stopped illegally gold mining and became an ecotourism center.

Speaker 1 And now he's running tours.

Speaker 1 So it's a little person now that's protecting the forest that's cool yeah it is cool but then there's pushback the the other gold miners got mad at him for changing teams and then they kidnapped him and he had to escape and thank god he was not killed jeez but it's serious down there if you stand up for the environment in these rainforest areas they'll kill you wow so you're you're a target out there then out there my whole team is a target and so we have to be very careful because you're you're you're going against narco-traffickers gold miners loggers people that you know they're they're doing this to survive and a lot of times if you What's up, guys?

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Speaker 1 You can give them a better option. They'll be your friends.
But if you get in between a person's livelihood and you're trying to stop it, they they will take you out. Right.

Speaker 1 So you got to be ready to present them a second option where they could potentially make as much or if not more money. Yes, and it's serious money.

Speaker 1 These are, you know, illegal gold mining mafias where they, I mean, in Peru, the police won't even go into the areas where there's gold mining. Wow.

Speaker 1 Because it's just, I mean, it's impossible to imagine it, but it's in the Amazon rainforest. There's just you can see it from on Google Earth.
You can see it from space.

Speaker 1 There's a scar running across the Amazon rainforest in the west in Peru

Speaker 1 where the illegal gold miners have cut the forest over so much area that now there's sandstorms in the barren wasteland where the Amazon used to be. Jeez.
So this is, this is, it looks like dune.

Speaker 1 You have, you know, you're driving a motorcycle over sand and there's just this dust storm blowing. And you can see the rainforest on the horizon, but every year they're eating into that.

Speaker 1 And so it's, it's just this incredible problem. And then with that comes, because it's an illegal, lawless area that the police can't get to, there's no society there.

Speaker 1 So then the human trafficking spikes, the narco-traffickers stay there.

Speaker 1 It just becomes sort of a cesspool of everything bad in one place so there's a lot of gold out there then there's a lot of gold out there but it's low quality gold and it's in very very low like it's there's not a lot of it in any one given area and so they have to continually remove more of the rainforest to get at the gold it's not in nuggets like what we think of they have to continually suck the sand off the ground.

Speaker 1 So they have to destroy the forest and then have access to the earth. And the more you take, the more you get.
So per football field of

Speaker 1 of sand that you pull up, you're getting tiny amounts of gold. That seems like a lot of work for that amount.
It's a lot of work and it's terrible work. And so they work day and night.

Speaker 1 They have horrible lives. And so if you can provide them with a better alternative, they're stoked.

Speaker 1 That's what we've done. We go to people who are making $20 a day being illegal gold miners.
And we're like, what if you were just a ranger?

Speaker 1 What if we gave you gear and a uniform and a boat and just we gave you medical benefits and pay? And they're like, yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1 And then half the time they go, I don't want to be cutting these trees. Recently, we saved an area that was 10,000 acres.

Speaker 1 And when we cleared, when we went there to clear the loggers out, the loggers were like, okay, cool. That's fine.
We understand. But can we stay? We went, what?

Speaker 1 And they went, we just, we love this forest. I went, you love the forest.
You're just, you're destroying. And went, yeah, we love this place.
And we said, can we, can we be rangers?

Speaker 1 And we're like, yeah, you can be rangers. Wow.
Like, yeah, it's easy. Like, we have, we, you know, make friends, not enemies.
That's cool.

Speaker 1 Well, there's a lot of new studies on how intelligent um like nature is right how trees are sentient in a way yeah in a way and just the interconnectedness of an ecosystem the the complexity of it i think that people don't understand like the the avatar analogy is really good you know what they did with that movie where they explained how connected everything is and plug in it's like when you're in the amazon rainforest there's there's medicines flowing through the trees there's medicines for diseases that we have not discovered yet

Speaker 1 and that entire system down from the leaf cutter ants to the jaguars to the giant trees trees, everything is just this cycle where it's all getting digested and regenerated.

Speaker 1 And that whole cycle is, in a way, intelligent. It's its own thing that

Speaker 1 we have very, very little understanding of how that works. And that's what we're still trying to study.

Speaker 1 But we're losing it so fast that a lot of the scientists I speak to say that they feel like they're documenting destruction instead of studying a current reality.

Speaker 1 And they worry that our current healthy reality will become an irretrievable past if we don't do something now. And so that's what we're doing.

Speaker 1 We're working with the local people, protect that rainforest.

Speaker 1 And also, it's like, you know, we don't you want an earth where, where there's huge areas of a vast wilderness with species that have never been described and just giant trees and anacondas and uncontacted tribes.

Speaker 1 There's so much amazing stuff out there that to me, it's comforting knowing that that's out there.

Speaker 1 Just like you think of, you know, areas in Alaska or Africa where there's just huge areas of wilderness. Like we need that.
It's important mentally, I think, for people.

Speaker 1 Have you ever run into an animal that hasn't been discovered yet?

Speaker 1 I've definitely many times run into insects where I take a picture of it and send it to my entomologist friends and they go, we have no idea what that is. Yeah, there's a lot of that.

Speaker 1 Some of them might be poisonous too, right? Some of them, well, yes, you don't, don't, don't eat the bugs on the Amazon. Don't eat the bugs.
Don't lick the frogs.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of stuff that's poisonous in the Amazon rainforest. I mean, everything that's there, it's, you know, we always say it's a festival of sex and death.

Speaker 1 It's, it's, everything that's there is, is either hunting, being eaten, trying to mate. And so, like, when you go out at night in the Amazon rainforest, it's wild.
Really? We just got a video.

Speaker 1 There was a, we saw this bright yellow frog moving in the water and it was, it was moving in a strange way. It went as belly up.
And we looked at it. We couldn't figure out what was going on.

Speaker 1 And then it flipped. And there was a spider with its fangs in the frog.
And it was just this huge spider sucking this frog out and venomating it.

Speaker 1 And you go out there and just, I mean, the jaguars are hunting for deer and the bats are hunting. It's like everything is moving and you are there, and you're part of that ecosystem.

Speaker 1 It's, it's incredible. So, you don't leave at night often, do you? No, we do.
We go out every day. It's the greatest freak show on earth.
I know it's fantastic. It's fantastic.

Speaker 1 I'd be pretty scared, man. Damn.
Probably easy to get lost at night, too, right? It's very easy to get lost. That's the most dangerous thing in the Amazon.
People ask me, you know, is it the vipers?

Speaker 1 Is it the jaguars? It's like, no, man, it's just the size of the forest.

Speaker 1 If you go off trail on the Amazon, 15 feet off trail, as soon as you lose sight of the trail that you were on,

Speaker 1 you can get turned around so easily. And I'm talking about expert trackers that, you know, we've gone out and you go, I know that I just left the trail.

Speaker 1 You know, you see something and you go to find out what it is. And then you look behind you and you go, where the hell was the trail? Damn.
And then you lose four hours trying to find it.

Speaker 1 And if you go in the wrong direction, you know, it's 70, 100 miles until the next river. Holy forget about the next road or town.

Speaker 1 You know, so even if you survived for weeks by yourself, you'd never make it. So the distance in Amazonia is definitely the thing that makes it the most dangerous.

Speaker 1 What's the longest time you've been lost for out there?

Speaker 1 I would say

Speaker 1 three full days of being fully lost where I've been away from a river, unable to get back, out alone, and just in a huge swamp system. That was that, and that is terrifying.
Were you solo? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was solo. And then it gets, it gets blare witchy because you're like.

Speaker 1 you're walking all day and you there's no way to you know if you're in the mountains you can go up and you can start to orient yourself in the jungle you're under 150 feet of canopy.

Speaker 1 So you're deep underneath the trees. So if you're trying to like triangulate where's the sun and figure things out, nah, it's not going to happen.
Compasses don't work out there, I'd imagine.

Speaker 1 Compasses work most of the time. There's, there's something with the forest where, where, where often they don't.
And then, you know, if you're using a GPS, you're good as long as your battery lasts.

Speaker 1 But if you're talking about multiple days of navigating, you, you need, and again, say, oh, I'll bring myself some solar panels. And it's like, that doesn't always work.
You're on a boat expedition.

Speaker 1 You can bring solar panels. You could charge up all your stuff.

Speaker 1 But if you're in the forest, and then the thing that people don't realize is that if you have rivers, you know, if here's a river and then here's a river and there's 100 miles in between there,

Speaker 1 no one's gone there.

Speaker 1 You know, like scientists will go to research stations and scientists have done rapid assessments where they go deep out into the forest, but we don't realize how big the Amazon is.

Speaker 1 You're talking about something that's almost the size of the continental U.S. And so you look between the rivers.
Like if you fly over the jungle in a Cessna,

Speaker 1 there's areas that no one's been so what medicines are there what species are there and there's there's just there's just so many areas that haven't been surveyed there's so much to discover yeah and so going out there and getting lost is kind of fun

Speaker 1 how'd you find yourself out did you get lucky or did you i i think i just got lucky you know because i you know they say find a stream and it'll take you to the river and i found a stream and it took me to a swamp okay and then that swamp system i later found out was

Speaker 1 gigantic, you know, miles and miles and miles across. And so I was just going in circles and moving around through there.

Speaker 1 And of course, that's stacked with vipers and bushmasters and stingrays and electric eels and falling trees.

Speaker 1 And so even when you make camp at night, you know, if the wind starts blowing, if you have a nighttime jungle, nighttime thunderstorm, you have falling trees.

Speaker 1 And those trees, you're talking about a tree with a base that's the size of this room. Yeah.
And then it's connected to other trees by vines. So when that falls over, it just takes down acres.

Speaker 1 Holy crap. That's crazy.
So you will not survive that.

Speaker 1 Trees are that big out there? Trees are that big out there. They do.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But you got to dodge those and you got to worry about yeah when you go to sleep you're just like yo look i wake up in the morning like

Speaker 1 oh my god yeah no that's that's that's the that to me is one of the scariest things that is nuts were you at any point worried that that might be it for you when you were lost for three days yes i started to think i was like you know into the wild i was like oh man i just did i just into the wilded myself i went out here trying to go on a big adventure and then i'm not going to come back and then they're going to write an article about how stupid i was like you know that was a good movie though it was a very good movie that that that kid That kid unfortunately chose too big of an adventure.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 people do that.

Speaker 1 If you want to go explore places like the tops of mountains and the deep jungle and

Speaker 1 super deep ocean, it's like you have to take a certain amount of risk to go there. And to go alone seems kind of stupid, which it is.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, you get this experience of being out in the middle of nowhere. It's like being on another planet.

Speaker 1 You go for, you know, you spend three days, you think of the fact that most of us, when we're born, we're born born into a room of people.

Speaker 1 There's doctors, there's parents, there's people, and your whole life, you very rarely go a day without seeing another human. That's true.
And we're so social and we're so immersed in

Speaker 1 humanity and our civilizations that we don't even realize that to be separated from that is incredibly rare. And so you're just hiking all day, camp, hiking all day, camp.

Speaker 1 And then you start to look around and go, you know, the world could have ended for all I know. World War III could have popped off and I'd have no idea.

Speaker 1 And it's very, very strange being that far out. And your brain starts acting.
It's like fasting or being in a deprivation tank. It's like you just,

Speaker 1 your brain starts acting very, very differently out in the jungle. Yeah, I bet you really find yourself out there, right? Yeah, you really do.
You really find out. You really find out.
And

Speaker 1 then it's like, you know, because you see something amazing. And that same thing with Eat Into the Wild.
I mean, his big thing that he took away from it where he was like.

Speaker 1 He has a great quote and I don't remember what it was, but it was basically like, you know, like life isn't worth it if you can't share it with people. Right.

Speaker 1 And when you're out there, you see this amazing stuff or you catch a fish and something, you know, or you survive this, this moment and there's no one there to see it.

Speaker 1 And so you, you realize you're like, oh man, this is, this is actually more fun with other people.

Speaker 1 Not to mention that in my case, you know, I see something amazing and then I come back and I tell the story and it's like, man, if you don't have pics, it didn't happen. Right.
These days, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, these days, yeah, but also like, and I'm, I'm, you know, I don't believe anything anybody says unless I see pictures.

Speaker 1 And I've had friends tell me the craziest stories and back it up with a video. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I had a friend who told me that an ocelot came out of the jungle and bit him on the leg.

Speaker 1 And I went, ocelots don't bite people on the leg. What's an ocelot? An ocelot is a medium-sized cat.
It looks kind of like a jaguar. Okay.

Speaker 1 A little bit smaller, still could, you know, serious predator.

Speaker 1 And he said this ocelot came out and bit him on the thigh and that he ran up onto this platform and then the ocelot started climbing up the ladder.

Speaker 1 And then he said he had to push the ladder and the ocelot fell backwards. And it's just a crazy story.
And I was like, absolutely not. That never happened.
And he went, dude, I filmed the whole thing.

Speaker 1 And I was like, all right, fine. It happened.
Wow. Yeah.
So they're not usually aggressive like that. No, that was a rabid one.
And that, again, the jungle is healthy. Right.

Speaker 1 And so you have laggers coming in. And in that particular case, the lagers had brought dogs with them.
And the dog had rabies that brought from town.

Speaker 1 And so a vampire bat bit the dog that bit the ocelot. And so all of a sudden you have rabies coming out there.

Speaker 1 Cause in the jungle, these things don't, there's not enough of a population to sustain, like where we are, we don't even have malaria. There's not enough hosts.

Speaker 1 There's so few people per square mile that there's, there's not, these diseases don't exist out there.

Speaker 1 But once you start seeing trees go down, once you start having farms and towns and things, then you start seeing that go up.

Speaker 1 The frog populations get wiped out by pollution, and then all of a sudden the mosquito populations go up. And so when we mess with the balance of nature, we start suffering.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was looking to go into Africa and they make you get a few vaccines, right? Yeah. And I mean, Africa, Africa's, Africa is a different story.
Africa is complex. A lot of disease out there.
Yes.

Speaker 1 It's also, I think, the source, like, you know, like Ebola comes from there. So That's the, that's the source, the Congo.
Congo, Congo and the Amazon used to be joined before the continent split.

Speaker 1 The Congo and used to flow into the Amazon, and the Amazon used to flow in the opposite direction.

Speaker 1 And then when the continent split, the South America hit up against the Nazca Plate, threw up the Andes Mountains, and then started draining out to the east in reverse directions.

Speaker 1 So the Congo and the Amazon are ancient siblings, sort of. I didn't know that.
Yeah. That is interesting.
So similar environment.

Speaker 1 Very similar environment, totally different, you know, in some cases, totally different animals.

Speaker 1 Like you have elephants in the, in Africa, and you don't have elephants in the Amazon, but just both places that are mega biodiverse. Yeah.
Super, super important.

Speaker 1 And both places, just like rainforests everywhere, you know, like growing up, you hear save the rainforest. And, you know, it's like, that's part of what led me there was like, I said, you know,

Speaker 1 you're telling me that the most amazing thing we have that only covers 6% of our planet's land area. And we're destroying it every year.

Speaker 1 And there's just trees going down and there's animals being hunted. And so part of going there was,

Speaker 1 I said, This, this can't be. And then I got there, and it was definitely happening.
It was worse than you thought, probably. It was worse than I thought.
And the local people were like, help us.

Speaker 1 And at 18 years old, I went,

Speaker 1 how, how can I, how can we do anything against this? There's this, you know, there's this road called the Trans-Amazon Highway. And it's this creation of Brazil and China and the World Bank.

Speaker 1 And they got together and they said, let's make a land trade route through the Amazon. And so for all of history, the Amazon has been intact and it's been almost impossible to penetrate for humans.

Speaker 1 Well, now there's a road. And that road has been called the single most devastating environmental project that humans have ever done.

Speaker 1 Because as that blazed across the Amazon, it was wiping out entire tribes of people, indigenous groups, wildlife, ecosystems.

Speaker 1 And then it let in more and more people, let in the chainsaws, it let in the bulldozers, it let in the illegal miners, it let in the illegal loggers.

Speaker 1 And now you're seeing all that, we call it fishboning, where you see off of the primary road, you start seeing all these other roads coming off.

Speaker 1 and then all across southern amazonia you just see this huge scar it's like it has cancer it's like it has some sort of a disease geez and so if we can stop that we can save it and if we can't then we're gonna have problems is that damage reversible you think or it's so damaged that it's hard to say

Speaker 1 uh the it's not that it's not reversible on a human time scale because the forest primary forest if you have the you know like the like an ancient tree in the forest is a skyscraper of life you go up an ancient tree and you have orchids and bromeliads and you have reptiles amphibians birds mammals monkeys, everything living in that tree.

Speaker 1 Thousands of species living on a single tree. Wow.
But that tree is 800 years old, 1,000 years old, 1,200 years old. So that tree's been there for generations.

Speaker 1 And so if you level forest, you know, there's a, there's a, I feel like there's this misconception, like, oh, if we leveled forest, we'll just replant it.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, you know how long it takes for, look at a 30-year-old tree. You know, it's not that big.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so really protecting these ancient ecosystems is one of the best things we can do for stopping the sixth sixth extinction, for mitigating climate change.

Speaker 1 And so those are irreplaceable things that we have. Those are systems that come standard with life on Earth that we don't want to ruin.

Speaker 1 That's like really, really, really like foundational to civilization on Earth. I didn't know trees got that old.
That's crazy. Trees get way older than that.

Speaker 1 I can't remember what the oldest tree is, but I mean, some of these sequoias are a couple thousand years old. They're like right here.
Are you serious? Yes. Have you ever been to the sequoias? No.

Speaker 1 That's right. Stop what you're doing.
From here, it's easy to get to the sequoias. Okay.
And the sequoias sequoias are, I mean, I said the size of this room for some of the trees down there.

Speaker 1 Sequoias are the biggest trees on earth. Wow.
And they are so big that when you see them, you're going to feel like you're in a video game where you're extra small.

Speaker 1 Like it doesn't look real when you see them. And the sequoias is an amazing story because people like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, you know, 100 years ago were protecting these ecosystems.

Speaker 1 They're going, we can't lose the greatest trees on earth. And they protected them.
And that's why we still have sequoias.

Speaker 1 so this this system of conservation and people going out and realizing how important ecosystems are this isn't new this is something we've been we've been going through for a long time that we have practice with and so the heroes of the past have made sure that we still have these ecosystems and that's why in new york and new jersey growing up i never saw a bald eagle yeah there was no humpback but you couldn't like stand in new york city and see a humpback whale there's humpbacks back now they're back in new york yeah so humpbacks went from i think it was about 130 000 globally pre-whaling yeah as a as a rough estimate of their population, and they went all the way down to about 8,000 individuals across the world.

Speaker 1 And then they stopped whaling. And today, humpbacks are back up to almost pre-whaling numbers.
So they're completely coming back. Well, because we stopped killing them.
It's that simple.

Speaker 1 And bald eagles, it was more complex. They were dying because DDT that we were using to control insect populations was getting into the fish.

Speaker 1 And then the eagles would eat the fish, and the DDT was causing their eggs to be so delicate that when the mother eagle sat on the eggs, they were breaking their eggs.

Speaker 1 Eagle populations tanked.

Speaker 1 But we stopped using DDT. Ecosystems got healthier and the eagles are rebounding.
And now there's bald eagles all over the place in New York.

Speaker 1 So it's like you can, it's very clear that if we just stop cutting it and burning it and hunting it until it's gone, nature will take care of itself. It's very easy.

Speaker 1 It's really, it's really a win-win here. And so.

Speaker 1 That's, that's what we're doing is working with the local people on the Amazon who are going, we just, we just want to save the thing that keeps us all alive. It's really simple.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Are there a lot of wildfires out there?

Speaker 1 No, there's actually none.

Speaker 1 There's no wildfires in the sense that the Amazon rainforest doesn't burn.

Speaker 1 And so people get confused because they hear that in California, for example, that fires are part of the natural ecology of a forest. In the Amazon rainforest,

Speaker 1 there's no natural fires. Like you could, lightning could strike the Amazon.
You could napalm the Amazon. It's not going to burn.
Wow. Humans come in.
They cut the trees. They leave them down.

Speaker 1 They let the tropical sun bake it for a while, then they burn it.

Speaker 1 And then they can make a farm on there because rainforest soils are very nutrient-poor.

Speaker 1 And so it's only after you cut the forest and burn the forest, then all of a sudden you can farm for like two years before you've used all the nutrients. That's it.
That's it.

Speaker 1 It's a very, very bad investment. It's a terrible, terrible way to make a living.
Yeah. And so it's really just fixing this problem where you have,

Speaker 1 you know, the.

Speaker 1 Beef is a huge reason that the Amazon is being cleared. Soy is the next one.
And just industry coming in and the illegal gold mining.

Speaker 1 But I think like as a as a global society, we need to start thinking about protecting these ecosystems because we've gotten to this point where historically speaking, we've never been at a turning point before where the entire Earth's ecosystems are at risk of being altered in a way that

Speaker 1 is irreversible.

Speaker 1 And so that's something where, you know, like just like in World War II, it was like, we had to come together and go, okay, are we going to fix this problem or not?

Speaker 1 And right now, this is an even bigger issue where if we don't fix

Speaker 1 the problems that we are waging onto nature, then we're going to have these incredible consequences.

Speaker 1 And if we can just, you know, we're very clever monkeys, but if we can show true intelligence and keep the systems that keep us alive safe,

Speaker 1 then the party's on. Yeah.
And then, you know. The ocean ecosystem also scares me with all the microplastics going on.

Speaker 1 The ocean with microplastics, what we're doing to our fisheries, it's the ocean is a whole other, I mean, but that's the thing.

Speaker 1 That's one thing right now that social media has shown me is that there's amazing work going on all over the world.

Speaker 1 There's people protecting ocean ecosystems all over the world. There's people protecting elephants in Africa.
There's people protecting tigers in India or actually the numbers are going up.

Speaker 1 And tigers were another serious one. There was 100,000 tigers in 1900.

Speaker 1 And then when I was growing up, there was like 3,000 tigers. I think we're up to about 5,000 right now.
There's been serious conservation efforts.

Speaker 1 So tiger numbers have been coming back a little bit, but habitat destruction, removal of their prey, humans hunt the deer. So if there's no deer, the tigers can't eat.

Speaker 1 And of course, humans don't cohabitate well with apex predators. Wherever there's apex predators, grizzly bears, tigers, jaguars, humans are scared of those things.

Speaker 1 So you need to have enough jungle that you're not having competition between humans and tigers. But again, we've shown that with the proper conservation, They're going to take care of themselves.

Speaker 1 They're tigers. They know how to live.
And so it's very fascinating what's happening right now. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I hope they can figure out the ocean one because I actually stopped eating sushi, to be honest. Because yeah, the microplastics just scare me too much.
Interesting.

Speaker 1 You know, have you looked into that? I mean, I've, I've looked into it and I've stopped like shrimp. They say like, you know, they're just drag netting behind the ship, ships.

Speaker 1 And they say like the amount of bycatch, the other things we're just cleaning out our oceans. We're just ripping the life out of the oceans.
And all of this can be done sustainably.

Speaker 1 That's the thing at the end of the day. It's like we don't have to be doing it in such a way that it's destroyed forever.

Speaker 1 We could do it in a way that sustainably makes it so that we have fish forever.

Speaker 1 One of the great things about Earth, there's fish. Yeah.
Yeah. But then when you go on the farming side of fish, it's not the healthiest.
So it's like a catch-22. No, no, absolutely not.

Speaker 1 I watched, I watched like 10 minutes of a documentary about fish farming and I had to turn it off because I got so stressed out that I was like, this is the worst. And I already see so much.

Speaker 1 death in the Amazon. You know, when you take an acre of the, of, of the Amazon, there's so many millions of animals in there

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 what people don't understand when you, when you hear about ecosystems being destroyed, it's kind of impersonal. It's like, oh, the ecosystem, the trees are being destroyed.

Speaker 1 But included in that is massive individual suffering for the animals. You have families of monkeys and river otters and eagles and macaws and all of that is being killed and burned.

Speaker 1 And so it's the work that we do, we're down there seeing all of this and trying to show the world that. I didn't even think about that.
You're right, though.

Speaker 1 When I think of like the forest being burned, I never thought of the animals. Yeah, the strongest have nowhere else to go.
You know, they go hide in the trees and the trees are burned.

Speaker 1 And so when we go through the Amazon after the fires, like it's just dead bodies on everywhere. No, it's awful.
That must be terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying.

Speaker 1 It's terrifying also because a lot of times we see the forest as it's being burned and we go try to rescue animals. We go try and take footage and show people what's happening.

Speaker 1 And you just, you just, you, you know, like the snakes have nowhere to go and there's birds and monkeys and the animals literally have nowhere to go. So we're, there's rescue centers down there.

Speaker 1 We try and save what we can, but it depends on us getting the support at this point to.

Speaker 1 So, like what I'm doing essentially is we've started, we've partnered with the indigenous people who've gotten organized, and we started this organization, Jungle Keepers.

Speaker 1 And what we did was we looked at the most wild place that we could find.

Speaker 1 And it's called the Les Piedras River, and it runs through this little corner of southeastern Peru, and it's the headwaters of the Amazon. And it's the wildest place that I could find.

Speaker 1 That's how I came to work there. I looked across the entire world, and I said, what's the wildest place I could find?

Speaker 1 I looked at New Guinea, I looked at the Congo, and I went, that corner of the amazon if you want to talk about expansive endless forest

Speaker 1 that's it and i came right before the destruction came we're right near the last piece of the trans-amazon highway that got completed

Speaker 1 and so i got there in this period where it was incredibly wild it used to take two days to get out into the forest and then with the road all of a sudden you started seeing illegal lagers and then lagers started going out into our forest and then the hunting and illegal gold mining.

Speaker 1 And so we banded together with the local people and we started jungle keepers.

Speaker 1 And that's really just a way of protecting this one river. And so it's a finite goal.
We're trying to save a watershed and contained in there is unbelievable amounts of endangered species.

Speaker 1 There's several indigenous communities in there. There's the uncontacted tribes living out in the forest.
And we can protect all of this. And it's a finite goal.

Speaker 1 We have to protect about 300 to 350,000 acres. Wow.
And the price tag on that is about $30 million.

Speaker 1 And right now we're one-third of our way to the goal. And so we're literally just trying to race the deforestation to save this.
It's literally avatar on earth.

Speaker 1 And we're just trying to save this forest. And the cool thing is that it's not, we're not just trying to save the environment.
You know, it's not some, it's not some intangible thing.

Speaker 1 It's no, we can save this watershed and then it's protected. And then all those local people have jobs protecting it like a national park.
And it's this crown jewel for Peru. I'm working in Peru.

Speaker 1 Most people, when they hear about the Amazon, they think about Brazil because Brazil has 60% of the Amazon, but Peru and Ecuador have the headwaters.

Speaker 1 And the headwaters, because the Andes, the cloud forests meet the lowland tropical Amazonia, you have even more biodiversity in those areas.

Speaker 1 It's the most biodiverse place, not just on Earth, but in the entire fossil record. So there's more life here than has ever existed before.
That's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 Just like we're alive, they say that the humpback, no, not humpback, blue whale is the largest animal to have ever existed. That's pretty cool.
We get to be on Earth.

Speaker 1 There's been so many different species with T-Rexes and all this stuff. We're alive with the largest animal that's ever existed, the blue whale.

Speaker 1 And we get to see an ecosystem that's been growing since the dawn of time, just speciating and just iterating life over and over and over again until the point that it's just this mega biodiverse carnival of rainforest life.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's just rainbows of macaws and there's monkeys swinging through the trees, there's vines. It's literally like another world.
And so the idea of that vanishing. is unacceptable to me.

Speaker 1 And so that's just become the life mission.

Speaker 1 it's just been this constant battle to protect this place yeah it's cool that you found that mission at a young age too yeah it's cool and it was unexpected and and very strange for someone that grew up you know i started my life in new york city yeah big change big change yeah went down there because i was curious about it and then ended up joining yeah and starting and now we're now we're leading this charge and we've become i mean jungle jungle keepers at this point has become we're like borderline global movement i mean just now in the airport as I was coming here, these two guys stopped me.

Speaker 1 They're like, you the jungle guy? The anaconda guy? I love it. I was like, yes,

Speaker 1 it's crazy. You know, I've been like living in the jungle barefoot for months.
I come up here and people are like, yo,

Speaker 1 like last night,

Speaker 1 Snoop Dogg shared

Speaker 1 one of our videos. We've caught a 19-foot anaconda, which is, as far as I know, a world record for the species.
And yeah, he just shared it on his Instagram.

Speaker 1 So like all these people are just like seeing what we do. And then like little by little, trickling in and getting involved.

Speaker 1 Like a lot of those people, now, we have thousands of people every month who are just,

Speaker 1 we tell people like, you know, one, one, for the price of one coffee a month, give us $5 a month.

Speaker 1 And we have all these people who are supporting jungle keepers, which is the most direct way to protect the Amazon.

Speaker 1 So that's another thing is that when I grew up, you watch a documentary about nature and at the end of it, they go, yeah, well, it's all disappearing because of roads, because of deforestation, it's all going to be gone soon.

Speaker 1 And you feel horrible.

Speaker 1 That's so depressing. And so what we've tried to do is combat that with tactics.

Speaker 1 What's that? The Banksy thing, the despair ends and tactics begin. It's like, we can't just sit there and watch it be destroyed.
We can fix this. I'll give you five a month, man.
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you think you're going to be able to do it. And we'll link it.
Yeah, we'll link it below if anyone else wants to do that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's, and like I said, it's the thing that makes it special is that we're protecting more life than anywhere else. And it's a finite goal.
If we do this, we have to do this this year.

Speaker 1 That's why I'm here right now. I was down there,

Speaker 1 I think January. I was down there almost the whole month.
And then I went back to town to resupply because I remember telling people, I was like, I haven't even been to civilization yet this year.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 I got myself like some ice cream.

Speaker 1 But we literally, I came here because there's so much forest right now that we could save if we had the resources.

Speaker 1 And so either we have to reach enough people and build that donor program, you get $5 a month from enough people, millions of people giving you $5 a month. We could protect the whole forest.

Speaker 1 And then everyone's name goes on the credit for making that national park or at this point what i'm hoping too because it'll make it faster is that we get somebody with the resources that just wants to be bad billionaire yeah i mean you this guy whoever this is would save more lives

Speaker 1 potentially than anyone else in history you should get in touch with mr beast mr beast

Speaker 1 i haven't he's friend i we have mutual friends but not because he does a lot of videos where he like saves ecosystems and helps people yeah so this would be the perfect yeah and that sort of thing of just like democratizing conservation to the point where you go, okay, you care about this.

Speaker 1 Let's all chip in. Let's all do small amounts and we can do work miracles.
I love that. Yeah.
Maybe even launch a volunteer program where people come out and help for three months. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that's what we do. That's what we do.
Well, that's why we built, we have the world's tallest treehouse that we built out there.

Speaker 1 So we did that because it's one thing for us to be out there and be posting these pictures of anacondas and the work that we're doing and the research and everything, but people want to experience it themselves.

Speaker 1 And so we said, how do we get people out here? And we started bringing people out to the Amazon, but it's the Amazon rainforest. There's deep mud and there's mosquitoes and there's all this stuff.

Speaker 1 And so the amount of people that actually want to come with you into the jungle is very small. Right.
So what we did was we found the tallest tree around. I climbed to the tallest tree I knew of.

Speaker 1 And then from the branches of that tree, looked over and we found the tallest tree on the horizon. And we built a treehouse in there.
It's the tallest treehouse in the world.

Speaker 1 And then we stacked it out and we put, we put Wi-Fi, shower, bed, bathroom, so you can stay up there. Wow.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And the thing with that is, is that the rainforest canopy, again, you're talking about 150 feet up.

Speaker 1 Because it's so high up, it's this whole other ecosystem. There's species that are in the canopy that don't exist on the rainforest floor.
And as humans, we don't have access to that.

Speaker 1 And so when you get up there, 50% of the life in a rainforest can be in the canopy. And it's almost completely unexplored.

Speaker 1 Because in the last hundred years of science, people have been climbing a single tree. and then trying to do surveys.

Speaker 1 And as you're doing that, you're being attacked by wasps and mosquitoes and flies and things. And it's dangerous.

Speaker 1 you're climbing a very very tall tree now you can go up to the alta sanctuary treehouse you can stay up there in air conditioning and watch as all these colorful birds fly by we've seen lizards that are seen nowhere else we're discovering species that have been seen nowhere else and so for the first time it's sort of luxury meets science yeah and it's allowing people to go and so a lot of times what we have now is people who want to help protect the rainforest and then they come and they stay in the treehouse they get to experience it see the local people and then the local people get

Speaker 1 we have people that used to be loggers and gold miners who are now chefs and guides and boat drivers and maintenance workers. And they all have jobs because these people come and visit us.

Speaker 1 It's really cool.

Speaker 1 There's no, there's no loser in this equation. It's a win-win.
Wildlife protected, forest saved, local people have jobs.

Speaker 1 And then the people visiting get this amazing adventure where they get to get up close with the wildlife in the Amazon rainforest, which really is not that easy to do in an authentic way.

Speaker 1 And that's what we've started to make it possible to do. Reminds me of those hotels with the giraffes that come inside and you get

Speaker 1 so cool. Those look that cool.
I just went to, I was just, I just went to do stuff in LA and I went out to the Living Desert Zoo. Yeah.
And I got to feed a giraffe lettuce.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And the guy who was bringing me around, who's the director of the zoo, he was like, oh yeah, that's where we do the giraffe thing.
And I was like, get me over there right now.

Speaker 1 And I was just smiling like a child. And he was like, what are you talking about? It's like, you live with elephants and animals all day long.

Speaker 1 I was like, I've never been, I've seen giraffes from a Jeep. You're by their feet.
I was like, I've never given one lettuce. I see them in the wild.

Speaker 1 So I was like losing my mind feeding this giraffe lettuce two days ago and I was having such a good time. It was so cool.
Giraffes are one of my favorite animals. Yeah, their tongue is like, oh, it's

Speaker 1 incredible.

Speaker 1 I think, you know, they, they, you pay for a bushel of lettuce. I got like 40 of them.
I got, I was buying all the lettuce. It's like I just stayed here all day.
Yes. It was so cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 They're intelligent too. People would be surprised how smart some of these animals are.
Like it's mind-blowing. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Even, even the, even the lower order animals, like I I had a, just a couple of weeks ago, I had a wasp on me that I flicked.

Speaker 1 And the wasp, you know, the force of the flick took it back like 10 feet, but then midair, he corrected,

Speaker 1 came back at me, changed his flight pattern and decided to come sting me in the face. Wow.
And I was like, how did you, you're just a wasp. Yeah.
Like, that's a complex thought.

Speaker 1 It must have been a survival thing or something. I know, but he's making a lot of calculations to do that.

Speaker 1 And I was going, how do you, you know, or the spiders that, you know, every day you, you know, if I go for a trail run in the jungle, you're running down this trail.

Speaker 1 It's like, we have these spiders that make, they make their webs specifically across the trails because they know that across the trails are bug bugs are flying. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's just, it's just wild because it's like, these are tiny little insects making all these calculations. It's impressive.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then when you get up to something like elephants, where I believe that elephants in many ways are smarter than we are. Really? Yes.
Because if you put

Speaker 1 a human and an elephant out in the savannah, who's going to survive? Probably the elephant.

Speaker 1 probably the elephant we're probably going to die of exposure in 24 hours or step on a venomous snake or not know how to find food there's all kinds of problems that are going to happen to us the elephant is going to start eating and be fine and they know how to find water and they can use seismic communication through the earth to communicate with other elephants really yes oh i didn't know that they rumble and they use their feet and they make a rumble through the earth they can communicate complex things like there's water over here there's danger over here there's they can help each other navigate without even seeing each other it's below our range of what we can hear.

Speaker 1 And then they've also documented elephants using medicinal plants. So elephants have actually been seen using plants that induce labor when they're giving birth.

Speaker 1 Daily. Yes.
And they all, you know, of course, then it's famous that they have burial rituals.

Speaker 1 I actually saw the craziest thing I ever saw an elephant do was an elephant backed this girl up against a village. It was this little hut.
And

Speaker 1 this matriarch backed this girl up and she just got scared. She hit the wall and and the elephant put its trunk out and started touching her stomach.

Speaker 1 And then the elephant started communicating with the other elephants and all these elephants came in and the girl was just being so quiet. She was being really good.

Speaker 1 And all the elephants were just moving over her stomach and the guy next to me translated, she was pregnant. The elephants knew it and they were curious about the baby that she had.

Speaker 1 So it's like they know things that we don't even suppose to know. Crazy.
It's wild.

Speaker 1 And elephants have better smell than dogs and dogs have such such good smell that people with diabetes can actually have dogs that can smell your insulin levels change and wake you up at night. Wow.

Speaker 1 Like they have superpowers compared to us. Impressive.
Yeah. Like our vision, our hearing, the fact that we don't have any kind of real defense systems, like we don't have big teeth or claws.

Speaker 1 We're not fast. When I'm out in the forest, I'm like, I feel like I'm the least intelligent animal.

Speaker 1 Snakes seem pretty intelligent too. Snakes are awesome.
Snakes are so cool. They're so good.
They're magic. You put a snake down and they'll just vanish into a forest.
They're just gone.

Speaker 1 Or the fact that anacondas that are way, you know, two the length of double this table, you have an anaconda that's, you know, huge and they can live their entire life without ever being detected.

Speaker 1 They're just moving through streams and they're taking down big prey and then they go hide again and they'll stay two months digesting and just pop their nose up and then go back down.

Speaker 1 And I actually know someone who she was studying Malaysian sun bears and a reticulated python, which is similar to an anaconda, but it's a python, not a boa,

Speaker 1 ate her study subjects.

Speaker 1 And the bears were radio-collared. And so she was able to track this snake.
And when they got to where the radio collar was transmitting from, it was coming from underground.

Speaker 1 There's a snake had eaten this mother bear and her baby and then gone into a stream underground to digest. And so they dug up the snake.

Speaker 1 and tried to get the radio collars out and then they did and then they released the snake but it's like these things are just holy crap yeah you're talking about a 22 foot reticulated python ate a whole bear?

Speaker 1 Ate a whole bear. And then those are the only snake on earth where we have documented proof that they can eat humans.

Speaker 1 There's plenty of videos now.

Speaker 1 Every now and then they'll take down like an Indonesian grandmother.

Speaker 1 I never know if those are real or not.

Speaker 1 There's a bunch of them that are real. Wow.
Where you see like all the villagers are around and they cut open the snake and like a person falls out.

Speaker 1 But that's like, because they don't just randomly attack people, right? They don't. It's very, very, very rare.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's like, I mean, like in Florida, like alligators very rarely actually eat somebody. Yeah.
Very, very rarely.

Speaker 1 But when you have a lot of people and a lot of snakes moving through a jungle, sooner or later lightning is going to strike and you get a hungry, giant old snake that hasn't eaten in a while.

Speaker 1 You get a little feeble old person, you know, bending down to get some water and making a little bit of splashing.

Speaker 1 Makes sense. That's that.
Have you had any sketchy encounters with snakes? I mean, I've been working with snakes, protecting snakes, educating people about snakes since.

Speaker 1 since before I was 20, like since for a very long time.

Speaker 1 And then now with the anacondas, because they're the top of the riparian ecosystem, they're like, you know, if you think of fish and caiman and birds, anacondas are at the top of that as the apex predator of the Amazon River.

Speaker 1 And so we've been trying to study these anacondas also because with the mercury contamination that comes from the illegal logging, they could be the ones that have the most bioaccumulation.

Speaker 1 So they could be an indicator species for how that's affecting the rest of the ecosystem.

Speaker 1 And so we've found some huge anacondas, absolutely massive ones. And the first one, first time that I jumped on a large anaconda, and again, we're trying to restrain them.

Speaker 1 We're looking at why, is there any baseline data for populations of anacondas? How many of them are out there? Are they endangered? Are we losing anacondas? We don't know.

Speaker 1 And what's the reason we don't know is that they're living in places that scientists don't want to go. Nobody wants to go neck deep in a swamp looking for dragons.
It's not fun.

Speaker 1 And there's wasps and there's venomous snakes and there's all kinds of dangerous stuff as you're going looking for your study subject that does not want to be found.

Speaker 1 And then when you find it, you're dealing with a giant snake that will fight you and if you even if you get it what i learned when i caught my first large anaconda is that i got my hands around its neck so it couldn't bite me yeah i was like i got it and then it wrapped my hands and then i was essentially handcuffed with a multi-hundred pound snake and then the second coil went around my shoulders oh my gosh and then it started constricting because they know if they have a problem just just kill it and if you've ever seen a snake kill a rat you know that when they kill something these snakes are so powerful that they can squeeze the guts and the eyeballs right out of a mouth

Speaker 1 And so I felt that happening and I tried to call for help and I couldn't. There was no, there was no lung.
So every time you exhale, you lose that breath and then you never get to inhale again.

Speaker 1 Oh my god. It just gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
And my friends got to me right in time and started unwrapping it from the back, but I just

Speaker 1 so close to my ribs snapping. And so then we had to come up with protocols for what's the safe way to catch a anaconda.
What did you come up with for that? You need more than that. More people.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 More people is safer. And if it's in deep water, maybe just don't.
It's too risky in water, right?

Speaker 1 It's too risky because these anacondas hang out in places where the water is 15, 20, 30 feet deep, and you have floating vegetation on the surface of the water.

Speaker 1 And so the anacondas will go there and they'll bask in the sun, but they're smart. They know that if anything comes, if a jaguar or a human comes, they just go boom.

Speaker 1 They go right down into the water and they're gone.

Speaker 1 We come and we're trying to study them. We're trying to get measurements of the snake, get a tissue sample, see how long they are.
If we jump on that snake, well, they have the advantage.

Speaker 1 They got the home field advantage. They will wrap you up and take you under and drag you to hell.
And that's our fault. We're putting ourselves in that situation.
But

Speaker 1 I've caught somewhere over well over 80 anacondas and not one of them has ever chosen violence. Every single one of them just wants to go into the water and be left alone.

Speaker 1 It's only when I get them by the tail, get them by the neck, start restraining them, then they're like, all right, if you want to fight. That makes sense.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, then I'll take care of you, which is fair enough. How long can they hold their breath underwater? I think they can hold their breath for at least a half hour.
Jeez.

Speaker 1 They can go for a while because once they're digesting something,

Speaker 1 they'll get under some vegetation and they'll just pop their nose up and they'll spend weeks.

Speaker 1 You know, if an anaconda eats a deer or something, something large, they can spend a long time just sitting in the water. They'll just take a breath and go right back under.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, they can do that. That's insane.
How often are you running into illegal animal hunters out there hunting?

Speaker 1 Is that a common issue? Because we work now in the, now that we've established this reserve that we're trying to grow, we're protecting the lower side.

Speaker 1 So a couple of years ago, we were seeing more in terms of poachers.

Speaker 1 I'm not seeing that so much anymore because the conservation work we're doing is working. Nice.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So in the old days when I was sort of exploring around the various rivers, I would go out with poachers and I would, I would, I've been there for all kinds of hunts. I've seen horrible things.

Speaker 1 But now we're... we're working on this reserve.
So we're really not, we're sort of stopping that down here. And then we're working upstream trying to save what's still wild.

Speaker 1 And so these days I don't run into poachers that much what were they mainly going after they want things like black caiman which is the largest crocodilian we have down there that can be up to 18 feet they're huge but their skin makes really good leather so they're they they were hit hard by the fashion industry um jaguar pelts monkeys for the pet trade macaws for the pet trade and so you just these people go out there and they just kill everything they can yeah it's messed up what's a pet trade pet trade is people want people want to own a monkey oh like they would just keep it alive and just

Speaker 1 shoot the mother, take the baby, sell it. Oh, wow.
Like, like those Tiger King guys, you know,

Speaker 1 keeping exotic animals. That guy got locked up.
Yeah. Yeah, he actually commented on one of my posts.
I think someone runs his account now. Really? Yeah.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I got to go to his place once before I knew what he was. And it was berserk.
And they have an incinerator there.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah, they have an incinerator because what they were doing was they would let people hold tiger cubs. And if you have, let's just say we had 15 tiger cubs this year.

Speaker 1 Well, in six months, that tiger is going to weigh a few hundred pounds. What do you do with that? And so what they were doing was incinerating tigers.
What? Yes. And then they would breed more tigers.

Speaker 1 And then next year, they'd let people hold the cubs. And then they were just quietly killing tigers.
Are you serious? I didn't see that in the documentary.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's why I think I believe he's arrested. Yeah, he's in.
The last thing I saw was like his FBI mug shot. No, yeah, he's in prison, but I didn't think it was for that.

Speaker 1 I think it was for other stuff. I mean, I think, I think people just, when you see people that do bad things, they do bad things.
And so there's more. Yeah.

Speaker 1 you know, it doesn't end with just the incinerating of the tigers. I think one of the people might have fed her husband to a tiger.

Speaker 1 It was such a mess that whole, I couldn't watch the documentary because it was so, it was just gross. I'm not a fan of tigers in captivity.
No, I'm not a fan of tigers in captivity and

Speaker 1 sharks. Sharks.
Yeah. Yeah, no, sharks.

Speaker 1 I went to a.

Speaker 1 what's it called aquarium once and the shark's nose was so damaged because it kept trying to get out from hitting the edge yeah

Speaker 1 because they got to be constantly moving sharks Yeah. No, I mean, you know, the right, the right zoo that's doing what it does for conservation and education, I support that.

Speaker 1 There's really good zoos out there. I grew up going to the Bronx Zoo and

Speaker 1 might not be doing what I'm doing if it wasn't for that. So zoos have their place, but that's accredited, good conservation zoos.
But this sort of exotic animal keeping fringe thing, that's horrific.

Speaker 1 That's just animal.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just terrible. Yeah, like monkeys.
I don't think that should be in a household environment. No, nobody needs monkeys.
I mean,

Speaker 1 I've rescued monkeys. They're wonderful.
They're good people, but you don't want to deal with like a monkey that's coming of age. They don't listen.
They don't. They do not listen.

Speaker 1 Let me attack if you, you know. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I was working with a spider monkey that got older, and we were trying to get him to a rehab center. And he would do this thing where he would jump around, you know,

Speaker 1 it wasn't a roof, we were outdoors, so he'd have branches to swing on, but he would steal a hat. And he knew that you wanted your hat back, but he'd take your hat and they're faster than us.

Speaker 1 So once the monkey has your hat, you're not getting it back. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I've seen videos in like Thailand where the monkey will steal a Taurus object and you have to feed it and then it'll give it back to you. They're smart, man.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that's like, I mean, he's doing business. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
They're super smart. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I saw, I saw, I think it was a Gibbon in Indonesia that would sit, he sat at the, at the, over the, the doorway to a bar and he would steal cigarette packs out of people's shirts and smoke them.

Speaker 1 He was addicted to cigarettes. That's crazy.
Yeah. And if people tried to get their cigarettes back, he would.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
It was very scary. Yeah.
I've seen those black market videos on YouTube where like someone will have a hidden camera, pull up to an animal black market.

Speaker 1 It's super sad seeing that stuff, man. No, that's terrible.
Yeah. They belong in the wild.
Yeah. Locked up in cages.
Are they selling them out there too?

Speaker 1 Honestly, in our, where I work is so far off the beaten track that, that we don't see a lot of that.

Speaker 1 And again, now that we have this huge jungle keepers reserve, there's, we're making sure that there's not, there's not people coming in and taking the animals out of the forest.

Speaker 1 We're protecting the animals. And so the only thing is, you know, the local people, the local people still eat monkeys, but that's, that's what they've done.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's no other, there's no cows out there. So well, that's the thing.
You want them, it's actually, it helps when people are connected to the ecosystem to a degree, right?

Speaker 1 If we're, if we're, if, if people are, are managing our salmon stocks and keeping the rivers healthy because they know that we all depend on those, well, then we have a vested interest in keeping the rivers healthy.

Speaker 1 So then if a company comes and go, we want to dam this river. No, all of us depend on that.
And that's the type of thing that you, that we need.

Speaker 1 So when these local people are modernizing, they're trying to figure out how do we, you know, like we always tell them, like, we have sustainable amounts of hunting of deer.

Speaker 1 And, and, you know, on the East Coast, that's an easy one. We grew up with that.
Yeah. And it's like, because we monitor how many deer there are.
We give deer tags.

Speaker 1 It's, we know that we're not depleting the deer populations too much. We're actually caring for them.
And so it's the same thing there where it's like, you guys can continue your native way of life.

Speaker 1 It's just, you just got to make sure that you're not wiping out species, which as technology gets introduced, People that were hunting with bows and arrows and fish hooks start bringing nets.

Speaker 1 They start having shotguns. And it's like the game changes where it's like it's not as fair as it was yeah at one point that makes sense what's the typical diet for you out there like

Speaker 1 i mean out there it's a lot of rice and eggs and like you know we get like local chickens and stuff yeah we try not to eat like it's fun fishing and stuff but like even that i try not to do it too much you forget there's a mercury issue now right oh not because of that where we are is very very pure it's very uncontaminated it's actually one of the last uncontaminated rivers in the region but not from a health perspective just from this perspective that we're out there pretty much year-round so if we're every day if we're going out and fishing we're going to start depleting rivers so it's like you know once a month if you pull up a decent sized fish and we all share it it's like great but like don't abuse it you know yeah try to be responsible in how much we harvest so you could drink water straight out of that river oh yeah that's cool oh yeah i've always wanted to do that but oh you can't do it out here come to the amazon drink the water man have you tested it uh yeah no no no no no we got it we got it tested because we tested one of the main rivers that was near a city and it was like pure sewage oh shit yeah and there was a lot of mercury mercury in there.

Speaker 1 Damn. And then we tested our river and it was pretty much pure.
Yeah, because the flow is what kind of purifies the water. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And our river comes from deep parts of the Amazon where there is nothing up there. You know, if you, if you were to go into this forest, it's essentially the last endless forest.

Speaker 1 It's the headwaters of the Amazon. So it's so remote that if you were to go upriver, you could go for two weeks by boat and not hit anything.
Damn.

Speaker 1 It's yeah, it's just, it's like, it's like something out of a movie. Yeah.
I've been on a cruise and we went across the ocean in three days, days, five days. Really? Yeah, two weeks.
It's crazy.

Speaker 1 The Atlantic.

Speaker 1 It was from like Mexico to Cali. Wow.
Was that Atlantic or Pacific? I always get that. Probably Pacific.
Yeah. Yeah.
But yeah, two weeks on a boat is. Two weeks on a boat is here.

Speaker 1 You on a boat for two weeks? I was on for five days. Wow.
Yeah. Okay.
I don't like boats, to be honest.

Speaker 1 Did you get seasick? I don't. The first time I did, but I think you kind of train yourself to it, you know.
But a lot of people I take on the cruises get sick. Super sick.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 something about the movement i don't know yeah i mean if you get seasick you get seasick i mean that's just like some people do some people don't yeah so have you caught a wicked disease out there yet

Speaker 1 oh yeah i've had all kinds of stuff i've had dengue four or five times

Speaker 1 i had a mersa infection that almost killed me mersa mrsa antibiotic resistant staph infection it was horrific that was a bad one and i was 19 and i was trying to save an anteater and i at that time there was no

Speaker 1 There was no way of getting back to town. Like I didn't have a boat.
I was stranded out in the jungle. So I had to wait.

Speaker 1 And actually that the people that saved me, not that they cared much, but they were poachers. So I was on this poaching boat and there's just dead animals everywhere and carcasses.

Speaker 1 And there was a baby monkey under the boat that they were bringing back to sell to the pet trade.

Speaker 1 And I was just sitting there with this really high fever and just pus coming out of my face and my body and just like literally dying. So you got it from the dead animals?

Speaker 1 No, I got it from a hospital. I had gone to treat the dengue.
So I'd gone back to town.

Speaker 1 And then in this, you know, backwoods hospital, I'd gotten the infection, gone back out out to the jungle and then i didn't know what it was it just kept getting worse and i kept going it'll get better tomorrow it didn't damn yeah what happened i mean eventually i had to come back to the us and i they put me in the in the sealed off room like like the end of et when they you know they don't know why he's dying and they had the doctors come in with hazmat suits and they said where did you just come back from and i said the amazon they said

Speaker 1 okay so they like suited up they did not know what i had and i spent days on antibiotics and they said a couple more days if you didn't get to help you would have died geez i actually have antibiotic resistance now because i took so many grown up really yeah i just found a huge problem yeah it's a big problem

Speaker 1 i'm allergic to uh penicillin now

Speaker 1 i took so much grown up yeah i think they said that uh

Speaker 1 antibiotic like we're in a constant race with bacteria to to to create new and stronger antibiotics because people don't finish their courses and then we get antibiotic resistant bacteria that can right yeah so that's a huge scary issue yeah were you out there during the pandemic in the rainforest yeah i just lived out in the amazon nothing changed for you really really nothing changed so the only thing was that law enforcement couldn't do their jobs and so the loggers and the gold miners made a lot of progress oh they cut a whole bunch of areas because they just didn't care yeah they were just like great you guys can stay inside if you want we're gonna go out here and we're just gonna chop everything damn and so we lost a lot of forest during the pandemic but i wonder what the trees sell for because they're just making it into paper right oh hundreds of thousands no no no no no no no you're talking about tropical hardwoods you're talking about really really just like like mahogany and spanish oh serious stuff like you're talking about serious stuff and now that that road there's a land trade route to asia so it's like you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars not millions of dollars yeah okay because i know this table was actually a lot i don't know what wood this is but this is a fantastic piece of wood i don't know what this is but it's beautiful wow okay that makes sense then so they're just selling it to china Yeah, and I mean, I'm not, I'm not going to absolve the U.S.

Speaker 1 from that. Like, we don't, we don't actually know where it goes.
And one of the things that we'd love to do is put chips in some of the wood and see where that's going. That'd be smart.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that would be really cool.

Speaker 1 Yeah, track the flow because then you can expose it and call people out yeah and that's the good thing about having friends that are ex-loggers they can help you get that done so my cousin runs a logging we'll just go in there yeah i can't wait to see that video that'll that that will be cool yeah you've had some interesting videos on your youtube lately you just met a polar bear what was that you or was that someone else no that was someone else where would i need a polar bear someone made a video on youtube that must have been someone else that wasn't that one wasn't me no i i did uh recently i We did have one where we were coming down the river and there was a spider monkey in the river and she was drowning.

Speaker 1 This was just a couple weeks ago and uh the river the river in the rainy season you get all these crazy cross currents and it's very hard to get from one place to the other and the spider monkey was just popping under and so i jumped in the in the river and talking about animal intelligence yeah um

Speaker 1 i took a paddle because i i went up i didn't want to lifeguard her and just grab her by the neck but i saw that she was going to drown so i had to do something so i took a paddle i jumped in the river and i went to the spider monkey and after having them you know, like you take them off the hands of poachers, you bring them to the rehab center.

Speaker 1 This times where

Speaker 1 in the indigenous communities, I'll find somebody that has a monkey because they hate the mother. And I'll go, can I take this back to the rehab center? They'll go, yeah, take it back.

Speaker 1 So then for two days, I'm living with this like baby monkey around my neck.

Speaker 1 And so you hear the sounds that they make and you get used to how they are. And so I went up to this monkey and I gave her the paddle.
And she looked at me and she was like, just terrified.

Speaker 1 She was happy to not be drowning, but she looked at me and she was terrified. She jumped back in the river.

Speaker 1 And then I gave her the paddle and I lifted her up and I started making spider monkey sounds. And she looked at me and she just went, fine, deal.
She held on and you can see her in the video.

Speaker 1 She's got her tail around the paddle and she's hanging there like it's a branch. And she keeps looking at me like, I don't know who you are.

Speaker 1 Like she's a little nervous and I just brought it to the side and she ran off into the forest, but it was cool. She actually accepted my help.
So you learned how to speak spider monkey language. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you feel like you could telepathically communicate with some of these animals? Nah.

Speaker 1 Some people call themselves animal whisperers or whatever. Yeah, I'm always, I'm pretty worried about them.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm kind of a pragmatist.

Speaker 1 I don't, like I said, I don't believe anything unless i can see it evidence-based evidence-based and if i get someone that goes oh man i'm an you know i'm a pet psychic i'm like

Speaker 1 cool caesar milan with the dogs i mean but but caesar milan is doing behavior right he's yeah i mean if he i don't know if i don't know if he's no he is i don't know maybe he's a dog trainer yeah if he went to the you know that he he knows the you know the dog is talking to grandma i don't know yeah there are pet psychics though i've met a few yeah yeah yeah you're a little skeptical yeah you have a diverse range how do you choose your guests What's your, what's, do you have like a mission with the show?

Speaker 1 I'm still figuring it out. Yeah.
I don't know the exact mission, but definitely to inspire and educate is a big reason for the show. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But there's no set criteria for the guests. Like it doesn't matter to me how many followers you have or anything.
I just want interest whoever interests you. Interesting episodes.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What's uh I was looking at your your Instagram

Speaker 1 once I knew that I was coming here. I was looking at like who your like last few guests were and then you had the dude the what's his name Tate Tate Andrew Andrew Tate.
What's his,

Speaker 1 what's his mission? Because it just sounds like he's like

Speaker 1 shouting about how he doesn't like women. It just sounds like this misogynistic doofus.
He gets labeled out a lot. His mission, I think, is to empower men.
Empower men. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 1 He thinks men are becoming weak in society and he wants to empower them.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. You know, I had a hard time watching that.
Oh, yeah. I mean, he just sounds like such a misogynistic, loudmouth doofus.

Speaker 1 It just sounds horrible he gets labeled out a lot yeah i mean i understand he gets labeled that but the stuff coming out of his mouth just sounded ridiculous it just sounded like somebody making a really big deal about coming out of the closet like if you hate women so much just go hang out with men right you know it's like we all have mothers like i don't understand why he was attacking women Strange.

Speaker 1 Strange. It was interesting.
I'll let the audience decide on how they feel. Well, that's the thing.
I think it's a good thing that you have someone like that on.

Speaker 1 Because if someone's going to, if someone, whether you like their message or not, it's like you want to know what's, what's going on inside people's heads right right that's why i'm big on free speech actually yes i respected that because i watched it and i was like why the hell would he have this person on and then i was like no this is great yeah i try to stay as neutral as possible that was cool i respect that yeah but there's been some interesting ones for sure yeah yeah i've been learning a lot man you know learning about this stuff is really important i think people aren't exposed to this you know they would never know about this living in america no no and that's the thing it's like this rainforest conservation stuff has always been far away and what we're trying to do is link people to it.

Speaker 1 It's like this is such an important moment in history. And it is a moment in history that as a global society that we all have to pay attention to.
And so it's actually, it's a cool time.

Speaker 1 It's like technology is making it possible to reach the people. I mean, the fact that we're doing this right now, it's like people are going to listen to this.

Speaker 1 And maybe some of those people are going to go, I want to go down there. Some of those people are going to go, I'm going to sign up and help Jungle Keepers.

Speaker 1 And it's like, we might help save a river because of that. It's like.
It is really exciting. It is cool.
How's the media coverage in Peru about this? Like, do they even talk about it? They don't care.

Speaker 1 Not at all. no and also in peru you have to worry about the fact that some of the politicians are actually running on platforms where

Speaker 1 they're on the side of the of the loggers because they make money yeah it's kind of like you know like in the u.s so you have like

Speaker 1 we're on the side of the coal miners you know they become a community and it's like some you have the environmentalists versus the coal miners and so there you have the environmentalists versus the illegal loggers and miners and it's like the same thing so Media coverage within Peru is not great on the conservation stuff.

Speaker 1 Like one of my guys who's my my teacher, my best friend, this guy, JJ, Juan Julio Duran, who, who started Jungle Keepers with me, he's this indigenous leader.

Speaker 1 He's the guy that stood on the side of the river and said to me, he goes, we could protect all this because we have to save this. And I said, well, who's we have to save? I was like 18 years old.

Speaker 1 I went, what do you mean we have to save it? I said, isn't there someone we can call? And he says, look up and down the river. Do you see any help coming? I said, no.
He goes, we have to do it.

Speaker 1 And that was such a powerful message because it's like, if you want to improve something,

Speaker 1 a lot of times you got to do it. Right.

Speaker 1 You know, and have that, that sense of, of that it's not, it's not, you can't just always pass it on to somebody else, that if you see a problem that you can improve, do something about it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that's, that's something that I learned from him. And that's something that's taken us all the way to here.

Speaker 1 And so people all over the world have latched onto that and been like, if there's a little bit of hope, we'll take it. Like we'll jump on.
We'll save that forest. And that's been amazing.

Speaker 1 I love that message because a lot of people try to rely on others, rely on government to fix their problems.

Speaker 1 Instead of what's it better to light a candle than curse the darkness, like just do something. It doesn't have to be the biggest thing in the world.
Take one step.

Speaker 1 And it's like that goes for so many things. And that's, again, people who are doing humanitarian work and people who are saving ecosystems.
There's a lot of good work going on.

Speaker 1 I feel like there's two kinds of people. There's people that go, the world's never been worse.
And there's people that go, the world's never been better.

Speaker 1 And I tend to be with the second group where it's like, yeah, we have a lot of problems, but we also have never had the resources we have like we have now.

Speaker 1 And people are so much more awake and aware and capable to actually improve things. And the work that's being done right now is incredible.
So it's an exciting time to be alive.

Speaker 1 And then you get to, you have a cool job because you get to actually meet all different kinds of people that are doing all this different stuff. So

Speaker 1 all sorts of people.

Speaker 1 In a few years of doing this podcast, you're talking, you're dipping your mind into all these different experts and people that are doing, I've seen like health experts on here and stuff. Like, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's changed all aspects of my life. Yeah.
And I think that's important because growing up, you grow up in these bubbles. Yeah.
Like, like you said, you were in New York.

Speaker 1 You You weren't exposed to any of this. No.
Like, you had no idea. No, it was like this faraway adventure thing.
It was like Pirates of the Caribbean,

Speaker 1 like Jurassic Park. It was like, man, I want to go on adventures.
You know, that's why I love these combos.

Speaker 1 That's why I listen to Rogan, Lex Friedman, these podcasts are like, wow, all this is going on. And it's actually impacting me.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, especially like, I think both of them have taken very seriously the size of their platform and tried to use it for good. Right.

Speaker 1 Those are both guys that have, that I respect a lot, that have helped me out a lot.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you've been on both their shows. Yeah.
And I mean, Joe, Joe has helped us so much just by, just by having those conversations. I mean, that's the power of these conversations.

Speaker 1 That's how I thought about this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, those are both awesome guys. I was just listening to Lex talking to Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India.
I didn't see that one. Amazing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex is doing amazing work.

Speaker 1 His eight-hour podcast with Elon. Neuralink.
I mean, he just, I wonder with him, the prep, right?

Speaker 1 Because he goes in and he's done so much research on such diverse topics where he's asking them complex questions about, I mean, I listened to his episode on chess and it's like

Speaker 1 he's deep inside the chess world. And then he's talking about AI and then he's talking about the politics of this country and that country.
And it's like, it's impressive. Oh, my God.
Yeah. It's wild.

Speaker 1 But I mean, he also, he does the work. He does.
He just spends weeks getting ready for those things. And he believes, and I think he's right, that.

Speaker 1 you know, bringing those conversations to a larger audience is going to improve human communication, build bridges and ultimately do good, which I think, I think he's correct.

Speaker 1 I think he's onto something, which is why it's working. Did he visit you out there in the jungle? Dude, Lex came out.
Yeah. I think I saw that one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 No, he came out for like two solid weeks. Yeah, you did a pod out there, right? We did a pod out there.
And that, that too, in the middle of the podcast, we're sitting there talking.

Speaker 1 And, and I stop at one point because we had the jungle right here. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And we just like brought a table out to the edge of the jungle at the edge of this research station and a snake starts going by. And I looked at the comments and everyone's like, they planted that.

Speaker 1 I was like, no, we didn't plant the snake. Like it was real.
It was right there.

Speaker 1 there i stopped the podcast like hold on i grabbed the snake and we like we're hanging out with the snake that's hilarious was it an anaconda no no no it was this little tree snake this little thing like the size of a pencil it's a dorable little snake yeah i didn't know they get that small yeah no they're tall tiny those little tiny little cute things yeah it was like this is a snake that you could literally you could lift it off of a tree branch and you could hand it to a baby wow it's a absolutely harmless delicate little shoestring thing called a blunt-headed tree snake i wish they knew how much i love them they're like because like as i bring people to the jungle i people you know, I'm scared.

Speaker 1 I'm scared of this. I'm scared of snakes.
I'm like, you're not scared of snakes. You just never met one.
People do fear snakes.

Speaker 1 People fear snakes, but it's like, that's like, it's like a type of species racism, man. They've just been told that snakes are bad.
Programming. Yeah.
From movies, I think. Movies, the Bible.
Right.

Speaker 1 Snakes are always the bad guy. That's true.
You know, even in Indiana Jones, you have Indiana Jones. He's so cool.
And then it's like, he's scared of snakes.

Speaker 1 Snakes always get cast as the bad guy, but snakes are the ones that are eating the rats and keeping populations of

Speaker 1 the things that carry diseases down. Snakes to me are helping us.
Plus, most snakes, rattlesnakes, if you go near a rattlesnake, it'll rattle.

Speaker 1 Don't come near me. I'll bite you.
Right. Don't worry.

Speaker 1 You go near a cobra, they'll put up their hood. They'll look at you and they'll say, don't make me do it.
Yeah. Yeah.
I was just having a talk with a bushmaster not that long ago.

Speaker 1 It's a huge viper, nine or 10 foot long viper, as thick as an arm.

Speaker 1 I wanted to catch him. Bushmaster looked at me.
He said, if you want to meet God,

Speaker 1 I'll arrange the meeting.

Speaker 1 I went, i'm good do you carry anti-dynamic whenever you go out no you gotta you gotta have refrigeration and you gotta know how to administer it and you have to know which species bit you so it's like no we oh wow if somebody gets bit we just eat back them damn do they have enough time to do that ideally we've never had a problem i mean i just i mean the snakes out there there's we we look for snakes the jungle is such good habitat for snakes that you if me and you went out on a night walk right now i would have to work very hard to find you a snake they blend in oh okay they're super cryptic they're up in the trees they're down

Speaker 1 It's not what you think in terms of that there's snakes everywhere.

Speaker 1 No, so we really, we really, one, one, one scientist I know got bitten by a very venomous coral snake. And thank God he was,

Speaker 1 he knew what to do. He knew that not to get his heart rate up.
He actually kind of evaced himself, got himself to a hospital, and then they didn't have the anti-venom at the hospital. Oh, shit.

Speaker 1 He ended up just having to sit there and wait. And he happened to live.
Whoa, that's scary. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We were thinking of writing an article together, me and Pat, Pat Champagne. He's uh, he's been doing a lot with our Anaconda work as well.
But yeah, it's luckily there's only been one snake incident.

Speaker 1 That's nuts. Do you have any run-ins with the uncontacted tribes? I know you're famous for some of those stories.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 We, we, I mean, I had one many years ago when I was out on a solo. I was

Speaker 1 multi-days deep on this solo and I was. on the rivers and I came around this bend and I saw smoke coming up off the off the jungle and I knew that I was way past where there was humans.

Speaker 1 And so I, I had a suspicion, but there was something in you that you don't, I have this problem where I don't think things can be real.

Speaker 1 You know what I'm saying? You thought you were hallucinating?

Speaker 1 Either I'm hallucinating or just put, no, I didn't think I was hallucinating, but, but you hear about uncontacted tribes and you go, it doesn't sound real. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 That there's sort of Stone Age humans living out in the jungle now. And so when I saw the smoke, I said, well, maybe it's, maybe it's poachers, right? Maybe it's somebody.

Speaker 1 So I kept going and then when i saw them i just saw a couple of naked guys standing across the river with bows and arrows and the blood just ran out of my face i just i was instantly thinking of every story i've heard where they're you know just shooting these six-foot arrows at people and i ran for days i ran for days they were chasing you they didn't chase me they they did they looked at me and they were pointing like the guy was like

Speaker 1 you could see them looking at me And I ran through the forest as long as I could, as long as I could take it. And then I came out onto the river.

Speaker 1 I inflated a raft and then I let the river take me, but I went for days. Damn.
Yeah, that was terrifying.

Speaker 1 And recently, one of my guys, one of our friends was shot by an arrow in the last few months. And we have to be careful how much we talk about it because

Speaker 1 you want to protect these people. You want to respect these people.
And there's something weird with when people hear about the uncontacted tribes, they idealize it.

Speaker 1 They go, they're the last free people. They're the last, you know,

Speaker 1 they idealize it, not that they're these hunter-gatherers that happen to be be still surviving in the modern world, and and they want to go find them.

Speaker 1 And we don't want that, you know, because we have to protect these people. Yeah, I've seen videos of people going to like islands and trying to find them.

Speaker 1 That guy, yeah, that guy showed up with a Bible and they oh, was that the same tribe? No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 So that was in the, in the, I think, uh, Nicobar Islands, I believe, Andaman or Nicobar, Nicobar Islands with this missionary.

Speaker 1 And they told those, those, the Indian government keeps people away from those islands. They know that those tribes want no contact with the outside world.
They've made it very clear.

Speaker 1 If you come here, we will shoot you.

Speaker 1 They've lived there as long as anybody can remember yeah this dude decided that he needed to go give them a bible so he showed up and they killed him on oh they actually killed him oh yeah oh oh yeah oh yeah damn they stuck him full of arrows i might have watched a different video then yeah no there's a couple videos of people running into them but you got to be careful because they don't have any sort of immune system defenses for even like our common cold oh wow forget about like you know any of the other things that we're carrying around but like we we've been in airports, we've been in civilization, we have all these defenses they don't have.

Speaker 1 Right. And so you or I shaking their hand could kill an entire tribe.
Holy crap. Yes.
I never thought of it that way. Yes.
So and that's, that's, we have to be very, very careful about that.

Speaker 1 Not to mention that on a technological level, these people don't have

Speaker 1 some of the tribes on our, on our rivers, like we, they don't, they don't have, they're using bow and arrows. You know, they don't even have metal.

Speaker 1 They don't even, we don't even have stones in our river. Yeah.
And so they're, they're extremely vulnerable populations of humans that we have to protect at all costs.

Speaker 1 And the crazy thing with them is that they can't advocate for themselves, right? Most groups, if there's something that's hurting them, can do something. You can go talk to them.

Speaker 1 You can interview them. You can make a documentary.
They might be able to send a representative to go. Some of the Zingu River tribes I know in the Amazon sent.

Speaker 1 representatives to go get educated and to go become lawyers so they could come back and fight the people that were trying to make dams in their in their homeland.

Speaker 1 These people are living out there and they have no idea about the world they have no idea what's coming for them they have no idea about our technology i mean they don't know about the wheel they don't have metal they don't have spoons

Speaker 1 so so so much of and and and there's the language barrier so it's like we really just have to protect them that's the best thing you can do is respect and protect um and then like i said just be a little careful talk i'm a little always a little careful talking about it because even even that me saying that on a solo i i saw them some people will come out and say you were being irresponsible by going so deep that you were even in the vicinity of them.

Speaker 1 And that was a mistake. I didn't know that they were going to be there.
I was told that that river was fine.

Speaker 1 They're nomadic. Got it.
Yeah. And so, and so, and the thing is, they, they became isolated most likely at a time when,

Speaker 1 you know, the Industrial Revolution probably was the last time they had contact with the outside world.

Speaker 1 And so you had rubber barons going to the Amazon where that was the only place we could get rubber from.

Speaker 1 In the Industrial Revolution, you, you need hoses and gaskets and tires and and all this stuff for a changing world.

Speaker 1 And so they went down to the Amazon and they were tapping the rubber trees and they were this horrendous Holocaust on the indigenous people where these rubber barons went down and were just making slaves out of everybody.

Speaker 1 And these tribes learned the outside world is dangerous. If people come, shoot first.

Speaker 1 And so you can't really fault them for being hyper-violent. They're basically like the Comanches.
Like if you go anywhere near them,

Speaker 1 they'll draw on you. And the fact that we're sitting here with microphones and an airport over there and a screen and these people are sitting there sharpening bamboo to make their arrows right now.

Speaker 1 And they've never heard of a podcast. It's like crazy world.
Yeah, it's a really, really crazy world. It is trippy to think about.

Speaker 1 Wow. Have they had any like conflict with the people deforested, like destroying the rainforest? Oh, yeah.
In in August of last year, a couple of loggers were killed. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And we know that the tribes don't like that they cut the trees. It's one of the first communications that they've said.

Speaker 1 They've asked for plantains.

Speaker 1 Like when the limited contact that the indigenous leaders and indigenous anthropologists have had with the uncontacted tribes, the first thing the tribes ask for is plantains. They want food.

Speaker 1 I think it's pretty hard to find food in the jungle with your group of people.

Speaker 1 If it was just me or if it was just you, if it was the two of us, like we could catch fish for us, but if there was 17 of us, 70, how do you feed that many people? Right.

Speaker 1 Without agriculture, as a nomadic civilization, it's very, very difficult. And so

Speaker 1 they don't have a lock on this stuff.

Speaker 1 And they have communicated that. They said, you know, you people come into our forest and you cut the big trees.
And that's the,

Speaker 1 they'll show you that they don't like the trees going down. They think that that's

Speaker 1 a high offense to them. I mean, the trees are the biggest physical feature in the jungle.
And so if you're destroying those, they're horrified by that. Yeah, because that's their homeland.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so that's also what makes the project that we're doing so special is that we're protecting all this endangered species, all of this biodiversity, the indigenous communities, and then as well, that way up at the headwaters of these rivers, we have the uncontacted tribes.

Speaker 1 And again,

Speaker 1 as a civilization, there's this group of people that is so incredibly special that it's sort of our responsibility to protect them. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, because if we do nothing, the loggers will go up there, the miners will go up there, they'll make roads across the thing, and then little by little, they'll just become extinct.

Speaker 1 We'll just allow that to happen. And so we're also preventing that by giving them huge areas of buffer buffer zone, of habitat where

Speaker 1 they have healthy forests that they can survive in. Beautiful.
Are there still a lot of roads being built out there? Yeah. Well, that's why I'm here.

Speaker 1 They're building roads and they're actually trying to jump around. Now they're racing us because now we've done this amazing thing.

Speaker 1 I grew up hearing the rainforest is vanishing, the rainforest is vanishing. The rainforest has always been being destroyed.
Now with Jungle Keepers, we're actually notching winds.

Speaker 1 People all over the world are helping us. We're going on podcasts.
We're reaching people.

Speaker 1 JJ, who's this indigenous leader that started all of this, just got recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 people protecting the climate. Wow.
Huge. I don't know how that happened, by the way.

Speaker 1 It just came out of the ether. It just appeared.
They were like, we got a message. They were like, JJ is being recognized as one of the top 100 climate leaders for 2024.
It was like, insane.

Speaker 1 But like, while he's out there doing that, we're literally racing the roads. And so we're actually trying to grow this reserve and protect this river.

Speaker 1 And so they're going, before they protect it, we got to get in there and get all that we can. And so now it's a race against time to protect the the wildest place on earth before they burn it.

Speaker 1 I love it. Well, we'll link your website below for people that want to.
Please do. Yeah.
Anything else you want to close off with? That's so powerful.

Speaker 1 No, just, you know, just the importance of the fact that we actually have the power to save these endangered species, to keep the ecosystems of our planet healthy, and that that's something that's only going to happen now.

Speaker 1 It's not going to, it's not a chance that's going to repeat itself in history.

Speaker 1 And so for that, thank you for having me on here because the more people we reach, there's going to be a few jungle keepers out there listening to this that are going to jump on that cause.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll donate tonight, guys. I'll post on Instagram.
If you guys can donate, please post and I'll reshare it on my page for awesome. Thank you so much.
Thanks for coming on.

Speaker 1 Thanks for watching, guys. I'll see you next time.