00:00:00how was getting stung by a stingray?
00:00:02- That's, it was wonderful.
00:00:05I loved every second of it
00:00:07because people pursue ice plunges and ayahuasca journeys
00:00:11and people are constantly looking for the edge.
00:00:15And I found the edge, right?
00:00:17I thought I was tough.
00:00:18I thought I'd been through pain.
00:00:20I didn't know anything.
00:00:21I was making deals with God.
00:00:23I was in so much pain.
00:00:26And you don't think, you think like your chest cavity
00:00:28or your head, you didn't think that your foot
00:00:30could throw you into agony.
00:00:32I got, you know, so it stung me in the foot
00:00:35and what happened was-- - Tell me, where were you?
00:00:37- So I'm in a stream in the Amazon rainforest
00:00:38and I had my shoes on just because I'd been hiking
00:00:42and I reached this waterfall and I said,
00:00:44I'm gonna take my shoes off to enjoy the waterfall
00:00:47and swim around.
00:00:48And as I'm playing in the waterfall,
00:00:50I just, you instantly know it.
00:00:52It's like you got shot in the foot.
00:00:54And the stingray, I stepped on the stingray
00:00:55and it stuck its barb, and it's, you know,
00:00:57it's the size of a steak knife.
00:00:58It sticks its barb in through the skin
00:01:01and the thing is it wagged its tail under the skin,
00:01:03so it flayed the skin off of the meat of the foot
00:01:06and then swam out.
00:01:08- So just what does a-- - In a split second.
00:01:10- What does a stingray, 'cause it's flat
00:01:15and it's just the tail, so have you stood on the tail
00:01:19or has it been looking for you?
00:01:20- No, no, no, it's flat, flat.
00:01:21The whole thing is flat.
00:01:22And then if it gets scared, it stings to make you go away.
00:01:25They're not trying to attack you.
00:01:26They want to be left alone.
00:01:27I stepped on him.
00:01:28It's my fault.
00:01:29I couldn't see him. - And then the tail came up.
00:01:31- Tail went straight up.
00:01:32And the arch of your foot is sensitive.
00:01:34And so steak knife to the arch of the foot
00:01:38injected a ton of venom as it flayed the skin off, pulls out.
00:01:42And so I'm like, I'm like, look, this hurts,
00:01:44but the flesh wounds don't hurt that much.
00:01:47And I'm like, that hurt, getting stabbed hurt.
00:01:49And so I'm over there.
00:01:50I'm about to film.
00:01:50And I'm like, I'm in the Amazon rainforest
00:01:52and I just got hit by a stingray.
00:01:53My friend comes up to me and he goes,
00:01:54we don't have time for this.
00:01:56He said, you're going to pass out soon.
00:01:58And when you pass out, we can't carry you to the river.
00:02:01And I said, how do you know I'm going to pass out?
00:02:02He goes, it happens to everybody.
00:02:04And sure enough, the next thing I know I'm on a cart
00:02:07getting wheeled through the jungle.
00:02:09I don't remember the boat ride at all.
00:02:11And then they got me to the research station
00:02:13and I was in so much pain.
00:02:14I was making every deal with the universe.
00:02:17If you just make this stop, I promise I'll do whatever,
00:02:21just everything.
00:02:22And luckily I was with the local guys.
00:02:25But they were scraping the trees,
00:02:26gathering medicinal barks that they baked in a pan.
00:02:30They wrapped it in leaves and they baked it into a poultice.
00:02:33And they put that on the wound, boiling hot poultice,
00:02:36which actually weirdly enough felt good, boiling hot,
00:02:39but the skin was already off.
00:02:41They put that on and then they wrap it to your foot
00:02:44and they leave that there for a few hours.
00:02:46And that sucks out the venom.
00:02:47But for about four or five hours,
00:02:48it was the worst, most blinding pain, like level 10.
00:02:51The doctor goes, what are you feeling?
00:02:53So two or an eight and I was like, this was a 10.
00:02:56I can't imagine more pain than that.
00:02:58It's like being just the venom.
00:03:00It's like having an electrical wire shoved into your veins.
00:03:05But the last guy I know that got stung by a stingray,
00:03:09he went to a hospital and he had permanent nerve damage.
00:03:12Didn't walk for two months, had a systemic infection
00:03:15because he went with the Western medicine way.
00:03:18The local guys are like, dude, we know how to deal with this.
00:03:21We have trees for that.
00:03:22There's a sap for that.
00:03:25They have it.
00:03:25They know, they've learned
00:03:26from their grandfathers and grandmothers.
00:03:28My God.
00:03:31- You know that Post Malone song, "I Got a Guy for That"?
00:03:35- I don't think I've ever heard a Post Malone song.
00:03:38- It's impressive that you managed to evade it.
00:03:41That's actually also made of bark and herbs.
00:03:43- Oh, I thought you were gonna say
00:03:44this is also made of Post Malone.
00:03:45(laughing)
00:03:47- It probably is.
00:03:48No, there's a--
00:03:49- Bark and herbs.
00:03:50- He's got a song called "I Got a Guy for That"
00:03:52and the indigenous people of the Amazon
00:03:54are, I've got a tree for that.
00:03:55- Yeah.
00:03:56- That's their equivalent.
00:03:57- Yeah, and Apple used to have an ad campaign.
00:03:59If you need it, we have an app for that.
00:04:01- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:04:02- Amazon, we go, we got a sap for that.
00:04:04(laughing)
00:04:04- Very cool.
00:04:05- Yeah, yeah.
00:04:06- What's the reason for the pain extending for so long?
00:04:11Is it the particular type of toxin is unusually--
00:04:14- Venom.
00:04:15- Yeah, the venom is unusually important.
00:04:16- Massive amount of venom.
00:04:18- Right.
00:04:19- People that get stung by coastal saltwater stingrays,
00:04:22they're like, oh yeah, you put something hot on it,
00:04:24it gets better.
00:04:26That's not the way it works with these guys.
00:04:27It's much, much worse.
00:04:28The venom is much more intense.
00:04:30And again, you're getting, I mean,
00:04:31just look at a steak knife.
00:04:32Next time you're eating a steak
00:04:33and just imagine just stabbing yourself
00:04:35through the foot with that.
00:04:38- And while it's in there, it's gone like this.
00:04:40- And then it swam away.
00:04:41- It's an electrical steak knife filled with venom.
00:04:44- Yeah.
00:04:45Yeah, it was great.
00:04:46But again, the whole experience was so visceral.
00:04:49The only part that I was truly upset about
00:04:52was as I'm laying there was the anticipation.
00:04:54We suffer more in an imagination than we do in life.
00:04:57I was just going, how much of my year is this gonna cut out?
00:05:00Am I gonna be off my feet for three months?
00:05:03I was on my feet in two days.
00:05:04So again, there's no point in worrying about it.
00:05:06- Are you conscious of the finality, the finitude of life?
00:05:11Is that something you think about a lot?
00:05:15- As someone that I think has come close to dying
00:05:18more than most people, very much so.
00:05:21Very much so, yeah.
00:05:22Like I want to live very much
00:05:29because I want to be around my family
00:05:31and I want to experience things, but scared of death, no.
00:05:34Not even a little bit.
00:05:36- But conscious of time.
00:05:37- Conscious of time.
00:05:39Not worried about it. - Conscious of time
00:05:40in that how long am I gonna be off my feet?
00:05:43How much of my life am I going to maximize
00:05:46or potentially lose from this sort of a thing?
00:05:49- Yes, but only because I need to be saving the Amazon.
00:05:53I need to be running around.
00:05:54I need to be helping other people.
00:05:56I don't want to be off my feet.
00:05:58What am I gonna do?
00:05:58What am I gonna do then?
00:05:59I'm useless off my feet.
00:06:01- Surely ever being barefoot in the Amazon is dangerous.
00:06:05- We are always barefoot in the Amazon.
00:06:07Actually, the only reason I had shoes on
00:06:10was because I was doing an ad for Vivo Barefoot
00:06:12and I put them on to film
00:06:16because they're like a barefoot shoe company.
00:06:18And then I was like, all right, that's enough with shoes.
00:06:20I took them off.
00:06:22I walk around barefoot.
00:06:22I learned from the natives, right?
00:06:24And so when you go hunting with the native trackers,
00:06:27if you were wearing boots in the jungle,
00:06:28it makes so much more noise, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk.
00:06:31The leaves, the report, the amount of sticks that you break,
00:06:34the slurp in the mud.
00:06:36It's just, you know, if you go barefoot,
00:06:38now you're moving quiet and you can hit over vines
00:06:42and things you can pick out the rocks much easier.
00:06:43You also have tactile balance control.
00:06:46Your toes become balancers.
00:06:48And so you're much better off barefoot.
00:06:50The only problem is in the Amazon,
00:06:52you have thorns that are 10 inches, 12 inches long.
00:06:55You have bullet ants, venomous snakes, stingrays.
00:06:58And the list goes on and on.
00:07:01- Bullet ants or fire ants,
00:07:03the most painful venom that that gentleman who did,
00:07:07see that guy that did the self study on himself
00:07:10where he allowed all of these different animals
00:07:13to bite him or inject him with venom,
00:07:16and he described the sense of it happening
00:07:18like a sommelier would, the notes of wine.
00:07:21And he would talk about sort of dull, smoky textures
00:07:24and sort of sharp, fiery electrical senses
00:07:27and stuff like that.
00:07:28I'm pretty sure that bullet ants are an ant.
00:07:30- Bullet ants are the top.
00:07:31- Yeah, so.
00:07:32- Yeah, I mean, they're horrible.
00:07:34And even now I'd say they would end the day.
00:07:36If you were me right now in the studio, you know,
00:07:38if it was a bullet ant crawling up your leg and hit you good.
00:07:40You know, you didn't brush it off quick.
00:07:42If it got you good, they sting you.
00:07:44They hold onto you.
00:07:45They grab you with their mandibles.
00:07:47They have these chopping mandibles.
00:07:48They grab you with the mandibles.
00:07:49So they grab you with their face
00:07:52and then they drive that stinger home.
00:07:54- Oh, so they don't inject the venom through the?
00:07:57- Through the mouth.
00:07:58They have a stinger like a wasp.
00:08:00And so they hold onto you and they think,
00:08:03and if you smack them, that's not,
00:08:05you can't kill them with your hand.
00:08:07You need like a hammer or a shoe.
00:08:09- You can't kill them with your hand.
00:08:10- No, you slap a bullet ant like that,
00:08:12they'll just sting you harder.
00:08:14100%.
00:08:15And it will hurt enough.
00:08:17Your glands will swell up in your armpit, in your groin,
00:08:19in your neck.
00:08:21You'll get a fever.
00:08:22- Immune system's going crazy.
00:08:23- And that the most creative thing of that venom
00:08:26is that it makes you feel like something's going wrong.
00:08:31You go, something's not right.
00:08:32Something's gonna happen.
00:08:33It gives you this panicked feeling.
00:08:35You're fine.
00:08:36I mean, I've always been fine.
00:08:38I've been bitten by like 12 or 13 times, but.
00:08:41- Sort of impending doom.
00:08:43- Yeah, it always gives you this really stressed response
00:08:45where you're like, oh man, I have a blood clot.
00:08:48Or it's like, it makes you think that the venom
00:08:50is causing damage and you just, but that's the point.
00:08:54The point is to cause you debilitating stress
00:08:57that you go away.
00:08:58And that's the same thing with wasps.
00:08:59I mean, they come and they just sting the shit out of you
00:09:01so that you leave their nest.
00:09:02- So ingenious, isn't it?
00:09:04- It's so ingenious.
00:09:05And I also love the wasp philosophy of,
00:09:07I think it's a good philosophy to embody in our own lives
00:09:10as well as we are peaceful here.
00:09:12We are in our nest.
00:09:13We're attending to our babies.
00:09:15Do not fuck with us.
00:09:17And if you do, we're gonna chase you.
00:09:21And it's kind of this like warrior peace thing
00:09:22where it's like, you know, you see a wasp nest?
00:09:24You go, I'm not going anywhere near that nest.
00:09:26And if you do, if you, by accident hit it with a machete,
00:09:29they're gonna chase you all the way to the river.
00:09:31Like they're gonna make sure they make their point.
00:09:34- What is the fuck there's a ton of wasps coming after me?
00:09:37Water, that's the solution?
00:09:38- Water, but then, see in the jungle,
00:09:42you can't see 10 feet in front of you, right?
00:09:43'Cause it's dense.
00:09:44So when you're running from the wasps,
00:09:47that's the most dangerous part.
00:09:48Because as you're getting stung, you're making bad decisions.
00:09:51'Cause you're running forward and there's vines
00:09:52and there's spikes and there's other bullet ants
00:09:54and there's snakes.
00:09:56And so as you're running, you're in a high likelihood
00:10:00of getting into more trouble.
00:10:02- It is kind of insane that anybody is able to not be killed
00:10:06in the Amazon.
00:10:06It sounds like it's just filled with things
00:10:10that could kill you pretty easily.
00:10:12- It's not as bad as so far.
00:10:14We've started talking about all the worst things.
00:10:16We started talking about stingrays and bullet ants,
00:10:18but I mean, you could totally either,
00:10:20most of the time I'm there,
00:10:21I'm walking barefoot through beautiful forests
00:10:24on trails that are quiet with macaws above me
00:10:27and frogs singing.
00:10:28And it's not as bad.
00:10:32It's really just those moments.
00:10:35You go through six weeks of wonderful
00:10:37and then you step on a stingray.
00:10:39The jungle is actually very, very serene.
00:10:41It's very calm.
00:10:42There's no honking car horns.
00:10:44You're not gonna get mugged.
00:10:45The most dangerous thing is falling trees.
00:10:48- Is it ever silent?
00:10:50- No.
00:10:51And I don't know what Rage Against the Machine song it is.
00:10:54He says, "Something about silence makes me sick."
00:10:56And I always think of that
00:10:57when I have to come stay in a hotel room
00:10:59because I fall asleep to the throbbing chorus of frogs
00:11:02at night.
00:11:03And so I come and I get into a room and there's silence.
00:11:08Nature is not silent.
00:11:09At least the jungle is not silent.
00:11:11It's loud.
00:11:12In the morning, there's howler monkeys and macaws and birds
00:11:15and everything's going crazy.
00:11:17You hit 4 a.m., the jungle explodes into song.
00:11:22It's loud.
00:11:23And at night you go in the swamps,
00:11:25the frogs are all coming down from the canopy and mating.
00:11:27I'd have to scream to talk to you right now.
00:11:29- No way.
00:11:30(roaring)
00:11:32- All that.
00:11:33I'd be screaming at you like, "Look at this one!"
00:11:35It's so loud.
00:11:37No, it's incredible.
00:11:38It's magical.
00:11:39It's absolutely magic on earth.
00:11:41- You know what it makes me think about?
00:11:42That humans have survived in pretty ancestral environments
00:11:47in very varied ecologies.
00:11:51And how different the nervous system set point
00:11:56of somebody who grew up in the jungle versus somebody
00:12:01who grew up on the plains.
00:12:03Because the plains presumably would be much quieter.
00:12:06You know, there's big, big chunks of space,
00:12:08nothingness between animals.
00:12:11And there might be some wind, there might be the blowing of,
00:12:14you might be able to hear something,
00:12:15some birds over the far side.
00:12:17But I spent a good bit of time in Zambia.
00:12:21And that at night, apart from maybe the sounds
00:12:26of some buzzing of a few insects and stuff,
00:12:29it's pretty fucking quiet.
00:12:30- Interesting.
00:12:33No, the jungle is almost its own superorganism.
00:12:37And it's like it has a consciousness.
00:12:39And when you're inside of it and you have to imagine
00:12:41a human, let's just say six feet and below,
00:12:46the jungle is 160 feet tall in places.
00:12:50So you're not, it's a 4D environment.
00:12:53You're underneath.
00:12:54It's like being at the bottom of the ocean,
00:12:56but the ocean is made of tree branches
00:12:57and leaves and animals, and you're under all of it.
00:13:00So when you're walking on a trail,
00:13:02there's most of what's around you,
00:13:03like a cathedral is above you.
00:13:05And so when you walk around at night,
00:13:08you have this little headlamp,
00:13:10you're this tiny little orb of light walking below
00:13:13this throbbing, teeming, murdering mass of wildlife
00:13:18that's all around you that you can't see.
00:13:21And there's frogs and snakes and night birds
00:13:23and kinkajous and jaguars and all of this stuff moving
00:13:26around you.
00:13:27And so it's very, very loud, very loud.
00:13:30And I think that to me is comfort.
00:13:32People, I don't know, to me, to fall asleep to that,
00:13:36people come to the jungle and they're shocked by the fact
00:13:40that the sounds of the jungle are calming.
00:13:43You put your head down and you hear all of that.
00:13:46And it just lulls you to sleep.
00:13:48I mean, as a kid, it was the cicadas in the summer.
00:13:51You know, the summer sound, that throb, I love it.
00:13:54Winter, when it's quiet.
00:13:56- Didn't you try to get eaten by an anaconda?
00:14:00- Some producers at Discovery Channel tried to get me
00:14:03to do that, yes.
00:14:04And I did do it.
00:14:05I did try to get eaten by an anaconda
00:14:07because they said that if I tried to get eaten
00:14:10by an anaconda, it would get us such high ratings.
00:14:13'Cause I said, look, we're gonna do research
00:14:14on the biggest anacondas on earth, right?
00:14:17We're gonna do something no one's ever done before.
00:14:19But sitting at a desk in Hollywood,
00:14:21they were like, that's not good enough.
00:14:23They're like, we wanna go bigger.
00:14:24How about we make you a space suit
00:14:25and we feed you to an anaconda
00:14:27when you have a breathing tube, so you'll be fine.
00:14:29And snakes regurgitate all the time.
00:14:31And so at the time, I knew the snake wasn't gonna eat me.
00:14:35And so in the room, you know, you shake hands, you go, sure.
00:14:39And then they told me the show
00:14:41would be called Expedition Amazon.
00:14:43And again, I'm 20, 24, right?
00:14:46And they're telling you, you can go to the Amazon.
00:14:49You have millions of dollar budget.
00:14:51You can take all your best friends and expert scientists
00:14:53and start research that's never been done before.
00:14:56The only thing that you gotta do
00:14:58is pay the piper by doing this one thing.
00:15:01And so at that age, at that time I went,
00:15:05how else do we tell the world
00:15:07that we have to save this river?
00:15:09'Cause it was just starting to crystallize in my head
00:15:11that if me and JJ, my local friend,
00:15:14if we didn't start to save this river,
00:15:16that nobody was gonna do it.
00:15:18So I said, this seems like the opportunity.
00:15:21This was my first experience.
00:15:22I was young, I had not learned yet.
00:15:25I was not yet a Jedi.
00:15:26I shook the hands and they said, don't worry, kid.
00:15:30We're gonna take care of you.
00:15:32Okay, they called it Expedition Amazon.
00:15:35And while we were in the jungle, they had, you know,
00:15:38they were like, we need danger beats.
00:15:40We need you to be scared.
00:15:42I said, scared of what?
00:15:43And they were like, we need you to be chased by piranhas.
00:15:45And I was like, I'm in, we swim in the water every day.
00:15:48We shower in the river.
00:15:49We're just playing in the river,
00:15:50back flipping into the river.
00:15:51Anyway, at the end, right before I was supposed to go
00:15:55on the Today Show or the Good Morning Show
00:15:57or whatever it's called, the Matt Lauer Show,
00:16:00they called me, they showed me the show and they said,
00:16:03we're changing it to Eaten Alive.
00:16:05Eaten Alive.
00:16:06And I said, but I didn't actually get eaten alive.
00:16:08And they said, but we're gonna tell everybody you did.
00:16:09So they watched the show and I said,
00:16:10you can't do that to me.
00:16:11So they did me hard.
00:16:16And I had to exile to India.
00:16:18The hatred was so bad.
00:16:19I'd be in the street and people would be like,
00:16:20yo, fuck you, man.
00:16:22- Why? - Talk shows.
00:16:23Because Peter was mad because they thought
00:16:26I risked the life of a snake.
00:16:27The American public was mad because they thought
00:16:29that they were gonna see a guy get eaten by an anaconda.
00:16:32Everybody was somehow outraged.
00:16:34All the late night shows.
00:16:36Kimmel was like, oh, for your next stunt,
00:16:38you should go have sex with a hippo.
00:16:41It destroyed my career professionally.
00:16:43- No way. - Destroyed it.
00:16:45So every scientist that I work with,
00:16:46every legitimate conservationist,
00:16:48I mean, someone actually said,
00:16:49you're not welcome in Brazil.
00:16:50I was supposed to do work on a giant anteater project.
00:16:54And so I took, and this is where, you know,
00:16:58you hear people say, you know, what's the Winston Churchill,
00:17:01go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
00:17:04This was a big one, right?
00:17:07I'm in my mid twenties.
00:17:08And I went from thinking I'm gonna have this opportunity
00:17:11where it's like, we're gonna, me and my team,
00:17:13we're gonna get to have the chance
00:17:14to save the rainforest and carry on that Steve Irwin legacy
00:17:18of being on Discovery Channel.
00:17:20And then it goes to everybody hated it.
00:17:22It was a complete disaster.
00:17:23You got lied to, you got cheated.
00:17:25And in fact, you should probably get out of here.
00:17:27And so for years that set us back years,
00:17:31'cause then we weren't taken seriously.
00:17:32And then if we wanted grants to protect the rainforest,
00:17:34if we wanted to work with other organizations,
00:17:37everyone would just go use that on anaconda guy.
00:17:39I mean, to this day, I think my Wikipedia still says
00:17:42Paul Rosalie is an American
00:17:44who was the host of Eaten Alive.
00:17:45It's like, it just, it's like you got branded with it.
00:17:48It's like, that's the guy that got eaten by the anaconda
00:17:50and it won't, it wouldn't leave for a long time.
00:17:54And so that was a very, very informative.
00:17:57I mean, at the time it was,
00:17:59you can only see the tragedy of it at the time, right?
00:18:03At the time, six months after that, I was just devastated.
00:18:06I didn't know what happened.
00:18:07It's like a car crash.
00:18:08You go, wait, wait, hold on.
00:18:10We caught the world record anaconda.
00:18:12We started research that no one's ever done before.
00:18:15We put together an amazing film that they,
00:18:16they chopped up and they ruined,
00:18:18but the backlash and then the professional backlash.
00:18:23But then it's funny 'cause now all these years later,
00:18:26that was what, 2014?
00:18:27So more than 10 years later,
00:18:29that was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
00:18:32'Cause now I know how to, I can spot that,
00:18:35I can spot that false handshake a thousand miles away now.
00:18:39When we do deals, we learn through those experiences.
00:18:44The successes are easy.
00:18:45It's those failures that teach you.
00:18:47And then you become confident because you've survived.
00:18:50If you can survive those, that thing of,
00:18:52it doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.
00:18:54Yeah, unless it maims you.
00:18:57But 'cause that does happen,
00:18:59whether it's mentally or physically.
00:19:01But if you survive enough of those hits,
00:19:05the confidence you have going into the hunt,
00:19:08then you know exactly what it's gonna do.
00:19:10And so, I think of it from an animal perspective.
00:19:13You know, you think of a lion going after a gazelle.
00:19:18I've seen a cheetah going after a gazelle
00:19:20and I've watched cheetah cubs learn,
00:19:22the mother will maim the gazelle
00:19:24and let the cheetah cubs sort of finish it off.
00:19:27So they learn and you see them get poked
00:19:29as they're learning by those horns.
00:19:31They'll come on from the back and they'll get poked.
00:19:34It's like, yeah, go down for that windpipe on the other side.
00:19:38They learn.
00:19:39And some lions, you know, some cheetahs,
00:19:41some predators don't learn.
00:19:42They'll get that straight through the eye
00:19:43and that's the end of it for them.
00:19:45They'll get that infection.
00:19:46And so that, professionally, the discovery thing was great
00:19:50'cause it was a huge train wreck,
00:19:51destroyed everything I had going on.
00:19:54And so I had to just exile it to go live with elephants.
00:19:57I had to go spend more time in the jungle.
00:19:58And so I couldn't do,
00:20:00if I had gotten a TV career at that point,
00:20:02it would have been terrible.
00:20:05I wasn't ready.
00:20:07It would have been the worst thing.
00:20:08That's a perfect example of life,
00:20:10not giving you what you want
00:20:12and instead giving you what you need.
00:20:14It was, it was, I was being moved.
00:20:16I was going, I want to go this way.
00:20:17And God went, no, this is where you're going to go.
00:20:21And I'm going to spank you for it.
00:20:23Like, it was great.
00:20:26And I got all these experiences
00:20:27that I never would have had otherwise.
00:20:28I went and lived with a herd of semi wild elephants.
00:20:30I went out on solos in the Amazon rainforest by myself.
00:20:33It led to a long period of isolated reflection.
00:20:36And years of, then I said, okay, well forget,
00:20:39forget trying to, you know, at that time in early twenties,
00:20:44you know, you want to, you have that,
00:20:47that young man's sort of need to prove yourself
00:20:51and to go, I'm the guy.
00:20:53And so then when you get, you get knocked on your ass
00:20:56and then you go, okay, I'm just going to do the work.
00:20:58And so we just started doing the work.
00:21:01We said, okay, what are we really trying to do here?
00:21:03Trying to save the forest.
00:21:04How do we do that?
00:21:06And there was a day where we saw smoke on the horizon,
00:21:08me and JJ, who was this local conservationist
00:21:12who grew up in the Amazon,
00:21:13didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old,
00:21:16has been working his whole life to protect the forest.
00:21:19And we saw smoke on the horizon.
00:21:22We have 300,000 acres of jungle behind us.
00:21:26And we see the, we see the destruction coming.
00:21:29And I was like, there's gotta be somebody we can call.
00:21:31There's gotta be something, this can't be legal.
00:21:33We're watching these millennium trees go down.
00:21:35It's like Avatar, we're just watching this destruction.
00:21:37And I said, there must be someone who can stop this.
00:21:41And he looked up river, he looked down river and he goes,
00:21:43do you see anybody else?
00:21:44I said, no.
00:21:47But I said, but then how, how can,
00:21:49how on earth can we have anything to do with stopping this?
00:21:52And so we had to start from beyond zero.
00:21:56How do you, how do you stop people from cutting down trees
00:21:58in the Amazon rainforest?
00:21:59How do you, how do you, you know,
00:22:01how do you start an organization?
00:22:02How do you, how do we find rangers?
00:22:04Who can be rangers?
00:22:05And so we had to answer all these questions.
00:22:07And so we just, it was just years of just being
00:22:09in the jungle, answering these questions.
00:22:11If we want to protect those monkeys and those birds
00:22:14and those millennium trees and the ecosystem
00:22:16that creates climactic stability on our planet,
00:22:19how do we do this?
00:22:21Or, or are we supposed to just watch this get destroyed?
00:22:24Are we part of the last generation that's going
00:22:26to have functioning ecosystems on this planet?
00:22:28And we're doomed to watch the ecological apocalypse.
00:22:33And that was the question.
00:22:35And there's that quote that said, you know,
00:22:37the search for meaning is only valid
00:22:38if you're willing to take action on what you find.
00:22:40And it's like, when I was a kid,
00:22:41I grew up with the extreme environmental stress.
00:22:45They tell you the world is ending.
00:22:47They tell you we've lost 50% of the wildlife on our planet.
00:22:50The elephants are going extinct.
00:22:51We're going to lose gorillas in our lifetime.
00:22:53And I couldn't deal with that.
00:22:56I couldn't sleep.
00:22:57And so I left, I dropped out of high school two years early.
00:23:00I got a plane ticket to the Amazon.
00:23:02I was like, I have to go out and see it for myself.
00:23:06- That was how this started.
00:23:07- That's how all this started.
00:23:09My mom, my parents made the huge mistake of,
00:23:12they read me Jane Goodall.
00:23:15So there's a perfect storm of,
00:23:17so I'm severely dyslexic, right?
00:23:19So I don't, I can't read well.
00:23:21I couldn't read until I was probably 11.
00:23:23But my parents, incredible.
00:23:25They would finish their day as parents and then read us.
00:23:30They read me and my sister, Sherlock Holmes,
00:23:33Lord of the Rings, Jane Goodall stories, James Harriet.
00:23:37And so I got my hero's complex,
00:23:41hero's journey from Lord of the Rings.
00:23:43Got the need for adventure and wildlife from Jane Goodall.
00:23:46Got the love of animals from James Harriet
00:23:48and all this stuff.
00:23:49And then sometime around teenager years,
00:23:51when you're getting detention, detention,
00:23:53detention, detention, why didn't you do better?
00:23:55Why didn't you do homework?
00:23:56'Cause I don't want to do any more homework.
00:23:58And I'm going, why did Teddy Roosevelt and Jane,
00:24:00they got to lead adventurous lives.
00:24:02And I'm stuck in a desk asking permission
00:24:04to go to the bathroom.
00:24:05And I was like, why do they get to do it?
00:24:07And I don't.
00:24:08And so I literally just, again, amazing parents.
00:24:12I said, I hate this so much.
00:24:14I was so depressed.
00:24:15I was so frustrated.
00:24:17And my parents just said, why don't you just leave?
00:24:19Get your GED, leave high school.
00:24:22We want you to go to college.
00:24:23So you have to go to college.
00:24:26But in between semesters, you can go wherever you want.
00:24:28I bought a ticket to the Amazon, went down, met JJ.
00:24:32And it was like, it's like the first scene in Jurassic.
00:24:35When you saw the jungle for the first time,
00:24:36it's like the first scene in Jurassic Park.
00:24:38They arrive and they're like, okay, this is going to be,
00:24:40you know, it's going to be cool.
00:24:41They said, there's some stuff here.
00:24:42It's like the first time they see the dinosaurs.
00:24:45The first time I saw a millennium tree, 160 feet tall,
00:24:49leaf cutter ants carrying leaves down from the canopy
00:24:51into their thing and macaws going across the sky.
00:24:53It was like, that was like the start of the movie in my life.
00:24:56That's like the color came on.
00:24:58I was just, I went, this is where, this is where I belong.
00:25:01I was like, this is incredible.
00:25:03Just limitless things to learn.
00:25:05Limitless wilderness to explore.
00:25:07Just incredible.
00:25:10That's why I said we should do the,
00:25:11you got one time you got to come down
00:25:12and we got to hang out.
00:25:13- I'm going to come, I'm going to come and see you.
00:25:14I'm going to come and see you.
00:25:15Let me get Australia, New Zealand, and Bali out of the way.
00:25:17And then you're next on my list.
00:25:19Before we continue,
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00:26:14That's athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom.
00:26:19- What is it that drove you from those early days?
00:26:24Because talking about conservation as a young man
00:26:29in his teens, most young people aren't that selfless.
00:26:34They're looking to be driven by the need
00:26:41for status and recognition, people that they admire.
00:26:44Accumulating wealth, or chasing girls, or doing whatever.
00:26:50What were the contributing motivations to this?
00:26:52- That's a great question.
00:26:54I've always loved animals.
00:26:57When I was a child, I would go,
00:26:59and it was specifically wild, and people get this confused.
00:27:02Domesticated animals is a different thing.
00:27:03Cats, dogs, cows, chickens, we've made those.
00:27:06Those aren't wild animals.
00:27:07There's something beautiful to me.
00:27:09Wild animals on earth have formed our ecosystems.
00:27:12They're our wild brothers and sisters.
00:27:15We grew up in the ecosystems that they created,
00:27:17and people think that animals live in the forest,
00:27:19and the animals make the forest.
00:27:20They carry the seeds.
00:27:22They pollinate the flowers.
00:27:23The trees grow because the animals move them.
00:27:26And so I was, even from the time I was this big,
00:27:29I said to my parents, "Take me to the streams."
00:27:32I wanted to find frogs.
00:27:34I wanted to find snakes.
00:27:35I liked places where there was,
00:27:36I always liked big trees, like the parts of the forest
00:27:39where there were poplar trees and big old oaks.
00:27:42So I was born in Brooklyn,
00:27:44and then for a while we were in North Jersey,
00:27:45so I always had access to these like lower New York forests,
00:27:49and it was just beautiful trees.
00:27:50But my motivation was not selfless.
00:27:56Everybody confuses that.
00:27:57My need to save the rainforest is extremely selfish.
00:28:01I like it.
00:28:02I think that there should be a continuing world.
00:28:05And when I look at the fact that, you know,
00:28:07the Amazon formed in the Eocene 33 to 55 million years ago,
00:28:13and so this cycle of speciation and these trees growing
00:28:16has been happening for millions and millions of years.
00:28:19And for us to break that cycle
00:28:20to the point that it no longer works,
00:28:23you're destroying part of the system on earth
00:28:25that makes life possible.
00:28:27A fifth of our planet's oxygen comes from the Amazon.
00:28:31A fifth of the fresh water on our planet
00:28:33is contained in that system.
00:28:35And that system produces the moisture
00:28:37that rains back down on the Amazon.
00:28:39So if you cut too much of it,
00:28:40you destroy the Amazon rainforest.
00:28:42And for that reason, we've lost 20% of the Amazon.
00:28:46We're the first generation in history
00:28:48that has a planetary crisis on our hands that we can stop.
00:28:52So we're the ones, all of history has taken place.
00:28:57We're the first ones where we're looking
00:28:59at 20% of the Amazon is cut.
00:29:00If we go past that threshold,
00:29:02there's a tipping point that we don't come back from.
00:29:04They've cut too much of the Amazon.
00:29:06It dries out.
00:29:07There's no, it's no longer the Amazon rainforest.
00:29:09So then the tropical sun bakes it.
00:29:11Human degradation destroys it.
00:29:13And then you're looking at post-apocalyptic nightmare.
00:29:16- So it becomes a feedback loop?
00:29:18- A snowball feedback loop.
00:29:19- Okay, can you just dig into it?
00:29:20Can you just dig into that a little bit more?
00:29:22- Sure.
00:29:23So every day, the Amazon rainforest trees produce,
00:29:27lift up out of the ground and into the air
00:29:3020 trillion liters of water.
00:29:32There's a larger invisible mist river
00:29:34above the Amazon rainforest than is on the ground
00:29:37in the Amazon river.
00:29:38- Held in the trees?
00:29:41Or held in the sky? - Floating through the sky.
00:29:42The trees each morning.
00:29:44And so I've seen this from the branches
00:29:45of the tallest trees.
00:29:46And when the sun comes up in the east,
00:29:49you could just see it for a few minutes.
00:29:50It illuminates the mist river
00:29:52that's flowing over the Amazon.
00:29:54And so there's this invisible particulate mist river
00:29:57that's larger than the largest river on earth
00:30:00flowing through the sky.
00:30:01- There's more water in the air
00:30:04than there is on the ground?
00:30:05- In the river.
00:30:06- Holy shit.
00:30:07- In the Amazon.
00:30:07That's the largest river on earth.
00:30:09And at the same time, it's also being fertilized
00:30:14with compounds from the Sahara desert.
00:30:17So the Amazon and Africa are exchanging nutrients.
00:30:20And so when people say that the earth is connected,
00:30:23like you don't realize the degree to which it is.
00:30:27And one of the things the locals down there
00:30:29that we've done is you have this thing we do.
00:30:32It's kind of like a physical form of prayer.
00:30:36It's a bit of a natural sacrament.
00:30:39You cup your hands and you drink from a clear stream.
00:30:43You hold your arm in the sunlight
00:30:48and you watch the vapor be lifted off your skin.
00:30:52The sun will lift the sweat right off your skin.
00:30:54And you can see it joining.
00:30:56The vapor is coming off the leaves.
00:30:57You watch it become thunderclouds in the afternoons
00:31:00and then it rains down and then you drink it again.
00:31:01You're part of the cycle.
00:31:03It's flowing through you.
00:31:04The river and the sky are flowing through you.
00:31:06And so that 20 trillion liters of water
00:31:09that's coming off the Amazon rainforest,
00:31:12which is bigger than the continental United States.
00:31:15It's tremendous.
00:31:17So globally it's this huge force.
00:31:19And so in the last century,
00:31:22because of chainsaws, deforestation,
00:31:24expanding countries, agriculture,
00:31:26we've lost 20% of the Amazon rainforest.
00:31:28This system that is the heart of our planet.
00:31:32And so scientists are warning now that if we lose more,
00:31:36we could cross a threshold where that missed river,
00:31:40that 20 trillion tons of water, liters of water gets broken.
00:31:45So if that's not coming up off the ground
00:31:47because there's not enough trees to produce it,
00:31:49then the rain stops.
00:31:51And if the rain stops, the forest dries.
00:31:52And if the forest dries, then it burns.
00:31:56And then we lose the Amazon rainforest.
00:31:58And that's a realistic possibility right now.
00:32:03- Is the reason that there is a tipping point here
00:32:06because there's a critical mass that's needed
00:32:08in order for rain clouds to form?
00:32:10I'm trying to work out if you cut 50% of it,
00:32:13why wouldn't you just have 50% of the water
00:32:16that would go up and you would have 50% of the trees
00:32:20that would need watering.
00:32:22So surely it would be self-limiting,
00:32:23but it seems like there's a tipping point here.
00:32:26- No, what we've seen in practice in reality
00:32:29is that there is this tipping point.
00:32:31Even with the 20%,
00:32:32we're starting to see the droughts get worse.
00:32:35And another huge misconception people have is,
00:32:37they say wildfires in the Amazon are out of control.
00:32:40There are no wildfires.
00:32:41There's no fires in the Amazon.
00:32:43People going-
00:32:44- Super hard to start a fire in the Amazon.
00:32:45- You actually can't start a fire in the Amazon.
00:32:47You could napalm that forest.
00:32:49I mean, there's been times
00:32:50where we're trying to start a fire when we're camping.
00:32:53You start a fire, you try and start an authentic fire.
00:32:55No chance, all the sticks are wet.
00:32:57You try and find some tinder.
00:32:58You hack into a stick, even the center of the stick is wet.
00:33:01So then you get the gasoline, you pour it all over your fire.
00:33:04You light that, the gasoline burns and the sticks are wet.
00:33:08So then you just eat, you have like a ramen noodle pack.
00:33:11You dip it in the river until it's a little moist and cold.
00:33:14And then you just eat it.
00:33:14And you just sprinkle this stuff on top.
00:33:16It's great.
00:33:17Or you just eat the fish.
00:33:19A lot of times we have fish that we can't cook.
00:33:21So you just eat the fish out of the river,
00:33:23like it's a Snickers.
00:33:26But I mean that Amazon tipping point,
00:33:30the extinction of species,
00:33:33I truly believe that this is the defining issue of our time.
00:33:36I think that we were born
00:33:37in the most important time in history.
00:33:38Civilizations rise and fall.
00:33:41Nature has always been a constant
00:33:43that we have existed within.
00:33:46And for the first time in the story of our species
00:33:50as a global society, we have to contend with the fact
00:33:53that we have to decide what the future of earth
00:33:55is going to look like.
00:33:56Because if we destroy the Amazon past the point
00:33:58that it can be repaired,
00:34:00then we're cursing all future generations with those actions.
00:34:03- Who owns the Amazon?
00:34:04Who owns most of the Amazon?
00:34:07- 60% of the Amazon is contained
00:34:08within the territory of Brazil.
00:34:10The next largest country is Peru, which is where I work.
00:34:15And that has the headwaters of the Amazon.
00:34:17The headwaters is the most important part
00:34:19'cause you have the edge of the Andes Mountains.
00:34:21And then you have the lowland tropical Amazon.
00:34:24And the Andes cloud forests
00:34:26are considered a mega biodiverse biome.
00:34:29That ecosystem is considered mega biodiverse,
00:34:32tons of plants and animals.
00:34:34The lowland Amazon is also mega biodiverse.
00:34:37And so at the confluence of those two, where I work,
00:34:42it's also higher up.
00:34:43If you think of the Amazon rainforest,
00:34:45the main river is a tree.
00:34:48And then all the millions of tributaries are the branches.
00:34:51Where I work is on the tip, tip, tip, tip, tip, top of the branches.
00:34:55High tributary.
00:34:56And that's why it's the wildest place on earth
00:34:57because people haven't been able to access it.
00:35:00There's been no access to this place for until now.
00:35:04And so it's still this forest that's been growing
00:35:06since the dawn of time untouched.
00:35:08And so you think some of these trees were saplings
00:35:12when they were painting the roof of the Sistine Chapel.
00:35:16Some of these trees were already giants
00:35:17when World War I was happening.
00:35:20When World War II was happening,
00:35:22they were towering 130 foot,
00:35:24and you're talking about 160 foot trees.
00:35:28Me and you could walk around on the branches of these trees.
00:35:33Some of the branches that I've,
00:35:35some of the branches that come off the trees that I climb
00:35:37are as big as this room.
00:35:38With bromeliads growing with the size of a Volkswagen bug,
00:35:44like there's species in the canopy of the rainforest
00:35:47that have never been seen.
00:35:49Because many of the species,
00:35:5150% of the life in a rainforest occurs in the canopy.
00:35:54We, think about that, 50% of the life
00:35:57in the most biodiverse place on earth occurs in the canopy,
00:36:01which is 160 feet off the ground.
00:36:03So it's one of the least explored things on the planet.
00:36:07Even if a scientist can climb one tree,
00:36:09you gotta know the ropes.
00:36:11You gotta get up there.
00:36:11You gotta survive the bees and the wasps and the height
00:36:14and the gravity and everything else that's gonna happen.
00:36:16- And I guess you couldn't even send drones
00:36:18because they're just gonna clink, clink, clink, clink,
00:36:19and then fall down.
00:36:20- Yeah, and animals hate drones.
00:36:22- Just looks like a predator.
00:36:25- It's like a giant wasp.
00:36:27They, birds are terrified of them.
00:36:30Elephants hate drones.
00:36:31Oh my God.
00:36:32- Spooks them.
00:36:33- Really scares them.
00:36:34Well, they're scared of bees.
00:36:36Elephants don't like bees, all right?
00:36:39- Like David and Goliath relationship.
00:36:42They have a Tom and Jerry thing.
00:36:44- They have sensed that this is,
00:36:45we're now we're moving out of the Amazon for a second.
00:36:47But yes, and in my experience,
00:36:49they're very, they have sensitive skin.
00:36:51They don't like, even though they can move through thorns
00:36:54and they actually had, in one sense,
00:36:55they have very thick skin.
00:36:57They don't like bee stings.
00:36:59And there's something about the buzzing of bees.
00:37:01They actually are using bees in parts of Kenya
00:37:04on the borderlands of farms.
00:37:06They put bee boxes on the edges of farms
00:37:09to keep the elephants, 'cause the elephants are like,
00:37:10look, we're just not gonna go that far.
00:37:11- They're the border collies of the elephant world.
00:37:13They're sheepdogs of the elephant world.
00:37:15- Elephants just hate them.
00:37:16- That's funny, it's making me think about
00:37:18a wonderful analogy that you made about the ocean.
00:37:22And it's almost like the rainforest is the inverted ocean.
00:37:25We talk about, well, how little of the ocean floor
00:37:29has ever been where you're talking about the canopy.
00:37:32Isn't that cool?
00:37:32Dude, so sick.
00:37:34Okay, so canopy, 50%?
00:37:36- 50% of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy.
00:37:39And so a lot of the species that are born up there
00:37:41never touch the ground.
00:37:45- What is the bulk of those species made up of?
00:37:50What are the sorts of animals that are in the canopy?
00:37:52- I mean, you have spider monkeys, howler monkeys,
00:37:55sake monkeys, capuchins, macaws, harpy eagles.
00:37:58I mean, there's hundreds of species of different birds.
00:38:02I think there's 50-something species of ant birds.
00:38:05There's all the toucans and arasaris
00:38:06and unbelievable amounts of birds, butterflies, dragonflies,
00:38:11millions and millions of just unbelievable amounts
00:38:13of wildlife, undiscovered medicines,
00:38:15orchids, bromeliads, cactuses, reptiles, amphibians,
00:38:18birds, mammals, it's just teeming.
00:38:20And so you think of, again, back to this sapling
00:38:23that started 1,000 years ago.
00:38:26I think what the world looked like 1,000 years ago.
00:38:28And that sapling today is this millennium tree
00:38:31with these giant branches as thick as this room.
00:38:33And how many, if you time-lapse that over 1,000 years,
00:38:37how many species, how many millions of species
00:38:39have lived on and in and around?
00:38:40- About one tree, huh?
00:38:42- One tree, and there's 400 billion trees in the Amazon.
00:38:46How many grains of sand are there on earth?
00:38:52It's like this place defies.
00:38:55And then when you see all this magic and the sky
00:39:00and the river are flowing through you
00:39:01and everything's interconnected
00:39:02and there's this energy exchange,
00:39:03and you suddenly understand the sunlight hits the leaves,
00:39:06goes into the trees, the animals eat the leaves,
00:39:09and then they hunt each other and everything makes sense
00:39:10and keeps rolling and it all produces oxygen
00:39:12and makes our lives possible.
00:39:14Because of them, we're here.
00:39:15Without them, we couldn't be here.
00:39:16And then you see the bulldozers and the chainsaws
00:39:19and the black smoke, and they're literally erasing
00:39:22all of the beautiful color,
00:39:23all of that avatar, riotous grandeur.
00:39:27The cacophony is silenced.
00:39:30- In order to get rid of 20% of 400 billion trees,
00:39:37that's a big operation.
00:39:39- Yeah, but we've taken a century to do it.
00:39:42- Right, but still.
00:39:43- But it's accelerating now.
00:39:45- I mean, that's a high velocity operation
00:39:50to be able to get that to happen.
00:39:51It must be a really, really big industry.
00:39:54- Well, I mean, you have to think Brazil's formation,
00:39:58the deforestation that's occurred in Peru,
00:40:00the various sources of it, there's illegal gold mining
00:40:03where they have to cut the forest, burn the forest,
00:40:07and then suck the land up through hoses to get the sediment
00:40:11'cause the gold is not in nuggets, it's in the sand.
00:40:14So they have to completely destroy the earth.
00:40:16- Or get tiny shards of precious metal.
00:40:20- Tiny, minuscule, almost microscopic pieces of,
00:40:23and you can see this scar from space across the Amazon.
00:40:26You can see the Amazon, it looks like it caught mange.
00:40:31You see human roads moving across the Southern Amazon.
00:40:35And so, I mean, just to summarize it
00:40:39for the people that don't know,
00:40:41I've been working with the locals for 20 years
00:40:44to find an answer to this.
00:40:46'Cause either we say we're going
00:40:48to have ecological collapse, we just give up on it.
00:40:50'Cause life on earth used to come standard
00:40:51with fish in the oceans, air, oxygen in the air,
00:40:56and water that you could drink.
00:40:58And now we're ruining those systems.
00:41:00And so we're the last generation that's gonna have a chance
00:41:02to save the Amazon rainforest.
00:41:04And what we've done over the last 20 years
00:41:06is we found a way to do that.
00:41:07We started asking our enemies,
00:41:15the loggers and the gold miners,
00:41:17if they'd like to join our team.
00:41:19The people that were cutting down the rainforest,
00:41:23we would go have a beer with them.
00:41:25The people that we thought were our mortal enemies
00:41:27that were causing all of the death and destruction
00:41:29and flames and silence.
00:41:32JJ would just go, "Let's go see how they are."
00:41:34We'd go and sit down and have a beer with them
00:41:36and go, "How are you doing?"
00:41:37They go, "Good, how are you doing?"
00:41:38They go, "Well, we moved down here
00:41:39"from another part of the Amazon.
00:41:40"There's no trees there, so we came here
00:41:42"'cause you guys still have really old trees."
00:41:45We go, "Cool, how much you make a day?"
00:41:46They go, "$15 a day."
00:41:48They go, "You like that work?"
00:41:49And they go, "No, the trees falling is dangerous.
00:41:51"We get bitten by bullet ants and stung by things
00:41:53"and it's hard and there's no food
00:41:55"and $15 a day really isn't worth it
00:41:58"once you subtract the gasoline it takes
00:42:00"to get all the way five days away from town."
00:42:03Okay, we go, "You guys wanna be jungle keepers?
00:42:05"We'll pay you three times that.
00:42:07"You get a really cool t-shirt, you get medical benefits,
00:42:10"a steady paycheck and a community
00:42:11"and we'll take care of the boat
00:42:13"and instead of your chainsaw,
00:42:14"you have to carry binoculars.
00:42:15"It's a lot lighter than a chainsaw
00:42:18"and now you protect the forest instead of destroy it."
00:42:20And they go, "Where do I sign?"
00:42:23And that's it.
00:42:24And so we've been doing that.
00:42:25We've been converting loggers and gold miners
00:42:28into conservation rangers,
00:42:29giving the local people opportunities that they didn't have
00:42:32because what we discovered
00:42:34is that the reason they're destroying the rainforest
00:42:36is because they don't have anything else they can do.
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00:43:51How much of this is bottom up them doing it on their own
00:43:54to then try and make a profit to sell
00:43:55and how much of this is top down a company going in,
00:43:58recruiting locals in order to do an operation
00:44:01on behalf of a bigger organization?
00:44:03- 50/50.
00:44:04- Right.
00:44:05So the second one is gonna be much harder.
00:44:06- The second one is gonna be much harder.
00:44:07- Because if you go and take away worker number three
00:44:11and make him work for you,
00:44:12then guy from the street becomes worker number three.
00:44:15- Yes.
00:44:16- And they'll continue to recruit.
00:44:17- But the good thing with that side
00:44:18is that you can put pressure on those companies, right?
00:44:21You can come and--
00:44:22- Lobby, restrict.
00:44:23- Yeah, that's accessible.
00:44:24Where we are, we're so remote.
00:44:27It used to take two days to get to the research station
00:44:29that I started working at, deep in the jungle.
00:44:32And so when you meet these people, it's the bottom up guys.
00:44:35It's people that just have a chainsaw
00:44:37and they're driving their little tiny motor
00:44:38through the Amazon rainforest.
00:44:40- They know where to sell the sediment or sell the tree
00:44:43or sell the whatever it is that they're going back with.
00:44:44- Yeah, I mean, JJ grew up, his father, his brothers,
00:44:47they would go out for three weeks at a time.
00:44:49They'd go 10 days up river.
00:44:51They'd find mahogany trees, they'd fell them.
00:44:54And they would spend time in the jungle
00:44:56milling them into boards.
00:44:57Then they would pile the boards
00:44:59in the river on balsa wood that floats.
00:45:02And then they would float it down the river.
00:45:03They'd put their motor on the wood and use the wood
00:45:06and they would, and they would pilot that
00:45:10down through the Amazon and it would get stuck in places.
00:45:12They gotta get in the water and pry it out, brutal work.
00:45:16And then when they finally get to town,
00:45:17they get paid practically nothing for that wood.
00:45:21And then when that wood hits the international market
00:45:23and the mahogany tree goes for a million dollars.
00:45:25And so the people on these poor people on the ground,
00:45:27they have no, and if you go,
00:45:28"What would you do if you weren't logging?"
00:45:30And they're like, "Fish."
00:45:32You know, hand to mouth, live out of nature.
00:45:34And so it's not, there's not a lot of opportunities.
00:45:36And so by giving them the opportunities
00:45:38to protect their forest, to attend classes,
00:45:41to become park rangers, to become boat drivers,
00:45:45chefs, guides, we're just changing the narrative
00:45:49in this place.
00:45:50And so now we've protected 130,000 acres
00:45:52of the Amazon rainforest, which is like,
00:45:54I believe it's nine times the size of Manhattan Island.
00:45:57It's more than half the size of Singapore.
00:46:00And the Peruvian government has taken notice.
00:46:02And they've said, "If you guys can protect 300,000 acres,
00:46:06we'll sign it over into a national park."
00:46:08So we're almost halfway.
00:46:09- Wow.
00:46:12- We're almost 20 years in.
00:46:1420 years ago, I left home because I wanted to see for myself
00:46:17if it really was an emergency in the Amazon rainforest
00:46:21like I had heard.
00:46:22I wanted to see for myself if what I had heard was true.
00:46:24And when I got down there, I found something more magical
00:46:27than I could ever have imagined.
00:46:29And 20 years later, we have an organization
00:46:31and we have a global movement and there's people
00:46:33all over the world that contribute monthly,
00:46:35that make it possible for us to pay these rangers
00:46:37and protect this land and keep it safe from the loggers.
00:46:40And we found a way to change the narrative of conservation.
00:46:44- Where can people go if they want to help donate money?
00:46:47- Well, we have junglekeepers.org
00:46:49and it's the most direct way to save the rainforest.
00:46:53And so I have people tell me that,
00:46:54traditionally with organizations, they say,
00:46:56"I made a donation to an organization to protect nature,
00:46:59but I don't know where it went."
00:47:01And so the thing that we started doing
00:47:02was just showing people, this is where your money went.
00:47:05Land acquisition, ranger pay, a little bit of admin,
00:47:08that's it.
00:47:09And if you look at most of these NGOs,
00:47:11what we started realizing was that--
00:47:13- Expensive C-suite, private jet.
00:47:15- Oh, playing their CEOs $500,000 a year
00:47:18and the next 10 people, $500,000 a year.
00:47:20And if you look at the breakdown, their pie chart,
00:47:2290% of their donations going towards advertising.
00:47:27You take the top 10 environmental organizations
00:47:30you could name, 90% of their donations go towards advertising
00:47:35to further their brand.
00:47:39The money that we get, I think 85% goes to land acquisition
00:47:44and ranger pay, direct action.
00:47:47So some people will come to us.
00:47:49Somebody reached out to me on Instagram not that long ago
00:47:51and he goes, "I just made a donation
00:47:52to blank huge organization that we all know."
00:47:55And he goes, "I have no idea where my money went
00:47:57and it's really driving me crazy."
00:47:58He goes, "I saw you on a podcast."
00:48:00And he goes, "I really want to help."
00:48:01He goes, "What are you working on right now?"
00:48:03And I said, "Well, we're actually
00:48:03in a state of emergency right now.
00:48:05There's a road coming in,
00:48:06the narco traffickers are attacking us."
00:48:08I said, "There's this sector on the northern boundary
00:48:11of the park."
00:48:12And he goes, "Well, how big is it?"
00:48:13I said, "It's several thousand acres."
00:48:14I said, "But it's like $250,000
00:48:16we don't have it right now."
00:48:17He goes, "I got you."
00:48:18This guy, Michael, he just, he reached out.
00:48:20He goes, "It'll be in your account tomorrow."
00:48:22He wired us $250,000.
00:48:24He spoke to me for half hour.
00:48:25We'd never met each other.
00:48:26We took the money, went to the landowner.
00:48:29We said, "Landowner, do you want this road
00:48:31to come through your rainforest?"
00:48:33And they're going to completely cut it down.
00:48:35Old guy, he goes, "No."
00:48:37He goes, "I don't want this."
00:48:37He goes, "But they're going to hurt me if I don't do it."
00:48:40We bought it and we got the cops to come in
00:48:42and we completely protected over 5,000 acres of rainforest.
00:48:46Like that.
00:48:47- How much are you fighting against crime?
00:48:48When I think South America,
00:48:51sometimes there's going to be some organized crime
00:48:53floating around in there.
00:48:54How, you're talking about the dangers of the urchin
00:48:58or the worries of the bullet ant or the jaguar,
00:49:04but what about the modern human concern?
00:49:08- That's the scary thing.
00:49:10That's the scary part.
00:49:11It's like the loggers and the gold miners,
00:49:13the local people in Peru,
00:49:15the local people in Peru are incredibly kind.
00:49:20The people of the Madre de Dios of Peru are rural people.
00:49:23I rock up in a raft or in my boat
00:49:26and they'll let me camp at their house.
00:49:30It's like these people live in thatched huts.
00:49:31They eat monkeys and turtles.
00:49:33They're wonderful rural people.
00:49:35We also have Norco traffickers coming in now
00:49:38and they are not local.
00:49:39They are not from there.
00:49:40They heard that there are extremely wild parts of the Amazon
00:49:45where the police can't get to.
00:49:46Deep, deep, deep, deep jungle.
00:49:49And so what they do is they launch expeditions
00:49:51deep into the jungle and they figure
00:49:52no one's going to come out here.
00:49:54- But what are they doing?
00:49:55Why would you want to be-
00:49:56- Growing cocaine.
00:49:57- They're what?
00:49:58- Growing cocaine.
00:49:58- Growing cocaine.
00:49:59- Growing cocaine.
00:50:00- So it's like farms, plantation.
00:50:02- But again, it's the artisanal guys.
00:50:03It's not the big crime bosses.
00:50:05It's like a couple of brothers that got together
00:50:07and went, "Hey man, you know what we should do?
00:50:09We should go grow some cocaine seven days."
00:50:12- It's the equivalent of being a weed farmer in California
00:50:15like 30 years ago, but doing it with cocaine in the Amazon.
00:50:18- Yes. And the difference is like the weed farmers,
00:50:20I feel like, you know, I don't feel like they'll shoot you.
00:50:23There's something about the cocaine grower culture.
00:50:25- So this is even though they're more small time,
00:50:28more grassroots, they're still kinetically protected.
00:50:33- And so when it comes to the uncontacted tribes,
00:50:35when it comes to us, they've made it very clear
00:50:38if we get the chance, we'll kill you.
00:50:40They say it, the cops actually intercepted
00:50:45one of the people that they arrested.
00:50:47They said that gringo and JJ,
00:50:51they said to anyone on our network,
00:50:52if you see them, take them out.
00:50:54- Talking about you.
00:50:55- Yeah. Oh yeah.
00:50:56- How does that make you feel?
00:50:57- Very unsafe.
00:50:59I mean, it's very stressful trying to do anything
00:51:01because it used to be that we'd drive around with our boat.
00:51:04I would just have machete, no shoes,
00:51:06we should be driving on my boat through the Amazon.
00:51:08Now you have to be very careful.
00:51:10And then, you know, even passing through a city,
00:51:12you can't sit down.
00:51:14I can no longer sit down in a cafe and have a coffee.
00:51:17You know, you just think someone's gonna come up behind you.
00:51:20You can't do it.
00:51:21- That's how much of a hit list you're on now.
00:51:22- Oh yeah.
00:51:23No, I travel with a huge security team when I'm there now.
00:51:26- A security team is not to protect you
00:51:29from the animals of the Amazon
00:51:31or even necessarily the uncontacted tribes or?
00:51:35- None of those things are gonna try
00:51:36and shoot me in the head.
00:51:37It's just the narcos.
00:51:38And so, yeah, I have a circle of armed men around me
00:51:43at all times, outward facing because of the-
00:51:46- You're like the president.
00:51:47- Yes, a very, no.
00:51:51Not at all.
00:51:53But no, I hate it.
00:51:54And so the good thing is that the Peruvian police
00:51:56have been working on this narco problem
00:51:58and really just, they just came in
00:52:01and so they're starting to just move them out.
00:52:03There was a small group of them
00:52:04and they're starting to move them out.
00:52:05So we're hoping that that calms down.
00:52:07Because again, it's when people hear,
00:52:10oh, you're 50% of the way to making this national park.
00:52:12That's incredible.
00:52:13Then they hear narco traffickers.
00:52:15And it's not even like they're the ones
00:52:16in the Amazon rainforest.
00:52:18And they go, you're gonna fail.
00:52:19Nobody can beat the narcos.
00:52:20And they stop donating.
00:52:21- It's a bit of a-
00:52:22- They stop helping us.
00:52:24And which I think is like, I mean,
00:52:26cowardice on a level they can't even imagine.
00:52:28And it's like, it's not like I'm asking you to come fight.
00:52:30I'm just saying, just help us.
00:52:32And they're like, no, it's a lost cause.
00:52:35It's like, no, we're fighting.
00:52:37We're not giving up.
00:52:38Why should you give up?
00:52:39- What is, is there a time in your mind
00:52:44that sticks out as the most fear
00:52:48that you felt the most afraid that you've ever been?
00:52:50I wonder whether it's come from threats from humans
00:52:53or threats from jungle or threats from something else.
00:52:57- The most afraid I've ever been.
00:53:00I mean, I can give you the most afraid
00:53:02I've ever been from an animal.
00:53:03I can give you the action version,
00:53:04but the most afraid I've ever been
00:53:06was when I was young and starting out and didn't know.
00:53:08I was dreaming so badly
00:53:11that we'd be at this point one day.
00:53:14I saw it 20 years ago.
00:53:16I wanted to do this.
00:53:18And at that time, if you wanted to protect species
00:53:23and save rainforest, you had to be a conservation biologist.
00:53:27And I didn't have the grades for that.
00:53:30I hadn't even finished high school.
00:53:31- Did you go back to college in the end?
00:53:32- I did.
00:53:33I did, I finished college.
00:53:34- What was the promise to your parents?
00:53:35- Yes.
00:53:36- By the skin of your teeth?
00:53:37- By the skin of my teeth.
00:53:38I would show up late to a semester
00:53:39because I was raising an anteater.
00:53:41- Didn't I hear that you nearly died
00:53:43because of raising an anteater?
00:53:45- Well, I got a really bad staph infection.
00:53:47I got a MRSA infection across my whole body.
00:53:49My whole face was rotting off,
00:53:51but I have this really bad habit of trying to walk it off.
00:53:54Horrific things.
00:53:56I almost chopped with a tendon that connects your kneecap.
00:53:59I chopped most of that tendon
00:54:02and I was like, "I'll walk it off."
00:54:04The stingray went, "I'll walk it off."
00:54:05And so I got this horrific infection.
00:54:07I kept going, "Oh, at some point it must,
00:54:08"at some point it's gotta get better, right?"
00:54:10"No, an antibiotic resistant staph infection
00:54:12"will eventually kill you."
00:54:15And so I was taking care of-
00:54:16- From an anteater?
00:54:18- Absolutely not.
00:54:19From a hospital.
00:54:20I had dengue fever and I'd gone to the hospital
00:54:22to get a shot.
00:54:23- So what's this got to do with the anteater?
00:54:24It just happened while you were looking after an anteater?
00:54:26- Well, because the only reason I didn't go home
00:54:28and get help was because I had this baby anteater
00:54:30that needed me.
00:54:31So I kept letting the infection get worse
00:54:33weeks and weeks and weeks.
00:54:35My body was just-
00:54:35- So that you could look after the anteater.
00:54:37- She needed me.
00:54:38- You know who else was a massive fan of anteaters?
00:54:41Salvador Dali.
00:54:42- Yes, that picture of him going out of the subway.
00:54:43- Do you know why he said that he loved walking an anteater
00:54:46through the streets of Paris?
00:54:47- No, I do not.
00:54:48- He said, "Because anteaters are never in fashion."
00:54:50(laughing)
00:54:51He just loved the idea of,
00:54:53I'm researching him for my next live show.
00:54:55The number of stories that he's gotten,
00:54:58one of them being, yeah, he walked an anteater
00:55:00through the streets of Paris
00:55:01'cause he said they're never in fashion.
00:55:02He also sued a man for dreaming about him
00:55:05and said, "Because the subconscious belongs to me."
00:55:08- Oh boy.
00:55:09- That's so cool.
00:55:09So sick.
00:55:10Anyway, so you've got the worst Mercer of your life.
00:55:13You nearly, that was, and you were young.
00:55:15- Yeah, I was 19 at the time
00:55:17and I remember writing a journal entry to my parents
00:55:19and being like, "Goodbye, thank you for everything."
00:55:21- Sweet life.
00:55:22- Yeah, I really was sad.
00:55:25I also said even if I live,
00:55:27I couldn't imagine I'd ever have a normal face.
00:55:29So I really thought it was the end.
00:55:30So I've lived through my own death many, many times
00:55:33in many different ways,
00:55:34whether it's being chased by an elephant
00:55:35or laying on the side of the,
00:55:37at that time I had to wait three days
00:55:38just for a boat to come by.
00:55:39That's how remote in the jungle I was
00:55:41and there was no one else.
00:55:42So when I finally realized I was in trouble,
00:55:45I said, "I gotta get a boat."
00:55:46Well, there was no boats.
00:55:47So you lay by the side of the river
00:55:49and you have all these pustules of infection
00:55:51boiling out of your skin.
00:55:53And so the flies are feasting on you.
00:55:55And I lay in that state for several days
00:55:57before the only boat coming down river
00:56:00was a poaching boat stacked with the carcasses of animals.
00:56:04So more flies, dying spider monkeys, crocodiles, macaws,
00:56:08all things destined for the illegal pet trade.
00:56:10And I laid on that boat for two days
00:56:14on the way back to town.
00:56:15Finally got to the remote,
00:56:16the first town with a telephone and called my mother
00:56:19and I said, "You gotta get me out of here."
00:56:22She got me a plane ticket.
00:56:23And the next day I got on a plane,
00:56:26everybody moved away from me at the airport.
00:56:28It was like fish moving away from a shark.
00:56:31People would look at me and they'd hide their children.
00:56:33I mean, I was leaking out of my face, yellow and green pus.
00:56:36I had my hood up like a freak.
00:56:38And somehow they let me on the plane and I arrived at JFK.
00:56:42You know, the port authority cop looks down
00:56:46and he goes, "Okay, Paul Rosalie."
00:56:47He goes, "Yeah, where were you traveling?"
00:56:48He goes, "Holy shit, dude."
00:56:50He goes, "What happened to your face?"
00:56:51And I was like, "That's why I'm home.
00:56:54"I need to go to a doctor."
00:56:55And he just stamped it.
00:56:56He goes, "Go, go, go, go."
00:56:57He was like, "Please go."
00:56:59And I went to the hospital and spent like four or five days
00:57:02on full IV antibiotics to kill the infection
00:57:06and bring me back.
00:57:07And the doctor said,
00:57:08"If you'd waited just a little long, a few more days."
00:57:10They said, "We wouldn't have been able to bring you back.
00:57:12"The infection would have been so established."
00:57:15But you know, in those early days,
00:57:19my reasons for doing these things were,
00:57:23I wanted so badly to be, to follow in the footsteps
00:57:28of someone like Jane Goodall
00:57:29or some of the conservation heroes like Alan Rabinowitz,
00:57:32people who have made national parks.
00:57:34And I wanted to save these things,
00:57:36but I also just selfishly wanted to have adventures.
00:57:39I felt so, I felt so meaningless as a kid,
00:57:43feeling like, oh, so I'm going to finish this
00:57:45and I'm going to get a good job.
00:57:46And I was like, but there has to be like,
00:57:48I want, I want like, like the story.
00:57:49- Adventure.
00:57:50- I want to go out on an adventure.
00:57:51I want to find some stuff.
00:57:52And so the Amazon was that.
00:57:54The Amazon was just horizon to horizon of jungle.
00:57:57And they said, "There's these uncontacted tribes out there.
00:57:59"And there's animals you've never heard of.
00:58:01"And there's all these rivers that no one's explored."
00:58:03And so I said, "This is where I can live out my life here.
00:58:07"Even if I can never hold down a normal job.
00:58:10"And if I can't be a conservation biologist,
00:58:11"at least I could just go on amazing adventures."
00:58:14And so that's how it started.
00:58:17But that was the scariest part to me was that longing
00:58:20of knowing what I really wanted
00:58:23and thinking I would never, ever have it.
00:58:25Knowing that I wanted to be an author one day.
00:58:27You know, and writing these little chapters.
00:58:29You know, it's in my journal.
00:58:31And thinking no one's ever going to read this.
00:58:32No one's ever going to, you know.
00:58:33And I even had people, you even have people in your life
00:58:35that say, I even had someone, you know, tell me,
00:58:39say you're crazy, like to publish a book.
00:58:41You know how hard it is to publish a book.
00:58:43They're not going to, that's never going to work.
00:58:44And you have people, you notice the people who encourage you
00:58:47and who disparage you.
00:58:50- My friends, my housemate, George calls them
00:58:52sofa friends and treadmill friends.
00:58:55Some people after you've spent time with them,
00:58:57you need to go and lie down on the sofa.
00:58:59And some people after you've spent time with them,
00:59:00you want to go and run on a treadmill.
00:59:02- Yeah.
00:59:02- And his goal is to spend as much time
00:59:03around treadmill friends as possible
00:59:05and a little time around sofa friends as possible.
00:59:07- And to get rid of the sofa friends.
00:59:08- Yeah.
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01:00:11Well, you've also got a new book,
01:00:13which people can go check out.
01:00:14- I have a copy of this for you.
01:00:16- Oh, very cute.
01:00:17- Yes, you need to-
01:00:18- Jungle keep of what it takes to change the world.
01:00:22- And so this is the whole story.
01:00:24This is from the frustrated kid to,
01:00:26it's crazy 'cause I wish I had a time machine now to go back
01:00:30because 18 years old, getting on the plane
01:00:33for the first time, leaving for the Amazon,
01:00:35never in a million years would I imagine
01:00:37that we would have caught the biggest anaconda
01:00:40and met the uncontacted tribes.
01:00:42And now that we're actually protecting 130,000 acres
01:00:45of rainforest and on the cusp of making history
01:00:47by saving a whole river.
01:00:49- And you've got one of the heroes that inspired you,
01:00:52writing a blurb on behalf of the forest that I love.
01:00:56Thank you, Paul, for writing this book, Jane Godall.
01:00:58Dude, that's so amazing.
01:01:00I'm so proud of you.
01:01:01I'm so proud of you.
01:01:02- Jane, Jane, Jane also,
01:01:05Jane taught me something very incredible,
01:01:06which is the grace of attention.
01:01:11Someone who's as luminary and famous and busy as she was.
01:01:16I came up to her to talk when I was in my early twenties
01:01:21with chapters about the anteater that I was taking care of.
01:01:24I lived in the rainforest with my anteater
01:01:27and I took care of her and we did this and we did that.
01:01:29And I waited in line with hundreds of people
01:01:32after a Jane Goodall talk in New York City.
01:01:35And I handed her a Manila envelope.
01:01:37You know, you have two seconds with her.
01:01:38Hello, you're so inspiring.
01:01:39She goes, yes, everybody says the same thing.
01:01:41And she takes a picture with you and then you move on.
01:01:44And I just said, I've been living in the Amazon rainforest
01:01:46and I'd have a story I think you'd love.
01:01:48And I had included a message in there and I said,
01:01:49my dream is to become an author.
01:01:53And it would mean the world to me
01:01:55because you're one of my heroes
01:01:57if you would endorse my book.
01:02:00And she incredibly actually read the material I gave her.
01:02:04This random kid out of hundreds and thousands of people,
01:02:07she would travel 300 days a year.
01:02:08She actually read it and had her team get back to me
01:02:11and said, as soon as you find a publisher,
01:02:13tell them you have Jane Goodall's words.
01:02:15- That's fucking go, dude.
01:02:17- Dude, she waved her magical, very powerful wand
01:02:20in my direction and gave me a career.
01:02:23And by giving me a career, handed me the Excalibur sword
01:02:26to go and actually start jungle keepers
01:02:29and protect an entire river.
01:02:30And so what she did was she empowered others.
01:02:32She wanted to save nature.
01:02:33She empowered other people to do it.
01:02:37- It's interesting that of all of the things
01:02:39that you've done, of all of the terrifying situations
01:02:41that you've been in, not fulfilling your dream.
01:02:44- By far.
01:02:46- Is the thing that gave you the most terror.
01:02:49- Absolutely, I mean, that's a state of agony.
01:02:52That's a state of, you know, that young--
01:02:53- It's protracted as well, right?
01:02:55It's like drawn out over time.
01:02:56It's the bar being in your foot for decades.
01:03:00- Yeah, it's the state you live in.
01:03:02It's the existential question of,
01:03:04am I gonna have these ambitions
01:03:05and never see them to fruition?
01:03:07Which, you know, there's that line,
01:03:10many are called, few are chosen.
01:03:11That's the other thing.
01:03:12Am I gonna invest 20 years in this and then fail?
01:03:15And there's a part in the book,
01:03:18and there's a part in my life where, you know,
01:03:21after the discovery thing, and after I'd gone,
01:03:23I've been going on expeditions with my local friends
01:03:25in the Amazon for years.
01:03:26And so I already was the guy in the Amazon,
01:03:28but I had tried, I'd written the first book.
01:03:32I'd done the Discovery Channel thing and failed.
01:03:34I'd gone and lived with the elephants.
01:03:36I'd even started Jungle Keepers, but it wasn't working yet.
01:03:40There was something missing and it was like,
01:03:42kept trying and kept trying and kept trying,
01:03:44year after year after year.
01:03:46And there was a point where my dad,
01:03:48we pulled over somewhere in the car and my dad went,
01:03:50"Hey, before you get out," he said,
01:03:53"I just want you to know, we love you no matter what."
01:03:57And I went, "What?"
01:03:59And he went, "You know,
01:04:00you just keep doing this jungle thing."
01:04:02- Did he think that you were doing it
01:04:03to try and prove your worth to your parents?
01:04:05- No, what he meant was even if none of this works out,
01:04:07it's okay.
01:04:09He was like, you know, what you're doing,
01:04:10you're not making any money doing this.
01:04:12You just keep going to the jungle and getting new injuries.
01:04:15And, you know, we see you trying real hard.
01:04:19And he was like, "It's okay."
01:04:22- He sounds like a good man.
01:04:23- He's the best man.
01:04:25My parents are angels on earth.
01:04:27They were the best parents
01:04:29and they're just very good people.
01:04:31But the horror of that moment was him saying,
01:04:33"You know, it's okay if this is all there is."
01:04:37And I went, "No."
01:04:39And so, you know, 'cause I went, "It's happening."
01:04:42You know, I go, "You're 32 years old."
01:04:44And I go, "I've been doing this since I was 18."
01:04:46And, you know, so slowly you learn
01:04:50that relentlessness is the greatest skill you can learn.
01:04:55'Cause there are so many opportunities to give up.
01:04:59- I have a slightly contrarian opinion
01:05:01on consistency and relentlessness.
01:05:03For a very long time,
01:05:06I always said that my superpower is consistency.
01:05:09I've slightly changed my opinion on that recently.
01:05:14I think it's stubbornness.
01:05:16I think that stubbornness is functionally the same,
01:05:19but much more accessible to a lot of people.
01:05:21Consistency sounds super sexy.
01:05:23There's a really famous visualization
01:05:26by my friend Jack Butcher from Visualize Value.
01:05:28And it's a graph that explains my life and your life
01:05:31and a lot of other people's lives as well.
01:05:34- Yes, that's my life.
01:05:37How'd you know that, man?
01:05:38- For the people that are listening,
01:05:40it's a bar chart and it's very, very long
01:05:43and it's completely flat.
01:05:45And there's a little arrow pointing
01:05:47to a point where it's completely flat saying,
01:05:49"This is pointless."
01:05:51And then the bar chart starts to lift off
01:05:53in a exponential curve.
01:05:56- That is the first 17 years of my adult life
01:06:01and the last three.
01:06:03That's exactly what happened.
01:06:04- Yeah.
01:06:05- You felt like you had that as well.
01:06:10- I think for at least the,
01:06:14at least a good bit of what I was trying to do,
01:06:17what I've been trying to do with the show,
01:06:19and it comes in waves.
01:06:19It's interesting with the way that sort of momentum occurs
01:06:23on the internet, for a very long time,
01:06:26I think it took five, 400, 500 episodes
01:06:30for us to get to 100,000 subscribers.
01:06:32- Yeah.
01:06:33- It's like four or five hours of,
01:06:36I was booking every guest, researching every guest,
01:06:40sitting down with every guest,
01:06:41doing the edits for every single audio episode,
01:06:44doing the ad reads for pennies
01:06:45because I wanted to keep on going
01:06:46and I wanted to do this thing.
01:06:47And I didn't care 'cause I just, I kind of liked it.
01:06:50So it was less mission-driven.
01:06:52My outcome was not to get to a stage where it was.
01:06:56It was simply sort of the doing of the thing.
01:06:58But if you were to look at the trend on a graph,
01:07:00there is a, this is pointless.
01:07:02Yeah, exactly.
01:07:03And as you start to zoom out a little bit,
01:07:05everything looks puny in comparison.
01:07:09You realize that for every conversation that you have now,
01:07:13the impact can be greater and the opportunities
01:07:15and so on and so forth.
01:07:16And yeah, the stubbornness to stick something out
01:07:21when it seems like it isn't working.
01:07:23But the thing that you've got,
01:07:24the confluence of what you were interested in,
01:07:28what you were inspired by,
01:07:29what environment gave you the opportunity to do,
01:07:31the people that were around you,
01:07:32chance meetings with heroes and opportunity,
01:07:35all the rest of the stuff.
01:07:36JJ, even just the fact that you found a guy
01:07:38that has stuck with you for so long.
01:07:41That is sort of the genesis of obsession.
01:07:44And I've been thinking a lot.
01:07:45I wrote this week a really,
01:07:47I think it's an interesting article about the relationship
01:07:51between discipline, motivation, and obsession.
01:07:53So the relationship is to do with friction.
01:07:55Discipline is friction accepted.
01:07:58You accept that there is an amount of friction
01:08:01that's going to be bestowed on you
01:08:03and you're going to use effort and habits and willpower
01:08:06and patterns in order to move through it.
01:08:08Motivation is friction removed
01:08:10and there is no longer the friction.
01:08:13You want to do the thing.
01:08:15So discipline, I will make myself do the thing.
01:08:18Motivation, I want to do the thing.
01:08:21Obsession, I can't not do the thing.
01:08:24So obsession is friction inverted
01:08:27and it pulls you into it
01:08:28and it causes you to stay awake at nighttime
01:08:31and it ruins your relationships and it destroys your sleep
01:08:35and it causes you to forget your health
01:08:37and it does all of these things.
01:08:40But the problem is discipline is relatively easy to engineer.
01:08:43Motivation is tough but can be engineered
01:08:46and obsession is impossible to engineer.
01:08:48You cannot engineer obsession
01:08:51and this is why the whole thesis of the argument
01:08:55is if you have an obsession that's worth something,
01:08:58allow it to climb inside of you
01:08:59and stare out through your eyes
01:09:01because most people for most of their lives
01:09:03don't have an obsession that's worth anything at all
01:09:05and it's destructive or pointless
01:09:08or just simply is not going to move them
01:09:12in the direction that they want to.
01:09:13What they're obsessed with is politics
01:09:16or the toxic ex or porn or gambling or some sort of,
01:09:21you know what I mean?
01:09:22Like the obsession is just not moving them
01:09:24in the direction that they want to go to
01:09:25and if you're one of the people
01:09:26that's been gifted with this and the coolest thing.
01:09:29- And it is a gift, yeah.
01:09:30- The coolest thing is that when you look at most people
01:09:34as they age through life, people who are serial obsessives,
01:09:38they have this period of obsession
01:09:40that's maybe a few years or half a decade
01:09:42or multiple decades and then what you see after that
01:09:46cools and hardens is something
01:09:48that looks more like identity.
01:09:50So you look at someone that,
01:09:53Dorian Yates, bodybuilder guy
01:09:56who now continues to go to the gym.
01:09:57The gym is no longer his obsession
01:09:59but what looks like discipline from the outside
01:10:02is just the echo of an old obsession.
01:10:04So it's what happens, discipline is often what happens
01:10:07when it cools into identity.
01:10:09- He's the guy that goes to the gym.
01:10:12- He's just the guy that goes to the gym.
01:10:13So I'm the guy that records the podcast.
01:10:15I'm the guy that wants to sit down.
01:10:16I'm always looking for people who wouldn't be cool
01:10:18to talk to, wouldn't that be a good idea?
01:10:20It's like it's just what I do
01:10:21and that's if you deny yourself what you did,
01:10:25yes, you're still obsessed which is great
01:10:28but much of what you're doing now
01:10:29is you're just the guy that goes to the Amazon.
01:10:32- I'm just the jungle guy now.
01:10:33- You're just the jungle guy.
01:10:35- Except yes, but it's so funny how many of those things
01:10:38are just the hero's journey.
01:10:39So you've been through it, I've been through it.
01:10:41The ruining of the health, the constant obsession,
01:10:43the graph going nowhere until it goes somewhere.
01:10:46I mean, you have to have the experience
01:10:48and in a way have those stories and have that knowledge
01:10:51and have those failures so that you're able to play the game
01:10:54at an expert level.
01:10:54You have to put in your 10,000 hours
01:10:57to the point that you know what you're doing.
01:10:59And so yeah, it's now the thing though here
01:11:03is that even if I wanted to get off the train now, I can't.
01:11:06'Cause now we're responsible for protecting millions
01:11:09and millions of heartbeats.
01:11:11Now those anteaters and those monkeys
01:11:13and all those ancient trees would be blackened to earth
01:11:17if we stopped.
01:11:18And coming and talking to yourself
01:11:21and writing a book like this.
01:11:24Now we're spreading this message to so many millions
01:11:26of people and we've created a way for them to,
01:11:28'cause so many people care about the Amazon rainforest.
01:11:31People, this, I get messages from fans.
01:11:33I get messages, classically I tell this story.
01:11:36A mother messaged me and she said, "I work two jobs."
01:11:38She's like, "I can't donate a lot."
01:11:40She goes, "We give $5 a month to jungle keepers."
01:11:42But I tell my kids,
01:11:43they're part of saving the Amazon rainforest.
01:11:46And that means so much to me.
01:11:48And so whether it's a billionaire giving a few hundred thousand
01:11:50dollars or a million dollars,
01:11:52or it's a mother giving $5 a month,
01:11:54the fact that people have the opportunity
01:11:56to change the narrative of destruction
01:11:58and actually make the world a better place.
01:12:00That is, to me, that's such a crucial thing
01:12:03that in these fallen times where everyone seems
01:12:07so disassociated, the modern nothingness wave
01:12:10that everyone seems to be feeling,
01:12:12the antithesis of that or the antidote
01:12:15to that is radical action.
01:12:17Is that there are people out there
01:12:18who are making things better, helping people,
01:12:21finding water for people that don't have it,
01:12:23fixing ecosystems and improving technology
01:12:26and the way the world works.
01:12:27And it's like, we've never lived at a more exciting time.
01:12:29- What, drinking water,
01:12:32what is the state of drinking water in the Amazon?
01:12:34Can you drink the Amazon water?
01:12:36- I wouldn't drink from the main channels,
01:12:39there's a lot of sediment.
01:12:41And also most, again, even in the Amazon rainforest
01:12:44that a lot of us imagine to be very, very wild,
01:12:47there's boats and some gasoline and like rivers,
01:12:50anywhere humans go gets polluted.
01:12:51But the river that we are on,
01:12:53the river that I work on is so remote and so pristine
01:12:57that we drink straight out of the river.
01:12:59You can bend down to a waterfall and drink.
01:13:01And that's a rare thing on earth these days.
01:13:06You know, I don't know in the US how many waterways
01:13:10they would recommend that you drink.
01:13:12I've been in national parks and I've had the rangers tell me,
01:13:15you know, whatever you do, don't drink out of the streams.
01:13:17And I'm like, we're in the Rockies, you know?
01:13:20Like what's polluting?
01:13:21- I would have imagined that there would be
01:13:25maybe some dangerous parasites.
01:13:27- Well, there are, there's Giardia.
01:13:29I think a lot of it is, you know,
01:13:34at some point you just start, you go,
01:13:36I'm gonna fully embody, I'm gonna play this game on full.
01:13:41You know, we're gonna walk barefoot.
01:13:43We're gonna go on that adventure.
01:13:44When you get to the scary part and there's a waterfall,
01:13:46you go, you know, let's just go over the waterfall.
01:13:48Sometime along the way, you know, they say,
01:13:50play the game like you can't lose.
01:13:52And it's like, I think I apply that
01:13:53to just about everything in life.
01:13:55You just go, it's gonna work.
01:13:57And if it doesn't work, you die.
01:13:58But that's okay.
01:14:03I mean, do you think of a Comanche warrior?
01:14:06Going out on horseback with their bow and arrow,
01:14:10they might die or they might win.
01:14:13How did we get so soft that everyone's worried
01:14:16about their little 401k and what their, you know,
01:14:18their feelings and their journey, go try.
01:14:21- I think they would have been scared too.
01:14:23I think the Comanches would have been scared
01:14:25before they left home.
01:14:26They've got wife, they've got kids.
01:14:28When the mission calls, yeah, they go and they do the thing.
01:14:31- When it's time to go, you go.
01:14:33- But the problem is that there is much more time
01:14:35to consider going and much less time that's spent going now.
01:14:38- Yes, and I think that the edge of anticipation
01:14:43and action is interesting.
01:14:43- Action is the antidote to anxiety.
01:14:46It always is.
01:14:46And unfortunately there is way less action.
01:14:48There's less opportunity and there's more time to consider.
01:14:50And that means that you vacillate and ruminate
01:14:52and talk yourself out of doing what it was
01:14:56that you were going to do.
01:14:56- Yeah, and I mean, that goes, you know,
01:14:58there's the warrior analogy of that.
01:15:00And then there's also the execution of whether it's starting
01:15:02that business or it's pursuing that relationship
01:15:05or it's moving to that country or whatever it is.
01:15:07It's, yeah, you might, it might not work out,
01:15:11but that's okay.
01:15:13- I've been playing with ChatGPT backgrounds for my phone
01:15:18and currently the one.
01:15:22- Yes, do it anyway.
01:15:26- Do it anyway.
01:15:27Do it anyway, do it scared, do it as high as.
01:15:29- Do it scared, yeah.
01:15:31- Do it scared, do it tired, do it uncertain.
01:15:33Do it uncertain, that's a big one for a lot of people.
01:15:36Do it anyway.
01:15:37Okay, so that was the existential fear.
01:15:42What about the kinetic fear?
01:15:44- Sure, I would say that the two times
01:15:49I've been the most scared, I'll give you two.
01:15:51One, because of this existential fear
01:15:54of not having adventures, not having a meaningful life,
01:15:56I said I want to go out like the great explorers did,
01:15:59but better.
01:15:59I want no porters, no guides, no nothing.
01:16:02I learned for a few years, I trained in the Amazon,
01:16:05and then I went out on solo expeditions.
01:16:07And so I took a boat three days deep into the jungle
01:16:09with some poachers, then they left me on a beach,
01:16:12and then I walked another few days into the jungle
01:16:14along the river.
01:16:15- Totally on your own.
01:16:16- Totally on my own.
01:16:17Camping at night, under the stars, backpack.
01:16:18I had a raft with paddles, so if things got bad,
01:16:21I could get to the main river channel,
01:16:24fishing and eating.
01:16:25And that was the first time.
01:16:29I was told that this tributary was so remote
01:16:31that there was nobody on it.
01:16:33I wouldn't see a human, it was just wild nature.
01:16:35And sure enough, the animals, it was like the Galapagos,
01:16:38the animals were so unfamiliar with humans
01:16:42that jaguars would walk out on the beach,
01:16:44and there'd be, you know, the animals just don't care.
01:16:46They don't know what you are, they don't care.
01:16:47Jaguar doesn't care.
01:16:48Tapirs and capybara and caiman,
01:16:51and just incredible amounts of life.
01:16:53And these are the experiences that I wanted to absorb
01:16:56because I wanted to see what raw nature looked like
01:16:59before humans touched it.
01:17:01So this was an incredibly important thing for me,
01:17:03and I was out there enjoying this,
01:17:04and then I went up this one tributary,
01:17:07I pushed a little bit too far,
01:17:10and it just happened to be where the uncontacted tribes,
01:17:13nomadic tribes, a small band,
01:17:16they had a campfire on the side of the beach.
01:17:19And these are naked people who are pre-Stone Age.
01:17:23They don't have stones.
01:17:25They've been living out there for thousands of years.
01:17:26They've missed the Sistine Chapel and the world wars
01:17:29and everything else that's ever happened,
01:17:30and they don't even know the name
01:17:31of the country they live in.
01:17:32They've never seen a spoon.
01:17:34And now they're looking at me.
01:17:36- You're on the what?
01:17:37- I'm on the side of the river,
01:17:39and they're on the other side of the river.
01:17:41And they see them see me,
01:17:43and they're holding bows and arrows,
01:17:44and they're naked, and they have face paint.
01:17:47And they're staring at me, and I'm staring at them.
01:17:50And I know that any help is about three weeks away by foot.
01:17:55And I just ran from my life.
01:17:58And I ran from my life through the jungle
01:18:00for about as long as I could.
01:18:02And then I opened up my pack raft.
01:18:04I inflated this raft.
01:18:05It's a pretty durable raft.
01:18:08And then I started paddling.
01:18:09For the next few days, I didn't stop.
01:18:11Because even if I stopped, I would go to sleep
01:18:15or put up my tent, fall asleep.
01:18:17And the first dream you have is that you hear the voices,
01:18:19that they're coming.
01:18:20'Cause these people are pretty famous
01:18:23for their seven-foot arrows.
01:18:26And they don't have modern, much like the Comanches.
01:18:29They're a warrior clan.
01:18:31So they don't, it's okay if they kill you.
01:18:33They don't care.
01:18:34So if they think your shirt is cool,
01:18:36they'll shoot you in the leg.
01:18:38'Cause they don't want to ruin the shirt.
01:18:40So to them, it's a whole different.
01:18:42And also, they've been, as a society,
01:18:45traumatized by the things that happened in the past,
01:18:47like the rubber boom, where outsiders came to the Amazon
01:18:51in the Industrial Revolution and made slaves
01:18:53and basically had this massive genocide,
01:18:55making people go out and tap the rubber trees
01:18:57that only existed in the Amazon.
01:18:59And so these tribes have learned the outside world
01:19:03is trying to kill us.
01:19:04So they're very happy to shoot first.
01:19:05So that was fear on a level.
01:19:08That was like the fear equivalent of the stingray thing.
01:19:11The idea of being hunted in the deep wilderness.
01:19:15It wasn't a paradise expedition
01:19:17through the rainforest anymore.
01:19:18All of a sudden, I was like, wait, I have a mother.
01:19:21Like I have people that are going to be brokenhearted
01:19:24when I disappear or that I just into the wilded myself.
01:19:27This is stupid.
01:19:29And then I was, you know, days of running scared
01:19:34and pack rafting all night.
01:19:36Although I'll tell you this.
01:19:37When you're pack rafting at night
01:19:38with a flashlight in the Amazon
01:19:39and you're sort of going down river
01:19:41with the crocodiles and the anacondas, it's incredible.
01:19:45It's an incredible ride.
01:19:47- What's the difference in the Amazon between day and night?
01:19:53Apart from the fact that it's light and dark.
01:19:58How does it feel?
01:19:59Does it feel different?
01:20:01- It's different realities.
01:20:02It's a totally different world.
01:20:03It's the daytime in the Amazon.
01:20:06Again, dawn, every moment is different.
01:20:08Dawn is this, it's every dawn
01:20:10is like the world is being created again.
01:20:12When you're in the mountains or the desert or the jungle,
01:20:16when you somehow living outdoors,
01:20:18you end up seeing the sunrise.
01:20:21And I think that that's something
01:20:21that we lose with modern society
01:20:23where you end up experiencing the sunrise
01:20:26and seeing when the light is coming directly
01:20:29into your eyes and the dawn chorus.
01:20:33And then dusk, you hear it switch over to the night chorus.
01:20:35Nighttime in the Amazon is wild.
01:20:38I mean, the Amazon has been called
01:20:39the greatest natural battlefield on earth
01:20:41because everything is eating everything else.
01:20:44Everything in that vast ocean of forest
01:20:47and branches and jaguars
01:20:48and everything will be digested at some point.
01:20:51So in this churning energy transfer,
01:20:54life is a momentary stasis
01:20:57in the entropic march of recycling.
01:21:01It's just being, it's just an eating machine.
01:21:04And it's just marching and marching for thousands of years.
01:21:07And so when you're there, you start to feel it.
01:21:10You go, you get one mosquito bite, two mosquito bites,
01:21:15some wasps land on you, they start eating your skin.
01:21:17It's like the jungle wants to eat you.
01:21:19It's like, give me your carbon, give me your energy.
01:21:22- You're decomposing while you're still alive.
01:21:26- They want you to, they want to start you.
01:21:29The wasps will land, they'll start pulling pieces off you.
01:21:31They can eat, like if you leave a piece of meat out,
01:21:33they'll tear it apart.
01:21:34- And then flying piranhas.
01:21:37- They're like flying piranhas.
01:21:38And the worst thing is that the bullet ants
01:21:40sometimes grow wings.
01:21:41I saw a bullet ant with wings the other day.
01:21:44But no, so running from the tribes was the most scary thing.
01:21:46The other most terrifying thing happened
01:21:49actually not in the Amazon in India.
01:21:52I set out to see a wild tiger.
01:21:59Now you can go, in the turn of the century, 1900,
01:22:03there was 100,000 tigers on earth.
01:22:05When I was growing up, there were 3000 tigers on earth.
01:22:10So tigers are almost completely extinct.
01:22:12We almost lost the greatest predator
01:22:14that we have on our planet.
01:22:15- And then the tiger king came along.
01:22:17- Well, there's more tigers in captivity than the wild.
01:22:22And what people don't realize is people go,
01:22:24well, at least there's tigers in captivity.
01:22:26What they don't realize though, it's a one-way door.
01:22:28Unless a tiger has its mother to teach it how to hunt,
01:22:32you can never take a tiger that's born in a zoo
01:22:35or in captivity and release it.
01:22:36It's never been done.
01:22:38Never.
01:22:39You can do it with a rhino.
01:22:41You can do it with a deer 'cause they'll go eat grass.
01:22:44A tiger has to learn how to stalk, how to hunt,
01:22:46what things to hunt-- - It's functionally useless.
01:22:48- It's functionally useless.
01:22:50So the fact that there's 6000 tigers in captivity
01:22:53across the world, useless.
01:22:56I think that might just be just in the US.
01:22:58- They're good to stay in captivity
01:23:00and breed for captivity, but--
01:23:01- They're good to entertain people, educate kids at zoos
01:23:05in the best possible-- - Interesting.
01:23:07It's like a genetic dead end for that type of animal.
01:23:12Yeah, it's irreversible.
01:23:14Okay, so you want me to go and see one?
01:23:16- So I went-- - Actually wild.
01:23:17- I wanted, I had a dream of seeing a tiger.
01:23:20So there's only 3000 tigers left on earth.
01:23:22This is the greatest predator that we have,
01:23:24this giant striped thing that, you know,
01:23:26I mean, their shoulder is so much bigger than you think.
01:23:30You think of them as like, kind of like a Great Dane.
01:23:32It's like, no, it's like a horse.
01:23:34They're gigantic.
01:23:36I mean, their paws are dinner plates.
01:23:38And it was just, you know, when I finally,
01:23:40years and years of walking through forests
01:23:42and hoping and hoping and hoping when that moment came,
01:23:46that I was standing on my own two feet in the forest alone,
01:23:49again, just as I had always imagined it.
01:23:52You work towards these things
01:23:55and then all of a sudden it happens.
01:23:57And there's a tiger standing there.
01:24:00And this giant thing just looking.
01:24:03And the tiger did the thing that scared me the most,
01:24:04which was that I was not acknowledged.
01:24:08You know, if you take a step, a raven will react.
01:24:12You know, a deer will stomp a hoof.
01:24:14Tiger didn't care that I was there.
01:24:16Tiger looked straight through me.
01:24:18Tiger didn't once make eye contact.
01:24:21I was irrelevant to her majesty and just kept walking.
01:24:26- Would that not have been less scary than going?
01:24:30- No, it was so, that almost would make sense, right?
01:24:33'Cause she would look at you and go, oh, I'm scared too.
01:24:36Or I'm taking notice of you.
01:24:37This was, eh.
01:24:39- You're a sandwich, I don't want to eat today.
01:24:41- Yeah, you're irrelevant.
01:24:42You're a blade of grass.
01:24:43And it was like the power in that statement was wild.
01:24:48That sort of disdain.
01:24:49And now I've used that in the human world too.
01:24:50If you really, really want to mess with somebody,
01:24:53somebody you really are trying to insult,
01:24:57you shake their hand and look right through them.
01:24:59Just.
01:25:00- Move straight on.
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01:26:06What's the most unpredictable
01:26:10or dangerous animal in the Amazon?
01:26:13Unpredictable or dangerous animal in the Amazon.
01:26:16The thing is the animals in the Amazon
01:26:18is they're all sweethearts.
01:26:19I mean, my jaguars.
01:26:20They sound like tree tigers.
01:26:27Jaguars sound like tree tigers.
01:26:28They are.
01:26:29The jags, okay, so the jags are,
01:26:31they call them the pit bulls of the big cats.
01:26:33They have the strongest bite of the big cats.
01:26:35They're 250 pounds.
01:26:36They're thick.
01:26:37They're muscles.
01:26:38Leopards are very lean and live.
01:26:39Slinky.
01:26:40They're way more about jumping up into the trees,
01:26:42get away from the lines.
01:26:44A jaguar is heavy.
01:26:45They think nothing of jumping onto a caiman
01:26:47and biting its skull.
01:26:49They have this crushing bite force.
01:26:51And so you look at that thick face of a jaguar.
01:26:55They can just crush everything.
01:26:56But whenever you see,
01:26:58whenever I've seen a jaguar in the Amazon,
01:27:00it's always, it's peaceful.
01:27:02It's always this kind of-
01:27:04- It can't be that peaceful if it was that hungry.
01:27:06You look like a nice meal.
01:27:07- Yeah, but they're never,
01:27:08their mothers, again, with the big cats,
01:27:10their mothers teach them see that deer,
01:27:12you can eat that deer.
01:27:13Don't go after porcupines.
01:27:14The baby caimans are safe.
01:27:17The mother would have taught the baby what to eat.
01:27:19And again, they're thinking about jumping on the back
01:27:22and biting the neck,
01:27:23or they're thinking about coming underneath
01:27:24and closing the windpipe.
01:27:26They've been taught to go after horizontal prey.
01:27:28Now, suddenly this vertical thing
01:27:31that smells like deodorant and conditioner
01:27:33and all this weird stuff that they've never smelled before.
01:27:36This is quite large vertical animals walking around then.
01:27:39They're usually curious.
01:27:40They come and they do the bob.
01:27:42They look at you from side to side and then they're gone.
01:27:46And even that, most of the time you won't see them.
01:27:48Most of the time, a big 250 pound yellow jaguar,
01:27:51I have literally been in one's presence
01:27:54and not been able to see it
01:27:56because the pattern disruption of their spots
01:27:58somehow blends them into the forest,
01:28:01the dappled light in the forest.
01:28:03And you're just looking around and you go,
01:28:05you have this moment of realization.
01:28:08Or one time I was checking a camera trap
01:28:10and I was down on my knees,
01:28:11just arranging this camera trap.
01:28:13And I heard (whooshing)
01:28:16loud footprints, footsteps.
01:28:19And I turned around with my finger up
01:28:20to tell whoever it was.
01:28:21I thought maybe it was one of my friends
01:28:24to be like, walk quieter in the jungle.
01:28:25I'm out here being quiet.
01:28:26You could be, there's a jag.
01:28:28Just walked by, look to me, kept walking.
01:28:33Never even broke stride.
01:28:34It was just like, hey, tongue out, big teeth out.
01:28:38And I was like, as close to him as I am to you.
01:28:40He walked right by me.
01:28:42Didn't care, didn't care at all.
01:28:44- Wow, so is it rare that humans get attacked by jags?
01:28:49- In our region of the Amazon,
01:28:50no one's ever been attacked by a jaguar.
01:28:52There was one old, this was 20 years ago,
01:28:54one old jag, you know, their teeth go.
01:28:57With big cats, usually the first thing is their teeth.
01:29:00And one old jag attacked like an old farmer.
01:29:07It attacked an old man and his wife defended him
01:29:09with a shovel and they ended up shooting the jaguar.
01:29:11But it was such a feeble old jaguar that it said,
01:29:13"The only thing I can go after is a human."
01:29:16And there's that classic story of,
01:29:17I think that Jim Corbett was the guy that eventually got it.
01:29:20But there was a tiger that was in North India
01:29:23and was killing hundreds of people.
01:29:25This one tiger, she's preying on hundreds of people.
01:29:28And a tiger has to eat about a deer a week to live.
01:29:32And so this tiger started eating about a person a week.
01:29:34And so she went to her first hundred people
01:29:36and they brought in hunters to try and get this tiger.
01:29:38And she was smart.
01:29:39So she moved over into a different village.
01:29:41And then she, another few years went by.
01:29:43- Like the Osama bin Laden of tigers.
01:29:45- I mean, she just, she was just hungry.
01:29:47But for some reason she figured out people.
01:29:49I could just run into it.
01:29:50They said one woman was working in the field
01:29:51and this tiger came, grabbed her by the waist, right?
01:29:56And just ran off with her.
01:29:57- Like a stick.
01:29:58- Like a dog running off with a squirrel.
01:30:02That's how big and powerful they are.
01:30:04And so another hundred people got eaten over here.
01:30:06And then finally they burned the forest down.
01:30:09They just surrounded the forest and burned it down.
01:30:12She managed to escape again.
01:30:13So they hired expert hunters.
01:30:15They got hundreds of elephants.
01:30:16They surrounded the forest with elephant back hunters.
01:30:21And they had this hunter, Jim Corbett.
01:30:22And they burned and they had drummers on the elephants.
01:30:26- Fence it in.
01:30:27- And they flushed her into a ravine.
01:30:30And finally, they finally got to see this tiger
01:30:33and he shot her.
01:30:34And they realized the reason this tiger
01:30:35had been eating people
01:30:37was because when she was just a sub-adult,
01:30:39barely above being a cub,
01:30:41she had been shot and it had taken out her canine teeth.
01:30:45And so she hadn't been able to hunt deer and wild boar.
01:30:48And so she had to eat people.
01:30:50Poor tiger had been shot.
01:30:51And so she was just trying to survive.
01:30:53But that made her the most legendary
01:30:56and prolific man-eating tiger, I think, in history.
01:30:59- The full circle of this situation from Genesis back round.
01:31:03- Yeah. - Oh.
01:31:08I remember watching some David Attenborough documentary,
01:31:12one of the newer ones.
01:31:13And the final episode was how wildlife
01:31:17is starting to interact with human civilizations, metropolises.
01:31:22And is it maybe India where some big cats
01:31:28have learned to hunt orphans?
01:31:31That the kids who are orphans on the street
01:31:34have learned to become nocturnal.
01:31:36Because if they sleep in the day and stay awake at night,
01:31:40they're less likely.
01:31:40But there was a bunch of cats
01:31:43that were going down into the city
01:31:47because there's these little meals on short, stubby wheels.
01:31:51They can't really run that fast.
01:31:55- The orphans can never run that fast.
01:31:58- Poor orphans.
01:32:00So I've spent significant time in India
01:32:03while I was tiger hunting.
01:32:04In Mumbai, there's beautiful photos of the leopards
01:32:07that have begun living in the city of Mumbai.
01:32:10And what's really cool is people's security cameras
01:32:12on their house.
01:32:13I haven't heard about the orphans,
01:32:15but I've heard about the dogs.
01:32:17They love dogs.
01:32:19There's literally videos of the dog curled up,
01:32:21asleep on the porch outside someone's front door,
01:32:24and the leopard coming up completely quiet
01:32:27and just biting this dog on the neck.
01:32:29And again, they have that bite force.
01:32:32That's it.
01:32:33- You're mine now.
01:32:34- You're shut off.
01:32:35They just break the spine.
01:32:37And for them, domesticated animals are easy.
01:32:40The difference between a wild animal
01:32:43and a domesticated animal is unbelievable.
01:32:47So for example, handling an anaconda that somebody has
01:32:50in a terrarium, that has been raised in a terrarium.
01:32:54Anaconda's never done anything athletic in its life.
01:32:56It's never hunted in its life.
01:32:58They're soft.
01:32:59They feel soft.
01:33:00If you go to those guys that have like the boa constrictors
01:33:03and you hold them, they're soft.
01:33:04You find the same snake in the wild.
01:33:07It's like holding a giant steel cable.
01:33:09It's a different thing.
01:33:10It's a totally different thing.
01:33:12And yeah, it's very fascinating.
01:33:16Even the same thing goes for the chickens.
01:33:19We've noticed that if we bring a chicken from,
01:33:21you know, they say you are what you eat,
01:33:23but you are what you do.
01:33:25And it's on a very physical level.
01:33:27The chickens that we bring from the town,
01:33:30same chickens, yeah?
01:33:32The chickens that come from an enclosed area.
01:33:35When you process a chicken and get it ready for dinner,
01:33:39the meat is soft and there's fat on the bones.
01:33:43And it's easy to, when you get the farm chicken
01:33:46that's been running around its whole life
01:33:48and hunting bugs and running away from jungle cats,
01:33:52they're lean and they're cord-like
01:33:54and their meat is not as good to eat
01:33:55because it's more gamey and tight.
01:33:58And it's like you literally, it's the same animal.
01:34:00They could have been born in the same clutch, but they--
01:34:02- You are what you do.
01:34:03- You are what you do.
01:34:04- Mm.
01:34:06What's your sense of spirituality in the jungle?
01:34:10Something more transcendent than mission,
01:34:12which is still on the physical,
01:34:13but a connection to something even greater?
01:34:17- Well, I think that humans have been given this planet
01:34:23where all of these miracles are happening.
01:34:25And first of all, if you think a single one of us
01:34:28knows the answers, then no one does.
01:34:31No one's ever come back.
01:34:32I think the jungle to me is where I feel God the most,
01:34:37where you feel this incredible proliferation of life.
01:34:42And life is the antithesis to the majority of the universe,
01:34:47which is black nothingness.
01:34:49And we're on this glowing example of beautiful life
01:34:53where there's this concert of biological organisms
01:34:56that create a living biosphere
01:34:58that allows us to be doing this.
01:35:00And so to me, the jungle is church.
01:35:03To me, the mountains, the ocean,
01:35:08but specifically the jungle because it's the apex of life.
01:35:11There's nowhere, there's been nowhere,
01:35:14it's the greatest proliferation of terrestrial biodiversity
01:35:17on earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record.
01:35:22- Really?
01:35:22- There's never been more life on earth in one place
01:35:25than the Western Amazon.
01:35:26And then we have to remember that no matter how much
01:35:29we want to think about aliens and Mars and everything else,
01:35:33this little blue planet is the only place
01:35:35where we know for a fact that life exists.
01:35:38And I feel like we've gotten into an age
01:35:39where people are very quick to go,
01:35:41"Oh, but soon we're gonna go to Mars, okay, sure."
01:35:45And the aliens, okay.
01:35:47Santa Claus is gonna come at Christmas as well.
01:35:50But what I'm saying, if you wanna talk about
01:35:52whether or not we're able to breathe,
01:35:54whether or not we're able to eat,
01:35:56whether or not our children have an impoverished world,
01:35:58there's a great Jane Goodall quote where she said,
01:36:00she said, "We're stealing, stealing, stealing
01:36:04from our children and it's shocking."
01:36:06And it's the idea that we borrowed the earth
01:36:11from the children of the future, that we're the stewards,
01:36:13we're the ones passing this on,
01:36:15and we can pass on a destroyed reality
01:36:19or one that's healthy.
01:36:21And so in the case, in this particular case
01:36:24of do we want a world that doesn't have elephants in it?
01:36:27Do we want a world where there are still
01:36:31healthy ocean fisheries that is filled
01:36:33with millions and millions of fish
01:36:35where life and biodiversity is thriving?
01:36:37We do.
01:36:37Nobody should want the,
01:36:39I mean, we're in a period of extinction.
01:36:43They're calling it the sixth extinction.
01:36:45And so this is a human, this is an anthropogenic extinction
01:36:50because we're taking up too much land.
01:36:52We're destroying ecosystems too rapidly
01:36:54for wildlife to adapt and keep up for things to regenerate.
01:36:57And so becoming aware of that is crucial.
01:37:00So that's why what Jungle Keepers is doing
01:37:01by saving this river, what I hope is that it can become
01:37:04a blueprint on how other peoples,
01:37:06we can save rivers in Africa, we can save rivers
01:37:09in New Guinea and India and other places,
01:37:11'cause everyone's fighting the same fight right now.
01:37:12They're going, okay, human civilization is moving up.
01:37:15Population is moving up.
01:37:16These poor people in these rural areas are realizing
01:37:19that in order to get the gasoline to provide
01:37:20for their families with the boat,
01:37:21even if they just want to do some basic farming,
01:37:24they need money.
01:37:25And if they need money, they need to go get timber
01:37:26or gold or wildlife products.
01:37:29So how do we get them out of poverty
01:37:31so that they can start becoming stewards
01:37:34of protecting the natural environments that they're a part of?
01:37:37- You've got to align the incentives.
01:37:38- Yes.
01:37:39- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:37:40Well, I think one of the saddest things is going to be
01:37:45if there isn't sufficient intervention to protect
01:37:49tipping points being reached with stuff like this,
01:37:53what you end up with is a world in future
01:37:55where there's significantly fewer people.
01:37:57I think population's going to peak at about 2090, 2100,
01:38:01something like that.
01:38:02We might just kiss the bottom of 10 billion people-ish,
01:38:05just about.
01:38:06And then it is going to be a very precipitous drop.
01:38:09It's going to be lower.
01:38:10I would guess that in 200 years,
01:38:11it'll be significantly lower than it is now.
01:38:15South Korea, 96% fewer people in 100 years' time.
01:38:19For every 100 Koreans, there's four great-grandchildren.
01:38:22- Interesting.
01:38:23- Because demography is destiny.
01:38:25You know how many one-year-olds they're on,
01:38:26you can't make anymore.
01:38:27And you know how many two-year-olds they're on,
01:38:29you can't make anymore.
01:38:30And population is increasing while both roads are going down
01:38:33because people are living longer.
01:38:35And the saddest thing would be if this brief swell,
01:38:39this brief fat bit in population,
01:38:42caused damage that this thin bit and whatever continues
01:38:47the rest of time then inherits.
01:38:49William MacAskill, who was the youngest
01:38:53tenured philosophy professor in history,
01:38:57I think he's a Scottish guy,
01:38:58or youngest maybe that was alive right now,
01:39:00he wrote a book called "What We Owe the Future."
01:39:03He's got this philosophy around long-termism.
01:39:04I think he'd really like it.
01:39:06It's a pretty accessible read.
01:39:08And it is what it sounds like,
01:39:12that we kind of have a duty to unborn humans,
01:39:16and it is this ethical inheritance.
01:39:21- Ethical inheritance, yeah.
01:39:23- My word's not his.
01:39:24- No, that's a good term.
01:39:26'Cause there's something called generational amnesia
01:39:29with nature where, you know,
01:39:33growing up in the forests of New York,
01:39:35I would go, these are beautiful forests,
01:39:38but I grew up, there was no bald eagles.
01:39:40There was no wolves.
01:39:42And it's the trees that I was growing up in,
01:39:44they were small.
01:39:45I didn't know that, you know,
01:39:48within the last 50 years, that forest had been cut.
01:39:51And those are oaks and maples
01:39:53that have been growing for a certain amount of time,
01:39:54but it wasn't an original forest, no old growth.
01:39:56There's no old growth left on the East Coast.
01:40:00And so, old growth forest was something I said,
01:40:03wait a second, so what I'm seeing is already
01:40:06an impoverished version of reality,
01:40:08where somebody or else already shaved these mountains,
01:40:10and this is just what grew back.
01:40:12And so, it's beautiful, the woods are beautiful,
01:40:15but they're not the original woods.
01:40:17And with nature, there's this authenticity
01:40:20that you can't replace a thousand year old tree.
01:40:23- Well, not to bring it back to fucking demographics,
01:40:26but it's a really wonderful, much more long,
01:40:28much more highly invested illustration
01:40:31of exactly what you're seeing when it comes to birth rates.
01:40:34And that's not to say that you need to have
01:40:37as many people as possible.
01:40:40But what it means is that you can't create any more ones
01:40:42that have already, you can't make any more
01:40:44hundred year old trees.
01:40:45You can only make zero year old trees
01:40:48and give them a hundred years.
01:40:50And yeah, this view of long-termism,
01:40:53trying to zoom out and give yourself
01:40:54a little bit more perspective and think,
01:40:57if you knew,
01:41:01if you knew what was coming, is this how you would behave?
01:41:06If you were gonna stick about,
01:41:08especially given that people are living longer,
01:41:10I would have assumed maybe,
01:41:11given that people are extending their lifespans,
01:41:15that we would have more long-termism,
01:41:17but it doesn't necessarily seem to be that way.
01:41:20- Again, I think it depends on,
01:41:21I think it's getting better.
01:41:23I think it is getting better.
01:41:24I think people are understanding that if we can,
01:41:26again, I'm coming at this from the environment
01:41:28and from the wildlife conservation,
01:41:31I feel like I am the voice for animals, for the trees.
01:41:34And what we wanna do is make it through this period
01:41:37of adolescence as a global society.
01:41:42- That's a good way to put it.
01:41:43- Where our technology is stabilizing,
01:41:45our population is stabilizing.
01:41:46So do we wanna make it through those periods
01:41:48without losing polar bears, right?
01:41:51Without costing the lives of the other things
01:41:53that we share our world with.
01:41:54And I think-- - Irreparable damage.
01:41:55- Irreparable damage, because if elephant populations dip
01:41:59and then come back, because for a while
01:42:02there was a lot of habitat used and then they come back,
01:42:04well, okay, great, but we don't wanna wipe out elephants.
01:42:07That'd be tragic.
01:42:09And the same goes for tigers.
01:42:10Thank God tigers have gone from 100,000 down to 3,000.
01:42:14And I think now we're back up to about five or 6,000.
01:42:16Countries like India and a bunch of other countries,
01:42:19Nepal, Bhutan, are working to get their tiger numbers up.
01:42:22It matters to people that we learn to,
01:42:25that we find a way to live in symbiosis with them.
01:42:29- Have you seen what Ben Lam's doing at Colossal?
01:42:32- I've heard about the Colossal guys, yeah.
01:42:36- Yes.
01:42:38So one of the things that might be interesting
01:42:41for you to look at, he's trying to bring back the dodo bird.
01:42:44The first one that he's trying to do
01:42:46is to bring back the woolly mammoth.
01:42:48I can see there's a face being made here.
01:42:51Let me give you the--
01:42:52- For the people just listening, I'm making a face.
01:42:54- You're making a face.
01:42:55Here's the reason that I think what he's doing
01:42:57with the dodo bird aligns with your worldview.
01:43:01The reason that he wants to do the dodo bird
01:43:04is that the dodo bird was killed almost exclusively
01:43:07due to human expansion.
01:43:11And what he wants to say is to basically use
01:43:15this entire project of the dodo bird,
01:43:18look at how much work and technology had to go into
01:43:23undoing the encroachment of human civilization
01:43:27on natural animal habitats.
01:43:29This is what we had to do just to get one thing back
01:43:34and what is it, 50% of biodiversity in the last
01:43:36however long has been lost?
01:43:39- Since 1970, we've lost 50% of the wildlife on our planet.
01:43:43Not in terms of species, but in terms of abundance.
01:43:45- Overall number, right, okay, so maybe not biodiversity.
01:43:47But I understand that people assuming that there's just
01:43:52a command Z undo button on extinction probably isn't great,
01:43:59but I think the way I spoke to Ben a long time ago
01:44:03and have kept in touch with him,
01:44:04I don't think that that's what he's trying to do.
01:44:05And the prospect of him saying, look at how fucking arduous
01:44:10and all the technology and all the rest of this stuff
01:44:12to bring back this thing that we destroyed,
01:44:14let's stop doing the fucking ecology thing
01:44:17that breaks down these habitats,
01:44:20I think could be an interesting marketing campaign.
01:44:22- Yeah, I mean, the idea that they're trying
01:44:25to theoretically help extinct animals,
01:44:30I suppose aligns with a conservation viewpoint,
01:44:33but till I see a wooly mammoth, I don't care.
01:44:37We're trying to save the animals that are here.
01:44:40And I find it highly suspicious, the idea that,
01:44:44'cause every scientist that I've spoken to,
01:44:47and this is gonna get me in trouble,
01:44:48'cause everybody loves this idea.
01:44:49No, everybody loves this idea.
01:44:51And when this came out, I did an Instagram post about it.
01:44:56And I said, even if you can clone grandma,
01:44:59it's not the same person,
01:45:01and the meatballs won't taste the same.
01:45:03And she's not gonna remember you.
01:45:05And the fact that you can genetically engineer a gray wolf
01:45:10to be white or whatever they did, and--
01:45:14- Or a wooly mammoth from an Asian elephant,
01:45:15which is what you're going to be.
01:45:16- Yeah, make a genetic freak of an Asian elephant
01:45:19that has some hairy traits or whatever.
01:45:22What you're doing is fundamentally misunderstanding
01:45:24what an animal is.
01:45:26You're fundamentally disrespecting what a species is.
01:45:29And you're fooling people into believing
01:45:32that you can resurrect dead species, and you can't.
01:45:34You're not gonna get a dodo bird.
01:45:37You're gonna make something that you think is a dodo bird.
01:45:39- It looks like it.
01:45:40Now, I don't disagree.
01:45:41And I think that he would also say,
01:45:43or most of the guys at Colossal would also say,
01:45:45this wooly mammoth is the closest approximation
01:45:48from us filling in some bits of gene code
01:45:51with Asian elephant and all the rest of it.
01:45:53That being said, I'll sort of stand the ground
01:45:56for at least the first time he told me
01:45:58about his idea of explaining to people this thesis,
01:46:02we're going to have to jump through
01:46:03all of these hoops technologically
01:46:05to make something that's the closest approximation we can
01:46:08to something which was driven to extinction by the expansion
01:46:13and the dismissal of the fragility of ecosystems.
01:46:18Stop doing it.
01:46:20Think about what you're doing now
01:46:22that is causing that to happen.
01:46:24- Yes, that's where we align.
01:46:25I think that that's the intersection between your two things.
01:46:30You mentioned uncontacted tribes.
01:46:33You recently just found another one.
01:46:38- So as of right now, we have employed numerous
01:46:45local indigenous people as conservation rangers.
01:46:50People that were maybe living in the Amazon,
01:46:52they grew up eating monkeys and turtles
01:46:55and then as they grew up, they said,
01:46:57"Well, I need to provide for a family."
01:46:58And so they got a chainsaw
01:46:59and they might go out and become loggers.
01:47:01We've said, "Hey, instead of becoming loggers, work for us."
01:47:03So we're working with these communities
01:47:05to figure out how they want their future to be
01:47:07because they live five days from civilization,
01:47:11deep out in the jungle
01:47:12and they're now working with jungle keepers.
01:47:15And so the donations that we get from people around the world
01:47:17go to their salary and towards protecting land.
01:47:19And so we were at one of these remote communities
01:47:22with our friends, planning for the future,
01:47:24making ranger patrols, doing all this.
01:47:26And we got news that one of the uncontacted tribes
01:47:32was approaching.
01:47:34Now, for all of the time that I saw the uncontacted tribes
01:47:39when I was on the solo, nobody believed me
01:47:42'cause I wasn't taking pictures.
01:47:44I ran for my life.
01:47:46All the pictures that you look at on the internet,
01:47:50traditionally, historically,
01:47:52it looks like pictures of Bigfoot.
01:47:54Somehow, they're always blurry.
01:47:55They're always far away.
01:47:56And there's a reason for that
01:47:57because the people that are seeing these naked warriors
01:48:02coming at them aren't sticking around to take pictures.
01:48:04And chances are they're loggers.
01:48:05- Hang on, just wait there a second.
01:48:07Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:48:08No, eyes over here for me?
01:48:09- Don't shoot yet.
01:48:11I want to just get this picture.
01:48:12- You're out of focus.
01:48:13- Yeah.
01:48:14And they're probably loggers
01:48:16'cause it's not like you're getting photographers
01:48:19and PhD students out six days into the middle of nowhere.
01:48:22They're at the usual research station Eco Lodge.
01:48:26But we were off at the end, the world's end.
01:48:31And these people came out across the beach.
01:48:36And we had this incredible moment
01:48:37where you see them with their bows and arrows
01:48:39and you see them stalking across the beach looking at us.
01:48:42And there's maybe 30 something of us
01:48:44and there's over a hundred of them.
01:48:46And they're moving through the forest.
01:48:47And there's, at different times,
01:48:49there's different amounts of them that we can see,
01:48:50but they came to the side of the river
01:48:53and we were at the other side of the river.
01:48:54And so it was sort of shirts versus skins.
01:48:57And it was, they were all naked,
01:48:59penises tied up, rope around their waist.
01:49:02And we're all standing there waiting.
01:49:04What are they gonna say?
01:49:05They put up their hands and they said,
01:49:08"Nomole, Nomole's brother."
01:49:11Nomole, they said, "We are the brothers."
01:49:13"Nomoles, we are the Nomoles."
01:49:15Traditionally, they're called the Mashco Piro,
01:49:17which really means the wild Piro people.
01:49:20And so Nomole seems to be what they call themselves.
01:49:24But what's crazy is you're in this moment
01:49:27and we all say, oh, I wish I could see,
01:49:31go back in time and see the world in the 1800s.
01:49:33I wish I could go see the Comanches
01:49:35riding across the plains 200 years ago.
01:49:38But this is people from a thousand years ago,
01:49:41at least walking out of the jungle
01:49:43because they've been in this natural time capsule.
01:49:45Human beings from another age
01:49:48stand across the river from us.
01:49:50And we're sitting here,
01:49:52I mean, we have iPhones and airplanes
01:49:54and we had professional,
01:49:56I had professional photographers with me,
01:49:58my friend Mohsen and Stefan,
01:50:00who were also jungle keepers directors.
01:50:02And so we're watching as this,
01:50:05so need to be very clear on this.
01:50:07They came out and contacted the local,
01:50:09the indigenous community we happened to be at.
01:50:11We didn't make contact.
01:50:13They came out and they started asking for things.
01:50:17And so they came out of the jungle a thousand years late
01:50:19to the show and they said,
01:50:23we want bananas.
01:50:26They asked for plantains.
01:50:28- Someone's able to communicate
01:50:29in a language that's close enough.
01:50:31- There's enough of a overlap between the Yene language
01:50:34and whatever the Mashkopiros speak
01:50:37that they can communicate at a percentage.
01:50:39So there's a good degree of miscommunication as well.
01:50:41And, but one thing they were able to make very clear
01:50:44is that they wanted gifts, they wanted food.
01:50:47And so the anthropologists put bananas in a boat
01:50:49and pushed it across and they fell on the boat.
01:50:53And as this happened,
01:50:55we were shooting the world's first ever clear footage
01:51:00of the uncontacted tribes.
01:51:03And since then we've released that footage
01:51:05and it's become controversial because people go,
01:51:07should you be releasing this footage?
01:51:09What if they want to be left alone, leave them alone.
01:51:11And it's like, listen, we are the only people on earth
01:51:17jungle keepers.
01:51:18The local people and the international experts on our team
01:51:22are the only people that are actually tactically fighting
01:51:25to save these people's forest.
01:51:27And if you look at what's happened to indigenous cultures
01:51:30through the centuries and how much has been wiped out,
01:51:34this is one chance again, to get it right.
01:51:37These people are living in isolation
01:51:40and it seems like the one thing they want to continue to do
01:51:42is live in isolation.
01:51:44That was their second message.
01:51:45We want bananas and stop cutting down our trees.
01:51:49They didn't want to come close to us.
01:51:51They didn't want to join us.
01:51:53They didn't want anything.
01:51:54I mean, they stole a machete.
01:51:56Like this will be useful.
01:51:57My friend was like, oh, they have me a machete.
01:51:59He was like, he's like, let's put down the machete.
01:52:01He's yelling across the river.
01:52:02- Go back and get it.
01:52:03- Yeah, yeah.
01:52:04- You should go get it.
01:52:05- Exactly what they say, what they smiled.
01:52:06He went, yeah, you come.
01:52:08And then right as they were leaving, one guy walked out,
01:52:10looked at us real proud,
01:52:13put one seven foot arrow on his bow and shot.
01:52:16Not at anybody, just shot an arrow.
01:52:18Be like, that's that.
01:52:21He walked off into the jungle, but like proud.
01:52:23And so the prevailing anthropological strategy on these guys
01:52:29is leave them alone.
01:52:30They want to be left alone, we leave them alone.
01:52:31But now with jungle keepers,
01:52:33in that 130,000 acres that we're protecting
01:52:35and the 300,000 that we're ultimately trying to protect,
01:52:38well, they exist in that territory.
01:52:41A lot of that territory is land that even our rangers,
01:52:44we can patrol the border of it, but the interior of that,
01:52:47these people live somewhere in there.
01:52:49And I don't think that generally people understand
01:52:51how large of an area we're talking about,
01:52:53but it's so vast you couldn't explore it.
01:52:56You know, if I said walk from one side of our reserve
01:52:58to the other side of the reserve through the jungle,
01:53:01where you can't see 10 feet in front of you,
01:53:02it would take you years.
01:53:04And by yourself, you'd never make it.
01:53:07And so the fact that these people live in this tiny little,
01:53:09you know, nomadic life under that ocean of canopy
01:53:12and the fact that they came out once,
01:53:14I mean, even the anthropologist who,
01:53:16the local anthropologist,
01:53:18he said it had been 10 years since they had come out
01:53:21and he'd never seen this clan before, it was first contact.
01:53:24And so he was, you know, he was trying to tell them,
01:53:26you know, we are also Nomole, we are also your brothers.
01:53:30Brothers, he kept saying Nomole.
01:53:31- He's a foreigner.
01:53:34- Yeah, they did, they asked about that.
01:53:36They said, you, and they like pointed,
01:53:38they go, we wanna see that guy.
01:53:40And I think I'm a little bit taller
01:53:42than most of the Peruvians that were there.
01:53:44And I'm the only person that's a little bit built
01:53:46and he's got a beard and they called me forward.
01:53:49He goes, show them that you don't mean harm.
01:53:51And I put up my hands.
01:53:53I put up my hands and they sang Nomole back.
01:53:55And I just had this moment of
01:53:58sort of the most basic form of communication
01:54:00with these people.
01:54:01- What did they feel like?
01:54:04- It was beautiful actually.
01:54:05'Cause they were, I think when they came out,
01:54:08it was very, well, terrifying seeing these people come out
01:54:12like Stone Age warriors with their,
01:54:14and there's no way to communicate or reason with them.
01:54:17And you have people around you with shotguns
01:54:19in case we get, in case this is an ambush slaughter.
01:54:22You know, there's a moment where you go,
01:54:24is an arrow going to come through the air
01:54:25and go through my neck?
01:54:26You know, so we were very on edge the whole time.
01:54:29And so right before they left,
01:54:30when I was able to raise my hands and go,
01:54:32and then they sang back and it was sort of easy.
01:54:36I said, oh, wow, you know?
01:54:38And also just, there's something about
01:54:41the uniqueness of a moment that, you know,
01:54:45it's 2024 at that point.
01:54:48And how many, you know, we're old men.
01:54:52Is this still going to be the case
01:54:53that there are still uncontacted tribes
01:54:55or that will be a thing of the past?
01:54:57And it was just, it felt like an aperture into history.
01:55:01It felt like something historically significant
01:55:03to communicate.
01:55:05It's almost like you were communicating
01:55:06through a time machine.
01:55:07You're just waving and they waved back.
01:55:09And then they took the bananas and they took the machetes
01:55:12that they had gotten on their backs
01:55:13and they hiked off and just vanished into the jungle.
01:55:17And then it's the moment that they were no longer visible.
01:55:21We all were rubbing our eyes.
01:55:22I mean, did that really happen?
01:55:24- Check the tape.
01:55:25- Yeah, you check the tape.
01:55:25And you're like, that really, really did happen.
01:55:27And of course there's an arrow sticking out of the sand
01:55:29on our side of the river.
01:55:30So, so it happened.
01:55:33- The locals scared of them?
01:55:35- Terrified.
01:55:36Terrified because they will murder you
01:55:38without thinking about it.
01:55:39- Do you think the uncontacted tribes
01:55:43are aggressive or scared?
01:55:45- They're scared and defensive.
01:55:47And so, but that manifests itself in like a lot of people,
01:55:50like my friend was fishing with his father
01:55:53when he was a child.
01:55:54And they surprised a group of uncontacted
01:55:58and the Mashko shot the father in the stomach,
01:56:03just impulsively.
01:56:04Seven foot arrow.
01:56:06Guts fell out.
01:56:07I mean, it's like a knife.
01:56:08It's a big knife.
01:56:08It's like a machete.
01:56:09- What's it made of?
01:56:10- Bamboo.
01:56:11- Single piece of bamboo?
01:56:12- Single piece of huge bamboo,
01:56:13but it's this big at the base.
01:56:15And then it comes down like this.
01:56:16- Has it got flights?
01:56:17How does it fly?
01:56:18Oh, because it's tailored.
01:56:19- Well, no, no, it's a big piece of bamboo.
01:56:21That's the arrow head.
01:56:22- Right, oh, okay.
01:56:23- Then there's a seven foot shaft.
01:56:26Then they use vulture feathers for the feathers.
01:56:30And they even twist them so that the arrow spins.
01:56:34So when it hits you, it's a huge knife wound.
01:56:39So as a gut shot, it spilled his guts on.
01:56:41So my friend had to watch his father's guts
01:56:42fall into the stream.
01:56:44And they were surrounded by the tribe.
01:56:46And the tribe was arguing it.
01:56:47Again, they understand,
01:56:49my friend understood enough of what they were saying
01:56:51that some of the tribes people were like,
01:56:53"Kill the kid, kill the kid."
01:56:54And the other ones are going,
01:56:55"Why did you kill him in the first place?
01:56:57You shouldn't have shot him.
01:56:58Now they're gonna come shoot us."
01:56:59And they were having a discussion,
01:57:01but it wasn't like the biggest deal in the world.
01:57:03It was like, man, why did you drop the shopping bag?
01:57:06You shouldn't have done that.
01:57:08And he got away from that situation and went back to town.
01:57:15And then of course there was a response from the community
01:57:19where they came out with guns and chased
01:57:20the uncontacted tribe and were shooting at them.
01:57:23And so there's this violent exchange as well.
01:57:26So then when they come for these semi peaceful exchanges,
01:57:31no one knows what's really gonna happen.
01:57:34It could end in violence at any moment.
01:57:36And sure enough, the next day after we had gone back,
01:57:39my friend, George, who was one of the ones
01:57:40putting the bananas on the boat for them,
01:57:43he was driving the boat and 200 of the tribe came out
01:57:47onto the river and started firing rain of arrows.
01:57:49So everybody got down onto the benches in the boat.
01:57:51And because he was driving, he couldn't take cover.
01:57:55And the arrow went in just above his scapula
01:57:57and poked out just by his belly button
01:57:59and went straight through his body.
01:58:01So he got shot with the seven foot arrow
01:58:04and went straight through him.
01:58:05And somehow he lived, but you know,
01:58:08if you could ask the tribe, like, what were you doing?
01:58:11We just helped you yesterday.
01:58:13- What do you think they'd say?
01:58:14- They'd probably say the motor spooked us or it seemed,
01:58:19it's very hard.
01:58:20There's also another story where this one man
01:58:23was very peacefully, very calmly contacting them by himself.
01:58:28This was over near Manu National Park.
01:58:30He was a local guy, jungle man.
01:58:33And he knew he would see the footprints.
01:58:34And so he would start leaving some bananas in the forest
01:58:38and the tribe would come and take the bananas unseen.
01:58:41Then he would go and leave some rope and some sugar cane
01:58:43and the tribe would come and take that.
01:58:44And he would never see them.
01:58:45And then after some time he would wait
01:58:48and the tribe would come and he would see them,
01:58:50acknowledge them.
01:58:52They would acknowledge him, take his gifts
01:58:53and they would leave.
01:58:54And then over time, he began to talk to them.
01:58:58This very, very, very slowly, very slowly.
01:59:01And then over time, over years passed
01:59:03and it became that he was kind of friends with them.
01:59:05He could mingle with them.
01:59:06They would show up.
01:59:06He would have some gifts.
01:59:07They would give him some stuff.
01:59:09They'd give him some meat.
01:59:09He'd have some clothes for them.
01:59:11And so he developed a relationship of hand gestures
01:59:15and a few exchange words.
01:59:17And then one day they found him face down
01:59:19with so many arrows in his back
01:59:21that they said he looked like a porcupine.
01:59:23Zero explanation.
01:59:26- What's strange about it is that
01:59:32although it's the same species,
01:59:34the environment has sort of crafted
01:59:38and time and inability to communicate and so on.
01:59:42- Yeah.
01:59:43- Has crafted such a, like we're trying to,
01:59:45it's like saying, why did that horse bolt?
01:59:50- Yeah.
01:59:51- What is it?
01:59:52What is it that caused that to happen?
01:59:54Why, if you were to ask them,
01:59:56why would they say that they had shot in that way?
01:59:58And what's particularly sort of strange
01:59:59is that you're saying this about
02:00:01an animal that is you, functionally.
02:00:05All of the, if that person,
02:00:07if that person who fired that arrow and hit your friend
02:00:10had been born in Brooklyn,
02:00:12they would have had the exact same language that you do
02:00:18and ability to write and all the rest of this stuff
02:00:22and would have been domesticated
02:00:23in the manner to which you have.
02:00:25- Trained the way we have
02:00:26and the skills and the communication.
02:00:28I mean, even if you're in the middle
02:00:29of the most foreign country you can imagine
02:00:31and somebody points a gun at you and you're like,
02:00:33whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't mean any harm.
02:00:35Unarmed, all good.
02:00:37You know, unless they're just trying to murder people,
02:00:39they're gonna go, oh, okay, you know.
02:00:40Well, we'll get on the ground then.
02:00:41You know, it's like you don't need to speak the same language.
02:00:44- It's the most wild that humans can be.
02:00:47- Yeah, these are the wildest people on earth.
02:00:50And again, we don't know
02:00:51if that's necessarily good for them.
02:00:53You know, some people are like, they're free.
02:00:55You have to leave them that way.
02:00:56But if you talk to the anthropologists,
02:00:58they'll tell you to say, you know,
02:01:00the rates of infant mortality,
02:01:02the fact that they're all clearly starving,
02:01:05the intertribal warfare,
02:01:06God only knows what things they don't know.
02:01:09You know, I mean, I remember hearing that during the gold rush
02:01:12people were using lead to stop up.
02:01:15They would open cans of beans or something
02:01:17and then they would use lead to plug the hole.
02:01:20And how many thousands of people died of lead poisoning?
02:01:23'Cause they didn't know.
02:01:25And I've read anthropological studies from,
02:01:27I think it was in New Guinea where they found a tribe.
02:01:28And the tribe had misconceptions
02:01:30that almost every time anyone got sick or injured,
02:01:33it was because of a spell that was cast by somebody else.
02:01:36And so these people were like in the trees living scared.
02:01:38Like their whole culture was based around fear
02:01:41on stuff that was made up.
02:01:43And so, you know, there is a certain amount
02:01:47that education helps to humans to live well.
02:01:50- Yeah, I suppose the problem that you have there,
02:01:52the storytelling animal that we are, as Will Stor says,
02:01:56if those stories don't get corrected by facts,
02:02:04and you're just, they're allowed to,
02:02:06what it is basically like the most extreme echo chamber
02:02:11that's never penetrated and allowed to persist
02:02:14for many, many, many generations.
02:02:17And then you end up with, yeah, people who live in trees
02:02:21or this is where superstitions would have come from
02:02:23or rain dances, you know, these.
02:02:27- Well, it's like this, I mean, at least a rain dance,
02:02:29you're trying to call in the rain.
02:02:30It's a positive ceremony.
02:02:31It's a cultural ceremony.
02:02:33This is like the Salem witch trials forever.
02:02:36She's a witch, burn her.
02:02:38And then the whole society becomes based on that.
02:02:40No one steps in to correct it.
02:02:41It's like, yes, she was a witch
02:02:43and we should have burned her.
02:02:44And actually we should burn more.
02:02:45And actually the reason.
02:02:47- And you're a witch and you're a witch.
02:02:49I mean, my God.
02:02:50And then, I mean, it's like the word,
02:02:52it's like the joke they were making in Monty Python,
02:02:54but turned up to a thousand.
02:02:56- Yeah.
02:02:57- And so a lot of anthropologists will say,
02:02:59you know, what we want is for them to,
02:03:02their right is to remain isolated,
02:03:04but in order to do that, we have to protect their forest.
02:03:06Then once their forest is protected,
02:03:08which is what I'm working on with jungle keepers.
02:03:11If they want to start interfacing
02:03:13with their nearest neighbors,
02:03:14which are the indigenous people of the Amazon,
02:03:18if they want to, they can, but that's their right.
02:03:20- Well, hang on.
02:03:21It also is a responsibility of the indigenous people
02:03:24who keep on getting fucking shot.
02:03:25- Yeah, that's the thing.
02:03:26They also-
02:03:27- It's not a costless interaction.
02:03:29What you're asking of the indigenous people
02:03:31in order to educate the uncontacted tribes
02:03:33is to put themselves on the line.
02:03:35- Well, that's what they would say
02:03:37is incredibly accurate.
02:03:39They would say, you know, we-
02:03:41- Fuck you, dude.
02:03:42I don't want to do this.
02:03:42- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:03:43- You're telling me it's not only is it my obligation
02:03:45to live in the jungle and to help you protect it,
02:03:47but also to potentially be kebabed
02:03:50by the fucking local tribe?
02:03:52- Well, to be fair, these communities have not been there
02:03:56as long as the tribe has.
02:03:57So if they've been there for 30 years,
02:04:00the tribes have been there for 300, 3000.
02:04:02- Feel free to fuck off.
02:04:03- And this tribe is very happy to do full on warfare,
02:04:06whereas these are more domesticated people
02:04:08that have been taught it's bad to kill.
02:04:10And it's like, so they're like,
02:04:10well, we're not going to just shoot them.
02:04:12- On sight.
02:04:13- Yeah.
02:04:14- The same may not be true in the reverse.
02:04:15- It's not true in the reverse.
02:04:17And so now they're living here and they're friends of ours
02:04:20and they are part of the jungle keeper's thing.
02:04:22And they're going, okay, well, cool.
02:04:23Now that we live here, I mean, they've said, you know,
02:04:25can we have like a safe house?
02:04:26'Cause they live in thatched huts.
02:04:28There's no real protection.
02:04:29They can't lock a door.
02:04:30- Yeah.
02:04:31Give us a steel box.
02:04:31- Yeah, exactly, they're like, bring us a container.
02:04:34- Give us a big steel box.
02:04:35- With a lock.
02:04:36- You know what the solution might be?
02:04:38More t-shirts, more jungle keeper t-shirts,
02:04:42more t-shirts could be.
02:04:43So a question I have is, of the work that you're doing,
02:04:47you're trying to get to 300,000 acres protected.
02:04:50And if that happens, the Peruvian government
02:04:54will denote it as a national park,
02:04:57which would make it, give it even more protection,
02:05:00I have to imagine.
02:05:02- In order to do what you think needs to be done
02:05:06for the entirety of the Amazon,
02:05:09how many Paul Rosalies do they need?
02:05:10- Ha ha ha, well-
02:05:12- Or how many jungle keeper operations do they need to be?
02:05:14- Well, okay, so this is the thing is like
02:05:16the Peruvian government, we do this as the blueprint.
02:05:19We lead by example.
02:05:20And so if we're successful and we create the, you know,
02:05:24we're at 130,000 acres protected right now,
02:05:26in the next 18 months, we have to raise $20 million more.
02:05:31It's only $20 million to protect the next,
02:05:33the rest of the national park.
02:05:35We get the national park.
02:05:36We had $20 million tomorrow, national park tomorrow.
02:05:39We have lawyers waiting, the landowner's ready to sell.
02:05:41We have the Peruvian government willing to do it,
02:05:43but they're like, we don't have the resources.
02:05:46If we can establish this, that's part of an already,
02:05:51there's already a huge legacy of conservation.
02:05:53There's Altopudus National Park.
02:05:54There's Mano National Park.
02:05:55There's the Tambopara Reserve.
02:05:57- What does the national park thing,
02:05:59how does that help calling it a national park?
02:06:02What does that-
02:06:02- 'Cause then it's officially protected
02:06:03'cause there's a lot of land in the Amazon
02:06:05that's sort of just land in the Amazon.
02:06:07It's someone's land.
02:06:08And so what happens is you inherited 20,000 acres
02:06:12from your father, who was a real jungle man.
02:06:14But now you kind of live in the city
02:06:15and there's 20,000 acres on there
02:06:16and you got to pay taxes on it once a year.
02:06:19And you never go there and you don't want to.
02:06:21And it's dirty and dangerous
02:06:22and there's bullet ants and jaguars.
02:06:24And then your friend comes to you and goes,
02:06:26yo, I'm getting into the logging business.
02:06:28I was thinking, could I go on that land you got
02:06:30and take down some of the ironwood trees
02:06:33and clear some stuff for farming?
02:06:34He goes, yeah, I don't care.
02:06:36I don't care at all.
02:06:37And they're like, cool, I'll throw you a few bucks.
02:06:39And so then they go out there and they do that.
02:06:41So if we go talk to you and we say,
02:06:42actually, can we buy that land?
02:06:44How much was he going to give you?
02:06:45We'll give you double that.
02:06:46Give us the land.
02:06:47And so we've just been doing that.
02:06:48We go into land acquisition.
02:06:50And again, as an organization,
02:06:51what we do is there's something called a 990
02:06:53that you have to file with the IRS when you're a 501(c)(3)
02:06:55so that when people donate, you can see where the money goes.
02:06:59Unlike every other organization on earth,
02:07:02when people donate, we protect the Amazon rainforest.
02:07:06When people donate, we hire more rangers.
02:07:08And so it's like bang, bang, bang, bang.
02:07:11And so all these people are coming out of the woodwork
02:07:13as heroes, it's large and small.
02:07:15It's the masses as well as some huge donors
02:07:18who have helped us along the way with large chunks of land.
02:07:22And so if we protect this, though, it shows a model
02:07:26where those indigenous communities can work as rangers.
02:07:31And then you don't have the problem of narco traffic.
02:07:34They don't become narco traffickers.
02:07:36And so then the Peruvian government's happy.
02:07:37The Peruvian government's, well,
02:07:39they have, our citizens are taken care of in that region.
02:07:43Well, this is great.
02:07:44And we have clean water flowing out of that region
02:07:47that feeds this city and this city and this city,
02:07:49and that's good.
02:07:50And so it's a win, win, win, win, win all around.
02:07:52So then you go, why don't we do that over here too?
02:07:55- How many times do you need to say,
02:07:57why don't we do that over here?
02:07:58How many of it, is it 3,000?
02:08:00Is it 200?
02:08:01- It's thousands, but so much of the Amazon already exists
02:08:05protected in indigenous territories.
02:08:07I mean, the easiest and best way
02:08:09to protect these natural areas
02:08:11is just hand it over to the people that have it.
02:08:13So the area that's protected by the Yanomami Indians,
02:08:16the areas that are protected by the Macha Ganga,
02:08:18there's different tribes all over the Amazon.
02:08:20If you look at a map, there's yes, there's national parks,
02:08:23but they're not as big as the tribal areas.
02:08:25And so what we have to do though is unfortunately work
02:08:30with world leaders on a large scale level
02:08:34to make slowing deforestation a priority
02:08:39so that we get past this huge population boom
02:08:43and this adolescence as a global society.
02:08:46- But you can't protect the whole thing from the start,
02:08:49but you have to start somewhere to protect the whole thing.
02:08:52And so, you know, a lot of people have said that to me,
02:08:54like, oh, you're great.
02:08:55You're gonna protect 300,000 acres in the Amazon.
02:08:58You'd have to replicate that a million times
02:09:01in order to be, yes, okay, well, great.
02:09:03It's better to do something than to do nothing.
02:09:06And we've risked our lives and spent 20 years, you know,
02:09:10in the mud and the blood and the mosquitoes trying to do this.
02:09:13And now we're getting this groundswell of people
02:09:16that want this to happen.
02:09:18- Are you gonna be sad to have to move on to a new area
02:09:23that needs to be protected after spending so long
02:09:26becoming intimately familiar with this one?
02:09:28- No, 'cause I don't think it's ever gonna end.
02:09:30I think that we're gonna protect this
02:09:31and turn it into a national park.
02:09:33And then comes the fun stuff.
02:09:35You know, if we weren't fighting to protect,
02:09:37I don't wanna do this job.
02:09:39I would have so much more fun being like,
02:09:41man, why don't we go up that stream and find out?
02:09:43We'll do a biological inventory of that stream.
02:09:46You know, and so as directors of the national park,
02:09:48we can have education, we can, you know.
02:09:50So what they did with Sequoia National Park,
02:09:52which was very similar to this,
02:09:53where John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt
02:09:55on a three-day camping trip.
02:09:56I think that was for Yosemite.
02:09:58And he was like, look, we have to protect this
02:10:00because it's so beautiful.
02:10:01And then they did.
02:10:02And so today we still have Yosemite Valley.
02:10:04We still have Sequoia trees.
02:10:06I mean, imagine missing out on the biggest trees on earth.
02:10:08They could have been cut forever
02:10:10and we'd never get them back.
02:10:11And so this is the same thing,
02:10:13but, you know, once we save it,
02:10:17oh, so we were saying what they did with Sequoia was,
02:10:20'cause then again, people worry.
02:10:21They say, well, if it's the wildest place on earth,
02:10:23how could you be bringing people there?
02:10:25I say, imagine a football field.
02:10:27I'm talking about it's so big
02:10:31that we're talking about maybe 10 pieces of grass
02:10:35are the area that we access to show people
02:10:37and the rest of it's inaccessible wilderness.
02:10:41And so we built the world's tallest tree house
02:10:43that I keep inviting you to.
02:10:44And we do some little tourism using local guides,
02:10:48which helps employ the local people
02:10:49and keeps the rest of that giant football field,
02:10:51the rest of the 300,000 acres wild.
02:10:54But I think that once we cross the finish line,
02:10:57if we make it and we're not assassinated
02:10:58by the narco traffickers, and if all these-
02:11:01- Or the animals or the insects or the pathogens
02:11:04or the anteaters or the Mercer or the elements.
02:11:07- Yeah.
02:11:08Or the, yeah.
02:11:09If we make it, if we make it,
02:11:10then no, I don't think there's an end.
02:11:11I think that we study it and we celebrate it
02:11:13and then I can consult on other areas
02:11:15and help other people to realize their dreams.
02:11:18I mean, just like Goodall did for me.
02:11:19She, you know, she tipped her candle to mine
02:11:22and passed on that light.
02:11:24And I think that that's, that was the lesson.
02:11:27You know, you just got to keep that going
02:11:28and then we can make all the change we need to.
02:11:31- Dude, you fucking rule.
02:11:33You absolutely rule.
02:11:34- Well.
02:11:35- Very, very glad that the world has you.
02:11:36- I can't wait till you come to the Amazon, man.
02:11:38- I'm ready, dude.
02:11:39I'm ready.
02:11:39Give me a few months, maybe later on this year.
02:11:41I'll be back in coming around.
02:11:42I've been looking forward to speaking to you
02:11:43and it's epic, dude.
02:11:46I'm really, really excited to see what you do next.
02:11:47Please keep yourself alive.
02:11:48- Yeah, please keep, please keep having
02:11:50these amazing conversations.
02:11:51I love listening to them on the wild.
02:11:53- Yeah, even if I'm not there with you,
02:11:54I'll be there on your ears.
02:11:55- Yeah, be there on my ears, Chris.
02:11:57- Thank you, man.
02:11:58- Thank you.
02:11:59- Congratulations.
02:11:59You made it to the end of an episode.
02:12:02Your brain has not been completely destroyed
02:12:04by the internet just yet.
02:12:05Here's another one that you should watch.
02:12:08Go on.