#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God

26:46They're coming back and they're huge and they're beautiful and I was I was walking near Lake and I never understood how big they could get except for I was walking near Lake last year and I was following this stream you know what it's like when you found a little stream and there's just a little trickle of water and all of a sudden this river otter had been running the other direction on the tree on the stream river otter comes up to me and I swear to God this animal looks me went hey and I went hey he's like didn't expect to see me there and he turned around he looked at a little spin started running down the stream then he turned around You could tell he was like, let's go.

27:16And I, you know, I'm not anthropomorphizing here. The animal was asking me to come with him. So I followed the river otter down the stream. We started running down the stream. The river otter looks at me one more time. It was like, yo, jumps into the lake. And I'm like, what does he want me to see? Now in the lake, there's river otters doing dives and freaking out and going up and down and up and down. And they're very excited. They're screaming. They're screeching. All of a sudden, and I've never seen anything like this is referring to like Game of Thrones. This crock head comes flying out of the water.

27:46All of the river otters were attacking this huge black came in 16 feet, head half the size of this table, and she was thrashing her tail around, creating these huge waves in the water, trying to catch an otter, and they're so fast that they were zipping around or biting her, and then going around in this otter. Where did God interspecies look to me and watch this? We're fucking with this can. It was amazing. And for the first time I got to stand there watching this incredible interspecies fight happening They weren't trying to kill the Cayman they were just trying to mess with it Mm -hmm and the Cayman was doing his best to try and kill these otters And they were just having a good time in that sick sort of hyper intelligent animal like wolf sort of way where they were just going You can't catch us.

28:29Yeah, like intelligence and agility versus like raw power Uh -huh and dominance. I mean I got to handle So some smaller came in and just the power they had, you know, you scale that up to imagine at a 16 foot, even a 10 foot, any kind of black came in, the kind of power they deliver. Maybe you can talk to that, like the power they can generate with their tail, with their neck, with their jaw. Alligators and Cayman and crocodiles have some of the strongest bite forces on earth. Think of saltwater crocodile wins as the strongest bite force on earth. And you got to hold about a photo that a four foot spectacle came in.

29:10And you got to feel, I mean, you're a black belt in your Jitsu. How do you compare the explosive force you felt from that animal compared to what a human can generate? It's difficult to describe it more as there's a lot of power. And we're talking about the power of the neck. Like the, what is it? I mean, there's a lot, it can generate power all up and down the body. So probably the tale is a monster, but just the neck and not to mention the power of the bite and the speed too because the thing I saw and got the experience is how still and calm, at least from my amateur perspective, it seems calm still.

29:54And then from that sort of zero to 60, you could just just go wild. Thrasher. And then there's also a decision it makes in that split second whether as it thrashes is it going to kind of bite you on the way or not. And that's where that's where of the four species of came in that we have here, you see differences in their personalities as a species. And so you can like just like you know like generally golden retrievers are viewed as a a friendly dog, generally, not every single one of them, but as a rule. Spectacle, Cayman, puppies. You released one in the river and it did nothing. It didn't bite one of your fingers, it just swam away.

30:36We dropped one in the river and what did it do? It chose peace. Now I had a smooth front of Cayman a few weeks ago and this is probably about a three and a half footer, not big enough to kill you but very much big enough to grab one of your fingers and just shake it off your body, just death roll it right off. And as I was being careful, totally different came in than the one that you got to see. This one has spikes coming off. They're like, like, like leftover dinosaurs. It's like they evolved during the dinosaur times and never changed. They have spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growths that you don't see on the other smoother came in.

31:09And I tried to release this one without getting bitten and I threw it into the stream gently into the water. Just went, wow, and tried to pull my hands back. And as I pulled my hand back, this came in in the air turned around and just tried to give me one parting blow and just got one tooth whack right to the bone of my finger and Bone injury feels different than a skin injury so instantly And it just reminds you of That's a came in with the head this big and it hurt and I know that it could have taken off my finger now if you scale that up to a black came in It's it's rib crushing It's zebra head removing size, you know, just meat destroying.

31:49It's incredible. It's nature is metal sort of, you know, just raw power. So what's the biggest crop you've been able to handle? We were doing Cayman surveys for years and we would go out at night and you want to figure out what are the populations of black Cayman, spectacle Cayman, smooth runs at Cayman, dwarf Cayman, and the only way to see which Cayman you're dealing with is to catch it. because a lot of times you get up close with the light and you can see the eyes at night, but you can't quite see what species it is. For instance, this past few months we found two baby black came in on the river, which is unprecedented here.

32:22We haven't seen that in decades. So it's important that we monitor our crock population. So I started catching small ones in Mother God. I write about the first one that me and JJ caught together, which was probably a little bigger than this table and probably mid -20s bravado and competition with other young males of my species led to me trying to go as big as I could and I jumped on a spectacle came and that was slightly longer than I am and I'm five nine so I jumped on this probably six -foot crack and quickly realized that my hands couldn't get around its neck and my legs were wrapped around the base of its tail and the thrash was so intense that as it took me one side I barely had enough time to realize what was happening before it beat me against the ground.

33:15My headlamp came off so now I'm blind in the dark laying in a river in the Amazon rainforest hugging a six foot crocodile. And I went, GG! As I always do. But in that moment, before I even let go I knew I couldn't let go of the crock because if I let go of the crock, I thought she was going to destroy my face. So I said, okay, now I'm stuck here. If I just stay here, I can't release her. I need help, but I was like, I'm never, ever, ever, ever going to try and solo catch a crock this big again. I was like, this is, this is, I knew in that moment I was like, this is good enough. So anything longer than you, you don't control the tail.

33:47You don't have, you have barely control of anything with it. Yeah, and that's a spectacle came in. A black came in is a, is a whole other order of magnitude there. It's like saying like, oh, you know, I, I was play fighting with my golden retriever versus I was play fighting with like, you know, what's the biggest, scariest dog you could think of? The dog from Sandlot, a giant gorilla dog thing, like a malimuth, something huge. What do they call it? Mastiffs. Yeah, mastiffs. I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs. What do you admire about Black Cayman? They've been here for a very, very long time. There's something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way of being about their presence in this jungle.

34:25with crocodiles, you're looking at this mega survivor. They're in a class with sharks where it's like, they've been here so long. When you talk about multiple extinctions, you talk about the sixth extinction, Earth's going through all this stuff, the crocodiles and the cockroaches have seen it all before. They're like, man, we remember what that comet looked like. And they're not impressed. Yeah, they have this, they carry this wisdom. Yeah. And their power. Yeah. In the simplicity of their power, they carry the wisdom. Yeah. And they're just sitting there in the streams and they don't care. And even if there's a nuclear holocaust, you know that there would just be some crocs sitting there dead -eyed in that stagnant water, waiting for the life to regenerate so they could eat again.

35:04It's gonna be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches. And the cockroaches are just background noise. Yeah, they'll always be there. Suns of bitches. You know, we're talking about individual black amon and cameon and different species of cameon, but whenever they're together and you see multiple eyes, which I got into experience, It's quite a feeling. There's just multiple eyes looking back at you. Of course, for you, that's immediate excitement. You immediately go towards that. You want to see it. You want to explore it. Maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff.

35:42What's, can you just describe that feeling when they're together and they're looking at you? So, head above water, eyes reflecting the light. Yeah. So, the other night, Lex and I were in the river with JJ surviving a thunderstorm. We're in the rain and we had covered our equipment with our boats. And the only thing that we could do was get in the river to keep ourselves dry. And so we were in the river at night in the dark, no stars, just a little bit of canopy silhouetted with all this rain coming down. It was such a din you could hardly hear anything. And all the way down river, I just see this came in I in my headland light.

36:21And I started walking towards it because I was like, this is even better. We can catch a came in a while. We're in this thunderstorm in the Amazon river. And when JJ went, Paul, it's too far. JJ very rarely, very rarely like he'll make a suggestion. Like he'll usually go like, maybe it's far. But in that situation, deep in the wilderness, unknown came in size. He went, Paul, it's too far. Don't leave the three of us right now. Yeah, there were too far out to take risks. We're too far out to be walking along the riverbed at night because then, you know, right here at the research station, if you step on a stingray, you get evact.

37:01Out where we went? Nothing. So, for me seeing those eyes, I think I've become so comfortable with so many of these animals that I may have crossed into the territory where I feel so comfortable with many of these animals that they just don't worry me anymore. I mean, you were, I looked at you in a raft while you had a sizeable, probably about 12 -foot black came in right next to your raft. I watched its head go under, the bubbles, it was all coming up right next to your raft as he was just moving along the bottom of the river because he looked at me, went under, and then my raft passed and yours came over him.

37:36So now I'm looking back and your raft is going over this black came in and I'm going, I'm not worried at all. I was not worried. I was not worried that the Cayman would freak out. I was not worried that he would try to attack you. I knew 100 % that Cayman just wanted us to go. So you could go back to eating fish. Yeah, that's it. Man, it's humbling. It's humbling these giant creatures. And especially at night, like you were talking about, and for me, it's both scary and just beautiful when the head goes under. Cause like underwater, it's their domain. So anything can happen. So what is it doing that it's head is going under it could be bored it could be Hungry looking for some fish it could be maybe wanting to come closer to you to investigate Maybe you have some food around you.

38:25Maybe it's an old friend of yours and you just want to say hi I don't know I have a few on the river old No, when we see their heads go under it's just They're just getting out of the way. We're shining a light at them. They're going. Why is there a light at night? I'm uncomfortable head under. So these came in, again, you think of it as this big, aggressive animal, but I don't know anybody that's been eaten by a black camein and the smaller species, smooth front of camein, dwarf camein, spectacle camein, they're not gonna eat me, but again, at the worst, if you were doing something inappropriate with a camein, you jumped on it and were trying to do research and it bit your hand, it could take your hand off, but that's the only time.

39:04I've been walking down the river and stepped on a camein and came and just swims away. And so in my mind, came and are just these, they're peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the river. And so to me, they are my friends. And I worry about them because two months ago, we were coming up river and on one of the beaches was a beautiful, about five foot black came and with a big machete cut right through the head. The whole came and was wasted. Nothing was eaten, but the came and was dead. What do you think that was? Curious humans? Just committing violence. Yeah, just loggers people who aren't from this part of the Amazon because a local person Would either eat the animal or not mess with it?

39:47Like Pico would never kill a came in for no reason because it doesn't make any sense So these are clearly people who aren't from the region which usually means loggers because they've come from somewhere else They're doing a job here and they they're just cleaning their pots in the river at night and they see eyes come near them because the came and probably smells fish and then they just whack because they want to see it And they're just curious monkeys on a beach. And again, me, friend of Cayman, I protect from my type. That said, you know, you protect your friends and you analyze and study your friends, but sometimes friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding.

40:24And if you have a bit of a misunderstanding with a black came in, I feel like just a bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a bone crushing situation. But not for a little five foot Cayman and I think that's incredibly speciesist of you About humans or about Cayman No, I'm like all my friends do the same thing they go you swim in the Amazon rainforest You know you swim in that river and I go yes every day We you know back flips into the river. We've been swimming in the river how many times with the piranha and the stingray and the Kendiaroo and the Cayman and the Anaconda's all of it in the river with us And we just do it.

41:02And what's that for you? So what allows you to do that? Knowing and having researched all the different things that can kill you, which I feel like most of them are in the river, what allows you to just get in there with us? Well, I think it's something about you, where you become like this portal through which it's possible to see nature as not threatening, but beautiful. And so in that, you kind of naturally by hanging out with you, I get to see the beauty of it. There is danger out there, but the danger is part of it. Just like there's a lot of danger in the city, there's danger in life, there's a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally physically.

41:40There's a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of ways. We went on an expedition to the forest just twisting your ankle, breaking your foot, getting a bite from a thing that gets infected. There's a lot of ways to die and get hurt in the stupidest of ways. In a non -dramatic came and eating you alive kind of way. It strikes me as unfair because humans were still in our minds. So, so programs to worry about that predator, that predator, that predator, what predator? We've killed everything. Black cameons are coming off the endangered species list. We exterminated wolves from North America. I actually heard a suburban lady one time tell her son, watch out.

42:20Foxes will get you. Foxes. Yeah. They baby rabbits and mice. Well, in the case of apex predators, I think when people say dangerous animals, they really are talking about just the power of the animal. And the black came and have a lot of power. A lot of power. And it's almost just the way to celebrate the power of the animal. Sure. And if it's in celebration, then I'm all for it because my god is that power. Like the waves of fury that you saw. Like when that tail, I mean, you saw the tail of the specks of that power. Perfect. Amazing thing with all those interlocking scales that works. So it's like a perfect creation of Engineering and then and then when you have one that's this thick and all of a sudden that thing is moving with all the acceleration of that power Wow, the volume of water the sound that comes out of their throat There's such their dragons.

43:13We talked about the scales of the snake with like they came in just the way it felt. Yeah was was incredible, just the armor, the texture, it was so cool. I don't know, the bottom one came in and had a certain kind of texture. And it just all feels like power, but also all feels like designed really well. It's like exploring through touch, like a World War II tank or something like that. Just within engineering, that went into this thing, that the mechanism of evolution, that created a thing that could survive for such a long time. It's just like incredible. This is a work of art. The, you know, the defense mechanisms, the power of it, the damage you can do, how effective it is as a hunter, all of that.

44:00All you can feel that in just by touching it. Do you ever see the mashup where they put side by side the image of, I think it's a falcon in flight next to a stealth bomber and they're almost the exact same design. It's incredible. Like that. What's the equivalent for a crock? Like you said, maybe a tank. Maybe a tank, like a little more like armadillo turtle one. Like hippos. Yeah, there may not be a machine, a war machine equivalent of a crocodile. We'd have to have like a big jaw element to it. Yeah, in the water, I mean, we talked also about hippos. Those are interesting creatures from all the way across the world.

44:39Just monsters. Yeah. Hippos and rhinos. Hippos are bigger, usually rhinos are bigger. rhinos. Right. Rhinos is after elephants is the largest white rhinos. They can be terrifying too. Again, when you step into the defense. Absolutely, but I have to tell you after being around so many rhinos. You have friends. I have rhino friends. Yeah. Black and white rhinos. And they're all sweethearts. And I mean, I mean sweethearts. And I mean, when you look at a rhino, it's like a living dinosaur. I know it's a mammal, but somehow it screams dinosaur because it seems like place to scenic and from another age with the giant horn.

45:16And there's so much bigger than you think, like they're many van sized animals. Like you're we're not taller than they are at the shoulder and they have the strange shaped head and the huge horn and they sit there eating grass all day. So if a rhino is dangerous to a human, it's because the rhino is going, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. Don't hurt my baby. And then they're like, you know what, I'll just kill you, it would be easier because you're scared of me now. You're too close to that right now. Yeah. And so like there again, I just think it's funny because humans were so quickly to go, which snakes are aggressive?

45:48There are no aggressive snakes. You know, rhinos can be dangerous. If provoked, otherwise they're peaceful fat grass unicorns. You know, like they're really pretty calm. The way of these incredible giant animals and the largest animals on our planet, the black came and the rhinos, the elephants, all the big beautiful stuff is becoming less and less. And it almost reminds me of like in Game of Thrones, they're like, yeah, in the beginning, they're like, yeah, they're used to be dragons. And it was like this memory. And it's like, yeah, we used to have mammoths. And we used to have stellar sea cows that were 16 feet long manatees.

46:24And it's, there were things we used to have, the Caspian tiger, that only went extinct in the 90s, our lifetimes. And that's mind blowing to me. that has haunted me since I'm a child. I remember learning about extinction and I went, wait, you're telling me that I remember being a kid and going by the time I grew up, you're saying that gorillas could be gone, elephants could be gone, and because we're doing it, and then I just, I remember, I remember looking at the nightlight being blurry because I was crying. I was so upset and oh, it was Lonesome George, that turtle, the glauph goes towards where there was one left and they said, if we just had a female, he could live, I as a six, seven, eight year old that destroyed me.

47:07We're all just starting to get laid and include in that turtle. Including that turtle for a few hundred years. Dude. So for young people out there, you think you're having trouble thinking about that turtle. Think about that turtle. Yeah. You know there's a turtle that Darwin and Steaver won both own? Yeah, yeah. I heard about that turtle. Man, they live a long time. They've seen things. They've seen things that there's a great like internet joke where they're like accusing him of like being in Congress with modern times, like he did nothing to stop slavery. He didn't fight World War II. Like cancel the turn.

47:42He canceled the turn. Oh, shit. What a world we live in. So it's interesting. You mentioned Black came in and Anaconda's are both apex predators. So it seems like the reason they can exist in similar environments is because they feed on slightly different things. How is it possible for them to coexist? I read that anacondas can eat camea but not black camea. How often do they come in conflict? So anacondas and camea occupy the exact same niche and they're born at almost the exact same size. And unlike most species, they don't have sort of a size range that they can find too. They start at this big.

48:25Baby camea are this big. baby anacondas are a little longer, but they're thinner and they don't have legs. So it's the same thing in terms of mass. And they're all in the streams, or the edges of lakes or swamps. And so the baby anacondas eat the baby came in. Baby came in can't really take down an anaconda. They're going for little insects and fish. They have a quite a small mouth. So they, again, it's in their interest to hide from everything. A bird, a heron can eat a baby came in, pop it back. And so they have to survive, but the anaconda and the came and kind of jost as they grow. Can you actually explain how the anaconda would take down a cameon?

49:04Like would it first use constriction and then eat it? What's the methodology? Yeah, so anaconda has kind of a, I don't know, like a three point constriction system where their first thing is anchor. So the first thing is latch on to you. I'll come writing this down like. This is J .J. to like master class here. This is for when you're wrestling in Anaconda just in case. And you'd be like the coach in the sideline. You got him. You got him. Don't let him take the back. Yeah. All right. So one time me and JJ were following her at a college peckery and JJ's teaching me tracking. So we're following, you know, the hoof prints through the mud and we're doing this and I'm talking about no backpacks, just machetes, bare feet running through the jungle.

49:52and we come to this stream and JJ is like, I think we missed him, you know, I think they went. And I'm like, no, no, no, they went here. Look, and not because I'm a great tracker because I can see a few dozen footprints, hundreds of individual footprints right there. And I'm going, no, no, they just crossed here. And JJ was like, you know what? We're not going to get eyes on him today. He was like, it's okay. He's like, we did good. We followed him for a long time. And I was like, cool. And then I was trying to gauge like, can I drink this stream? And I see a culpa. And a culpa is a salt deposit where animals come to feed because sodium is a deficiency that most herbivores have here.

50:26And all of a sudden, I just hear like the sound of a wet stick snapping, just that bone crunch. And I looked down and there's about a 16 foot anaconda wrapped around a freshly killed peckery wild boar. And what this anaconda had done was as all the pigs were going across the stream, the anaconda had grabbed it by the jaw, swiped the legs, wrapped around it, bent it in half, and then crushed its ribs. And that's what the Anaconda do, whether it's to mammals, to came in, it's all the same thing. It's a grab on. They have six rows of backwards facing teeth. So once they hit you, they're never going to come off.

51:09You actually have to go deeper in and then open before you can come out. All those backward facing teeth. So they have an incredible anchor system and then they use their weight to pull you down to hell to pull you down into that water wrap around you And then start breaking you and every breath you take you And you you're up against a barrier and then when you when you exhale They go a little tighter and you're never going to get that space back your lungs are never going to expand again And I know this because I've been in that crush Before JJ pulled me out of it and so this pig the anaconda had gotten it and as the pig was thrashing in the anaconda was wrapping around, I had bent it in half and I just heard those vertebrae going.

51:48And so for a came, it's the same thing. They just grab and they wrap around it and then they have to crush it until there's no response. They'll wait an hour. They'll wait a long time until there's no response from the animal. They'll overpower it. Then they'll reposition, probably yawn a little bit, open their jaw and then start forcing that entire... Now here's the crazy thing. is that an anaconda has stomach acid capable of digesting an entire crocodile when nothing comes out the other side. And when you see how thick the bony plate of a crocodile skull is, that that can go in the mouth and nothing comes out the other side.

52:25That's insane. And so it always made me wonder on a chemistry level how you can have such incredible acid in the stomach that doesn't harm the anaconda itself. And someone said that you're able to digest. Oh, it's some kind of mucus. Oh, mucus. There's a lot. Oh, interesting. There's levels of protection from the anaconda itself. But it seems like the anaconda is such a simple system as an organism. I know. But that simplicity taken a scale could just do the, can swallow a, came and digest this slowly. I know, but my question was how, how on earth is it physically possible to have this hellish bile that can digest anything.

53:02Even something as horrendous as a cameon, scales and bones and all the hardest shit in nature, and then not hurt the snake itself. And I had a chemist explain to me that it's probably some sort of mucus system that lines the stomach and neutralizes the acid and keeps it floating in there, but my god, that must be powerful stuff. What does it feel like being crushed, choked by Anaconda? When an anaconda is wrapped around you and you find yourself in the shocking realization that these could be your last moments breathing, you are confronted with the vast disparity in power, that there is so much power in these animals, so much crushing, deliberate, reptilian, in ancient power that doesn't care.

53:57They're just trying to get you to stop. They just want you to stop ticking and there's nothing you can do. And I find it very awe inspiring when I encounter that kind of power. When you, even if it's that you see, you see a dog run, you know, you're ever trying to outrun a dog and they just zip by you and you go, wow, you know, or you see a horse kick and you go, oh my God, if that hoof hit anyone's head, it knock him three states over. And it's like, it's like there is muscular power that is so far, like you said, that explosive, that we dream of doing it. Imagine if a Moitake kickboxer could harness that sort of came in power, then smash.

54:35And so it's just awe -inspiring. I think it's really impressive what animals can do. And we're all the same sort of makeup for the most part, all the mammals. Our skeletons look so similar. If you look like a kangaroos biceps and chest. It looks so much like a man's. And if same thing goes for a bear, or you ever see a naked chimp, there's like chimp with alopecia. Oh shit. And so it's shredded. It looks like a body builder. Like it's got cuts and huge, huge everything. It's got pecs and they got that face. It's just like, just let me in. What now? Wish you a wallet and do something. But yeah, but there's a the specialization of a lifetime of Doing damage to the world and using those muscles and just makes you makes you just that much more powerful than most humans because humans I guess have More brain so they get lazy they start puzzle solving versus You know using the biceps directly.

55:38Well, yes, no, and I have this question. Okay, so I you know that whole you are what you eat thing Now, we one time here had two chickens. Now, one of them was a wild chicken, like from the farm, had walked around its whole life, finding insects, and the other chicken was like factory raised. And so we cut the heads off of both of them, started getting ready to cook them. Now, the factory raised chicken was like a much higher percentage of fat, had less muscle on its body, was softer tissue, a lighter color. the farm raised chicken had darker, more sinewy muscles, less fat, was clearly a better -made machine.

56:16My question is, is that what's happening with us? If you go see a Sherpa who's been walking his whole life and walking behind musk oxes and lifting things up mountains and breathing clean air and not being in the city versus someone that's just been chowin' down at IHOD for 40 years and never getting off the couch. like, I imagine it's the same thing that you become what you eat. Yeah, I mean, like you and I were like, have dead running up a mountain. Meanwhile, there's a grandma just like walking and she's been walking that road and she's just built different. With her alpaca on her shoulders.

56:53With a baby and she's just, they're just built different. When you apply your body in the physical way, your whole life. Yeah. Like, you can't replicate that. Like, just like that chimp has those from constantly moving through the canopy, constantly using those arms. Just like if you're, you know, if you see an Olympic athlete or you hug Rogan, you just go, why is there so much muscle? That's exactly what I feel like when you give him a hug. This is definitely a chimp, of some sort. How does that just just that the constriction of the anaconda just the the feeling of that as Are they doing that based on instinct or is there some brain stuff going on like is this just like A basic procedure that they're doing and they just really don't give a damn.

57:49They're not like thinking oh Paul This is this kind of species who takes good or is it just a mechanism to just start activating and you can't stop it? With an anaconda, I really think it's the second one. I do think that they're impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane. I think they're a very simple system, a very ancient system. And I think that once you hit predation mode, it's going down, no matter what. The stupid mosquito. I'm going like this and every time he just flies around my hand like I'm a big slow giant Woo And he just goes around my hand and then he goes back to the same spot like and I'm like no And then he comes right back to the same spot.

58:29It's like it's like he's just going fuck you Here's the question if the mosquito is stupid and you can't catch it. What does that make you fucking stupid? Dude, I flipped a wasp off me the other day It flew back like 12 feet in an in the air corrected and then flew back at my face It made so many correct like calculations and corrections and decided to come back and let me know about it And it was like shoot that was probably went back to the nest said guess what happened today The bitch asked kid from Brooklyn tried to flick me and I showed him was so bad. I'm running They had a good chuckle on that one Yeah, you actually mentioned to me just on the topic of anaconda is that you've been Participating a lot of scientific work on on the topic so like really in everything you've been doing here You are celebrating the animals, you're respecting the animals, you're protecting the animals, but you're also excited about studying the animals in their environment.

59:24So you're actually a co -author on a paper, on a couple of papers, but one of them is on Anacondas and studying green Anaconda hunting patterns. What's that about? So the lead authors of that paper, Pat Shampain and Carter Pain, friends of mine, and what we started noticing, for me began at that story, I told you where we were coming across the stream and we saw the Anaconda had had been positioned just below a culpa. And then other people began noticing that Anaconda seemed to always be beneath these culpas where mammals were going to be coming. And that contrasted with what we knew about Anacondas, because what we understood about Anacondas are they're purely ambush predators and they don't pursue their prey.

1:00:12But what we began finding out here and Pat led the process of amazing scientists. He worked with the KD University for a long time, worked with us for a long time. And he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an Anaconda. right around here and we were able to see their movements. And that's what these papers are showing is that they actually do pursue their prey. They do move up and down using the streams as corridors through the forest. They actually do pursue their prey. They actually do seek out food. So I mean, think about it. It's a giant anaconda. Obviously, it's not, it can't just sit in one spot.

1:00:48It has to put some work into it. So they're using scent and they're using communication to use the streams. You could be walking in the forest in a very shallow stream and see a sizable anaconda looking for a meal. So in the shallow stream, it moves not just in the water, but in the sand. Yeah, so it also likes to borrow a little bit. They borrow quite a bit. And so these large snakes operate subterranean more than we think. Interesting. Like there's times that you'll go with a tracker, you go with a telemetry set and they'll say, do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do like it will be over the snake, the snake's underground.

1:01:26Snake has found either a recess under the sides of the stream. You saw it last night where all the fish have their holes under the side of the stream. There was a six foot dwarf came in right in the stream right where we were standing. He had his cave. He goes under there. They know. They have their system. Yeah, we walked by it. We walked by it. And he stuck his head out because he thought we'd gone and then we turned around and I just got a glimpse of him because I was in the front of the line and he just went right back into his cave. if you guys are not going to touch me. And so yeah, with the Anaconda, it's been really exciting.

1:02:00And in 2014, JJ and me and Mosin and Pat and Lee, we all, we ended up catching what at the time was the record for UNECTI's marina scientifically measured. It was 18 feet six inches, 220 pounds, one of the largest female Anaconda's on record. And since that time, these guys have been continuing to study the species, continuing to just, just again, just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge we have of the species and studying green anacondas in lowland tropical rainforest. You've seen how hard it is to move, to operate, to navigate in this environment. And so, when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about this species, you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them and then finding out a way to keep tabs on them, because even if you get lucky enough to see an anaconda by the edge of a stream, to be able to observe it over time, to learn its habits, or to put a radio transmitter on it, or to take any sort of valuable information from the experience is almost impossible.

1:03:08And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote about Mother of God, us jumping on anacondas and trying to catch them. And at first, it just seemed like something we were doing to learn to just try and see them, but it ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would have scientific implications later on because now it's allowing us to try and find the largest anacondas. And people used to say there's no way there's 25 foot, 27 foot. Well, there's just that video of the guy swimming with the 20 foot anaconda. And so now as we keep going, I'm going, we'll maybe through drone identification, we could find where the largest anacondas are sitting on top of floating vegetation.

1:03:45And even then, how do we restrain them? So that we could measure them and prove this to the world. It's sort of a side quest, but so By doing these kinds of studies you figure out how they move about the world what motivates them in terms of when they hunt Where they hide in the world as the size of the anticotic change so all of that that's that's those are scientific studies Yeah, I mean look There's so much that we don't know about this far as we don't know what medicines are in this forest we don't know with a lot of the 1500, something like 4 ,000 species of butterflies in the Amazon rainforest and of the 1500 species that are here in this region, all of them have a larval stage, caterpillars, right?

1:04:25And each of the caterpillars has a specific host plant that they need to need to eat in order to become a successful butterfly to enter the next life -sake cycle. And for most of the species that fill the butterfly book, we don't know what those interactions are. I recently got to see the white witch, which is a huge moth. It's one of the two largest moths in the world. It's the largest moth by wing span. Wow. Huge. It looks like a bird. Big white moth. I believe that we still don't know what the caterpillar looks like. It's 2024. We have iPhones and penis -shaped rocket ships. We don't know where that moth starts its life.

1:05:07We still haven't figured that out. By the way, the rocket ships are shaped that way for efficiency purposes not because they wanted to make it look like a penis. Speaking of which, I have ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring. Have you. And make me, I know it's not just a figment of my imagination. I'm pretty sure they're real. In fact, you explained it to me and they make me very uncomfortable because there's just a lot of penises hanging off of a tray. Yes. I don't know what the purposes. Who they're supposed to attract. But it certainly makes, but certainly Paul really enjoys them.

1:05:40Yeah. Well, clearly you've done some research. You've noticed a lot of them. I haven't even seen them. There was a time when I almost fell and to catch my balance, I had to grab one of the penises of the penis string and unforgettable. Anaconda, the biggest badass anaconda in the Amazon versus the biggest badass black came in, because you mentioned there like there's race, if there's a fight to see UFC and cage who wins underwater. The biggest in the baddest. The biggest in the baddest. You have, can imagine given all the studies you've done of the two animals species in the baddest. You're talking about an 18 -foot, several hundred -pound black came in versus a 26 -foot, 350 -pound anaconda.

1:06:25Yeah. I think it's a death stalemate. I think the camein' slams the anaconda, bites onto it. The anaconda wraps the camein' and then they both thrash around until they both kill each other. Because I think the game will tear him up so bad. And the game is not going to let go. He's going to never. He's never going to let go, but then he's going to realize that he's also being constricted. So then he's going to stop and he's going to keep slamming down on that anaconda. And the anaconda is just going to keep constricting. But if the game can do enough damage before the end, it's, again, it's almost like a striker versus a G2.

1:06:55Yeah. You know, if you can get enough elbows in before they lock you. How fast is the constriction? So it's pretty slow. It's, no, it's incredibly quick. So it's, it's you take the back and get me in chokehold. It's that, I have maybe 30 seconds, maybe on the upward side, if you haven't cinched it under my, under my throat, but if you've gotten good position, it's over. Is there any way to unwrap the choke on to the choke defending? No, unless you have outside help, unless you have another human or another 10 humans coming to unwrap the tail. Help me put for an animal, like if a deer gets hit by an antica, there's no way.

1:07:31They don't stand a chance. So the black came in would bite somewhere close to the head and then, and just try to hold on a thrash. Yeah, I don't think a large black came in. Here's the thing, every fisherman knows this like the biggest fish, they're smart. Yeah. And more importantly, they're shrewd. They're careful. A huge black came in that 16 feet long isn't gonna be messing with the big anaconda. Like they, they, they'll, they won't, they won't cross paths because while they are technically occupy the same type of environment, that black came in is going to have this deep spot in the lake and that anaconda is going to have found this floating forest like sort of black stream back water where it's going to be and they'll have made that their home for decades and they'll already have cleaned out the competition.

1:08:19So maybe if there was a flood and they got pushed together, they, they, they could have some sort of a showdown, but almost more certainly is that when they get to that size, that came in at any sign of danger, bloom right under the water. It's almost like, even if you, what do you learn when you're a black belt? What do you do with a street fight? You still run away. There's no reason for a street fight. I think the animals really understand that. There's no reason for this. So like a giant anaconda and a giant black came in, they could probably even coexist in the same environment, just knowing, using the wisdom to avoid the fight.

1:08:57Right. Or they would have a big showdown and one of them would either die or have to leave. They would have a territorial dispute. Yeah. Without killing either of them. Yeah. On it, dude, nature, anything could happen. One of the things that me and Pat wrote up was that I saw a yellow -tailed creepo, which is like a six -foot rat snake eating an oxy ropas, millennio, jennies, which is the red snake that we found last night. And just no one had ever, in scientific literature, we'd never seen a Creebo eating anoxyropas before. And so I had the observation in the field, I sent it to Pat Champagne, Pat writes it up, paper.

1:09:35And so it's like, it's this really cool, that's a really cool system because we're just out here all the time. You end up seeing things, JJ's dad saw an anaconda eating a taper, taper is the size of a cow. Yeah. And it's, that guy didn't lie. You know, like some people you trust your sources on that he he saw enough stuff He didn't need to make up stories and you know how you know what I love now is when you go to so when you ask people when we were going up the mountain with Jimmy Yeah JJ said to him he goes Have you ever seen a puma up here in the mountains and Jimmy goes there up here and JJ JJ went no No, have you seen it and Jimmy went no never seen one and You know how most people will go yeah That makes me trust the person when they admit nah I haven't seen it.

1:10:20They're up here. I haven't seen it. And Jamie has been living there his whole life. His whole life. This Puma's in the mountains. You know, mountain lions, Puma's, whatever, you know, there's all different names for them. They're distributed from, I think from Alaska, down through Argentina. It's, they're everywhere. It's this extremely successful species. From deserts to high mountains, everything. I think you're saying Puma's have a, have a curiosity, have a way about them where they like explore, like follow people, like just to kind of figure out like just that curiosity, which is like as opposed to causing harm or hunting and that kind of stuff like what is this about?

1:11:02I think it's based in predatory instincts, but I also think there is a playfulness to higher intelligence animals that you don't see in lower intelligence animals and so So something like a rabbit, for instance, you're never going to see a rabbit come in to check you out. You just, you just, you can't even think of it like that. Like a rabbit's just going to either eat or run away. There's really two settings. When you think of something like a river giant river otter or a tyra, which is a, they call it munko here. It's a, it's a huge arboreal weasel. And they'll come check you out. I woke up at my house the other day and there was a tyra climbing up the side of the house and he was looking down at me sleeping.

1:11:43And it's like, he came to check me out. Like, it's like they're smart enough and they're brave enough. Here's the important thing. They know that they can fend for themselves. They can fight, they can climb, they can run. And so they're like, let me, I'm curious. I got time. Let me check this out. Yeah, they're gathering information. I wonder how complex and sophisticated their world model is. Like how they're integrating all the information about the environment. Like where all the different trees are, world, the different nests of the different insects are, what the different creatures are, by size, all that kind of stuff.

1:12:14I'm sure they don't have enough, you know, storage up there to like keep all that, but they probably keep the important stuff. You know, so to sort of integrate the experiences they have into like what is dangerous, what is tasty, all that kind of stuff. I think it's more complex than we realize. You go back to that friends to wall book, are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? There's so many incredible examples of controlled studies where the researchers weren't understanding how to shed being so insurmountably human and understand that there are other types of intelligence. And whether that's elephants or cats, so big cats for instance, we just saw a camatrap video from last night where you see one of our workers walk down the trail and then five minutes later a cat behind them.

1:13:07By the way, we're walking just exactly the same area, also exact same time. Yeah. Yeah. So we're out there and there's deer and there's cats and there's a jaguar and there's a puma and there's all these animals out there. And we're out in the night in the Inky Black night in this ocean of darkness beneath the trees and we're just exploring and getting to see everything and there's all these little eyes and heartbeats. I love the jungle at night, man. It's the most exciting thing. You want things you do when you turn off the headlamp, complete darkness all around you. And just the sounds. Everything you hear, the cicadas, the birds, they're all screaming about sex all the time.

1:13:42So they're just trying to get laid. So all of them are making mating calls. Now the trick is to make your mating call without attracting a predator. But at night, what amazes me is that for us, it's so So from the caveman logic of it's hard to make fire here, it's hard to even light a fire here to having this incredible beam of, you know, all of a sudden we can look at the jungle and walk through that darkness, then we're seeing the frogs on those leaves and the snakes moving through the undergrowth and the deer sneaking through the shadows. It's like, it's almost as supernatural as skydiving.

1:14:25It's a strange thing to be able to do that technology allows us to do. We're doing something really complex. And we're walking on trails that have been cleared for us that we've planned out. And so walking through the jungle at night, you just get this freak show of biodiversity. And I'm addicted to it. I truly love it. Except for the times over the last few days when we walked on through jungle without a trail. And that's just a different experience. Well, how would you categorize if somebody said, Lex, I think I'm going to go for a hike through the jungle, not on the trail. Yeah. What would you tell them?

1:14:59Every step is really hard work. Every step is a puzzle. Every step is a full of possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude of ways. You just a wasp nest under a leaf, a hole under a leaf on the ground where if you step in and you're gonna break a knee, ankle, leg and go to not be able to move for a long time, there's all kinds of ants that can hurt you a little or can hurt you a lot. Bullet ants, there's snakes and spiders and oh. My favorite that I've gotten to know intimately is different plants with different defensive mechanisms, one of which is just spikes. So sharp. You have, I don't know if you brought it, but there's a club.

1:15:58There's an epic club with spikes, but there's so many trees that have spikes on them. Sometimes they're obvious spikes, sometimes less than obvious spikes. and you know, it could be just that innocent as you take a step through a dense jungle, it could be an innocent placing of a hand on that tree that could just completely transform your experience, your life by penetrating your hand with like 20, 30, 40, 50 spikes and just changing everything. That's just a completely different experience than going on a trail where you, where you're observer of the jungle versus the participant of it. And it truly is extreme hard work to take every single step.

1:16:42Now just think about this. I think scientifically, because people like to summarize. People like to get really, really sort of cavalier with our scientific progress. And they go, you know, we've already explored the Amazon. It's like, well, have we? Because in between each tributary is, you know, let's say I just between some of them, let's just say a hundred miles of unbroken forest. Who's explored that? Yeah. Yeah, maybe some of the tribes have been there, maybe some areas they haven't been. Now when you're talking about scientists, whether they're indigenous scientists, western science, whatever, so many of the areas in this jungle that is the size of the continent to the US still have not been accessed.

1:17:20The places where people are doing research, they have been down here long enough. I see all the PhDs come down here and they all go to the same few research stations. They're safe. they have a bed. If you get hella dropped into the middle of the jungle in the deepest most remote parts you're going to find micro ecosystems. You're going to see little species variations. You're going to see a type of flower that JJ's never seen before like what happened the other day. As you start walking through new patches of forest you start finding new species and everything here changes. You just go a little bit up river and the animals you see differ.

1:17:52You go on this side of the river versus on the north side of the river. There's two other species of primates there that don't exist here. That's in the mammal paper that we did with the emperor Tamarins and the pygmy marmosets that the rangers found. Yeah, the mammal paper is looking at the diversity of life in this one region of the Amazon. What can you talk more about that paper? Mammal diversity along the, let's be address forever. Once again, the mammal paper patched in pain, the prodigy. He was sort of leading on this with a bunch of other scientists who have worked in the region, including Holly O'Donnell out of Oxford.

1:18:30Myself, I really just made a few observations. The jungle keepers, Rangers, got featured because they're the ones that spotted a pygmy mormous set that had previously been unrequited on the river. I got to contribute because I had the only photograph that I believe anyone has of an emperor tamaran on this river. It's the first proof of emperor tamaran on this river. And that's exciting. It's exciting because you can post a picture or share a scientific observation or write about something. And then what happens is you get these like couch experts, these armchair experts who will come and say, no, no, you don't get blue and yellow and will cause there.

1:19:11I can tell from my bird book, it says they're not there. And they'll tell you you're wrong. No, you don't get woolly monkeys there or emperor tamarins. But we have proof. And so we're coming together to try and add to that knowledge. My general sort of amateur experience of the species of encountered here is like, this should not exist. Whatever this is, this is not real. This is CGI. Like what? Just the colors, the weirdness. I mean, there's a... I think I called it the paraseldin caterpillar because it's like fur... It looks like a... It looks like a paraseldin dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like really furry and it's transparent and sort of, it's transparent.

1:19:51All you see is this white, beautiful fur and it's just like this caterpillar. It doesn't look real. Do you think there's species, like how many species have we not discovered? And is there species that are like extremely badass that we haven't discovered yet? If you look up how many trees are in the Amazon rainforest, it's something in the order of 400 billion trees. There's something like 70 to 80 ,000 species of plants, individual types of plants here. 1 ,500 species of trees. It's so vast that it's comparable, like the scale is only comparable to the universe in terms of stars and galaxies and for the sheer immensity of it.

1:20:41And so we're describing new species every year. And just walking on the trail at night, you and I have seen, you see a tiny little spider hidden in a crevice and has the scientific eye ever seen that spider before? Has it been documented? Do we know anything about its life cycle? There's still so much that's here that is completely unknown. We have pictures of all these butterflies. Somebody went out with a butterfly net and caught these butterflies, took a picture of it, gave it a name, put it in a butterfly book. What do we know? What host plant do they use for their caterpillars? What's their geographical range?

1:21:16What do we actually know? Not that much. So are there creatures out here that haven't been described absolutely? And some of them could be extremely effective predators in a niche environment. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, certainly, certainly in the canopy, 50 % of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy, and we've had very limited access to the canopy for all of history. You know, if you wanted to get up into the rainforest canopy, you basically have to climb a vine or what scientists, when I was a kid, I always used to see them with like the slingshots or the bow and arrows. They would shoot a piece paracord over a branch, pull the rope up and then, you know, do the ascension thing and then you're up in this tree getting swarmed by sweat bees, getting stung by a wasps.

1:21:58You're trying to do science up there in that environment. It's incredibly hostile and And so having canopy platforms, I actually met a guy at a French film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over the canopy of the Amazon and then lay these big nets over the broccoli of the trees. And the nets were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets and then reach through and pull cactuses and lizards and snakes and whatever. Just take specimens from the canopy. That's how difficult it is that scientists have resorted to using hot air balloons. And so having a tree house, having canopy platforms, it's starting to get, it's starting to be more and more access to the rainforest canopy.

1:22:39And so we're beginning to log more data. You know, we've even observed in our tree house, which is supposed to be the tallest in the world. We're seeing lizards that we don't see on the ground. Lizards that have never been documented on this river. Like we're seeing snakes where they're saying we saw the snake inside a crevice on that tree in the stranglific and we don't know what it is, it's just people haven't been up there. And that's where a lot of the monkeys are. That's where there's just a lot of dynamic life up there. Yeah. I mean, when you wake up in the canopy in the morning in the Amazon rainforest, as soon as that the darkness lifts, as soon as that purple comes in the east in the morning, the howler monkeys start up.

1:23:21Yeah. And then the parrots start up. And then the tinnitus start going in. The macaws start going and pretty soon everybody's going to the spider monkey groups are all calling to each other and it's just the whole dawn chorus starts and it's so exciting. So you're saying when they're screaming is usually about sex. Sex or territory. Usually sex and violence or implied violence or the threat of violence. Yeah. I mean howler monkeys in the morning they're letting other groups know this is where we're at. We're gonna be farging over here. You better stay away. And so it's a little bit respectful as well.

1:23:50There is order in the chaos. So just speaking of screaming, macaws are like these beautiful creatures. They're lifelong partners. They stick together. So there's your obviously, they're monogamous. So you see two of them together. But when they communicate, their love language seems to be very loud screaming. Yeah. What do you learn about relationships from macaws? That it can be loud and rough and still be loving. And still be loving. But is that interesting to you that there's like monogamy in some species that they, their lifelong partners and then there's like total lack of monogamy in other species.

1:24:26It's all interesting. I mean, there's the anti -monogamy crew who's like, you know, we were never meant to be monogamous. We're supposed to just be animals and then there's the other side of the crew that's like, we were meant to be monogamous. We are monogamous creatures. That's what God wanted between a man and a woman and then other people like, yeah, but I know about these two gay penguins and so that's natural too. and so then everyone tries to draw their identity, they're trying to justify their identity off of the laws of nature. So the fact that macaws are monogamous really doesn't have anything to do with anybody, except for that it's beneficial for them to work together to raise chicks.

1:25:01It's difficult. They rely on ironwood trees or agua hay palms, and it's difficult to find the right hole in a tree. There's only so much macaw real estate, and so they need to use those holes. and each one of those ancient trees, it's usually 500 years or more, is a valuable macaw generating sight in the forest. And so if those trees go down, you lose exponential amounts of macaws, and that's how you get endangered species. And so that's why we're trying to protect the ironwood trees. Another ridiculous question. If every jungle creature was the same size. No, boy. Who would be the new apex predator, the new alpha at the top of the food chain?

1:25:40Dude, that's like super smash brothers of the jungle. That's incredible. Like bullet ants, if you had a bullet ant that was the size... Yeah. Can it be like a tournament? So everyone is pound for pound ratioed for efficiency. So you have basically like a six foot bullet ant versus a huge black cameon versus an Anaconda versus an oscillator the size of Jaguars versus... Yeah, well let's go bullet ant versus black cameon. But they're size. Same size. John. I don't know, man. I never thought about it. I mean, bulletin has these giant, giant, giant mandibles. It could probably grab the black camein and then at that amount of venom, you're talking about a bucket of venom going into that black camein.

1:26:23Black camein's gonna get paralyzed immediately. Well, insects have just a, just a tremendous amount of like strength. I don't know how they generate the, what the geometry of that is. The natural world can't create that same kind of power and the bigger thing. It seems like, it seems like it. and like just these tiny creatures in the ones they're able to have that much strength. I don't know how that works with the physics of this. Yeah, so like an ant, leaf cutter ant lifting that leaf. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. That doesn't make any sense. I don't know if that's a limit of physics. I think it's just a limit of evolution of how that works.

1:26:54One of the most interesting limits that I heard somebody talking about recently was the reason that dinosaurs didn't get bigger. Even bigger because the conditions on earth were favorable towards it. was that at some point their eggs reached, there's physical limits that their eggs reached the size that the eggs were so big that eggs need to breathe for the embryo to survive. And their eggs reached a limit where, in order to have a shell that could hold the mass of the liquid and the young dinosaur, if they got bigger, it wouldn't be permeable anymore. And I thought that was so interesting because the entire size of physical creatures was determined by how thick shell can be before it breaks or before it can't pass air through it.

1:27:34Yeah, there might be a lot of the biophysics limits that's fascinating stuff. Just like the interplay between biology, chemistry, and physics of a life form. It was like this thing, there's a lot involved in creating a single living organism that could survive in this world. And being big is not always good. Being a big creature, it's for many reasons. Like you were saying, the big creature seemed to be going extinct for many reasons. but in the human world is because there's seem to be a higher value. Given the current size of the jungle, I think that the MVP, the pound for pound goat, is oslots.

1:28:15You're talking about like a mid -size, 40, 40, 50 pound cat that can climb that does unlike a jaguar. A jaguar every time it hunts, it's going after a deer. It catches a deer. The deer could hit it with its antlers, it could tear it with its hooves. It's risking its life for that meal. And Oslo, Oslo's walk around at night, and they climb a tree, eat a whole bunch of eggs, eat the mother bird too, kill a snake, maybe mess around and eat a baby came and they can have whatever they like. And they're sleek enough and smart enough to get away from predators. They don't really have predators. And so they sort of occupy this perfect niche where they can hunt small prey in high quantity without taking on big risks.

1:29:02And so if you had to choose an animal to be, it would probably be like an oscillot, or I would say giant river otters, which are so damn cool, because they're the locals call them logos de rio river wolves, because they're so tough, and they're so social, and they're so like us, because they're intensely familial groups. They live in holes by the sides of lakes, and they swim through the water, and they catch fish all day long, piranhas, the eat them just like, the scales go flying as they eat these piranhas. and they're so joyous in the way they swim and they have friends and they have family and they I think it would be I think we could relate to being a river otter really because I can't picture being a cat and being so solitary and just marching along a 15 mile route and making sure there's no other cats and coming in on your territory and marking that territory It seems it seems very solo and very Cat -like.

1:29:54So lonely existence. Lonely existence. And we humans are social beings. It was so social. So to me, River Otters is like having a big Italian family. You're constantly eating, you're freaking out. You're just causing problems with the black camein'. Take down a black camein'. Start street fights. Yeah, it's a family thing. You mentioned piranhas. Yeah. What do you think, there's a source of a lot of fear from people. What do you find beautiful and fascinating by these creatures? They're also kind of social, or at least they hunt and operate in groups. Yeah, not in the mammalian way though. Piranhas are in large schools, but I fish are so different.

1:30:28Like if you, I can talk to you all day about how, how much I'd love to be an otter also. Going back to the fighting thing, otters and weasels, muscle a day, tend to be very loose in their skin. So if you grab an otter, it can still rotate around to bite you. So it's like if I grab you by the back, you're stuck, you know, like we can't, you grab them by the skin. Yeah. They can rotate around and just shred you apart. So they're really cool fighters. Piranha fish, fish I don't, I don't, you know, I don't identify with fish in terms like that. I think living out here has made me think of fish as kind of rapid food that can or can't be gotten.

1:31:07Like, you know, to me, a piranha is just, when I see a piranha, I think about how I want it to taste. Yeah, so like fish is a food source of so many creatures in the jungle. So they're primarily food source, but piratas are, I mean, they're predators. They're serious predators. They are serious predators. I found a baby black came in not that long ago and he was missing all of his toes Because the piranhas it eaten them off. It was really sad He just had these stumps and he was swimming around the water and I was like you are not gonna make it He was like eight inches and he was such a cute little puppy.

1:31:37You know those big eyes And I was just like man you already are missing all your toes. It's like just a matter of time Okay, now he can't get away So some big agami heron's gonna come and just nail and pop them down his throat And that's the end of that for the camein. I mean nature is metal nature sure sure it as metal. Bite off a little bit and then makes you vulnerable and then that vulnerability is exploited by some other species and then that's it, that's the end. Yeah, but humans are brutal too. Like that story we heard about that guy the other day who caught a stingray on a fishing hook chopped its tail off to make it safe for humans, caught a piece of the stingray off so he could use it for bait and then threw the live fish back in the river.

1:32:18Like to me that is incomprehensible amounts of cruelty with flawed logic in every direction. Like if you're gonna use the thing as bait, use it as bait. If you're gonna remove its tail, well then just kill it all together. Yeah. Or if you want to save the animal and not kill it, then don't maim it before you return it to its, it was so weird. So if you kill an animal, you want to use it to its fullest by using it as a food source, by cooking it by, you know, eating every part of it, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So we have, We've been eating paco. Yeah, and your time here fried paco is great. Fried Amazing.

1:32:54It's delicious full of nutrients. You could tell it makes you healthy. I feel like we better work out so that we can go harder in the jungle and so a few months ago in August when the river was down it was there was a day that the river was clear and A friend of mine Victor who's who's married to a native girl. He said it's time to go paco fishing and at the time we were stuck out here and we had no resupply everybody was busy and so everyone was demoralized, the staff was hungry, we were hungry and it really became this thing of like, hey go catch us some paco. They were working on the trails, they were installing the solar, we were working hard and we didn't have food.

1:33:31And so we went out to the river and what we did was we went up river, we camped on the beach and in the morning, Victor's wife was canoeing with the paddle, dead quiet, don't let the paddle touch the wooden boat. Nikita was balanced in the middle of the thing, Victor's on the front with this huge fishing rod, and I'm sitting there and he goes, I'll catch the first one, you catch the second one, and he's got this huge fishing rod and a piece of half rod and meat from the day before, and he's smacking it against the well six am. He's just letting it smack against the water, and I'm going and we're floating down the river, and I'm going this is not going to work.

1:34:08And we're floating and we're floating in a half hour passes and I'm going it's dawn I want to go back to sleep. I'm such and I'm just not a morning person and all of a sudden a fish hits that line Almost pulls this man off of his feet and he swings the thing in the fish comes on the boat And then I realized he's got a big metal mallet on the boat so that you could try to shut that fish off And it's this huge or shaped thick muscular paco and as soon as I saw that fish I just thought, wow, the strongest of this species from millions of years have been swimming in this river. And suddenly we've, through this incredible combination of the boat and the cord and the hook, none of which we made, and the skill that he had from knowing how to fish a pockle.

1:34:55Because otherwise, no chance that you're getting that fish. They hide, they're very, very suspicious of what you're doing. we had gotten this fish onto the boat and boom, you hammer it like a caveman, boom, it doesn't die, boom, you have to crush it skull. And now you have this fish and you're holding this genetic material, this sustenance for your life, that has been developing since the dinosaur times. It's so beautiful. The act, the sacred act of eating that, of the fish, of the competition with the fish. And we spent the morning fishing. We got three Poccos, three huge giant vegetarian piranha.

1:35:33And I just remember touching them with so much reverence thinking about the incredible history and how that before these rivers existed, those Poccos were swimming through the water and and and trying to survive through through history through history through history until this until we we took just a few and we did it respectfully and we did it when we needed it most, not at a time when it was just for fun and it was really, really special. Well, humans using them for sustenance, there's a collaboration there. That's something also that I've seen in a jungle that there's creatures using each other.

1:36:09And it's like a dance of either mutually using each other, or it's parasitic or symbiotic. It's interesting. Like, there's a medicinal plant you grabbed that was full of ants. Yeah, they were like trying to murder you by biting By they were defending the plant that they were using for whatever purpose But there's a clear dance there of the ants using the plant and the plan existing therefore all their applications and all They use for humans and there's that kind of circle of life happening But the answer or defensemen so that the plant didn't have its own defense mechanism the ants the army of ants Was there to protect the plant?

1:36:51mm -hmm and And did you actually, when you remember we put our backpacks down at that one spot and it was like the ants got on your backpack and I said, oh shit, this is that tree. Did you actually get bitten by one of those? Because they're incredibly painful. Yeah. The time run awon. They're like, yeah, surprisingly painful because they're small. And there's nothing like, luckily I've not been bitten by a bullet ant yet. But it's just, it's amazing because they live inside the tree. The tree comes standard with holes in it that allow the ants to move and to exist safe, and it protects their eggs, and they protect the tree.

1:37:26So we saw that spot where there's a perfect circle around the trees because the ants had excavated the other vegetation so that those trees could have no competition to grow. The incredible calculation of how ants know to come programs to garden that tree and the tree somehow has been genetically informed to have ant habitat within itself. It's mind blowing and it actually is the foundation of a lot of existential confusion for me because how the hell is this possible? Yeah well one of the things you mentioned that's also a source of a lot of existential confusion for me is ants and the intelligence of different creatures in the forest, there's these giant colonies, there's just giant systems.

1:38:14But even just looking at a single colony of ants, them collaborating, leaf cutter ants, is an incredible system. So individually the ants seem kind of dumb and simplistic. But taken together, there is a vast intelligence operating that's able to be robust in resilient and you kind of conditions, is able to figure out a new environment, is able to be resilient and you take any kinds of attacks and all that kind of stuff. What do you find beautiful about them? Like as you said, just leaf cutter ants in this jungle, that's forgetting all the other hundreds of species of ants that are in this jungle, but just the leaf cutters apparently digest roughly 17 % of the total biomass of the forest, everything, all these giant trees, all that leaf litter, 17 % of that, almost a fifth of this forest cycles through leaf cutter colonies.

1:39:07So they're constantly regenerating the forest. They're a huge source of the driver of this ecosystem And so to me when you see them working It's again like I said you see your friends as you go through the jungle You see all the k -pop trees a canoea tree You see all those leaf cutters doing what they're supposed to do and it's just so beautiful I find them very beautiful Armie ants they're so tough. They're so ready to fight they have the huge mandibles They're just ready to they're just they're transporting their eggs are moving from here to there anything that's in the way is getting eaten, they're just savage.

1:39:37And they're kind of cute for that. Unless you're tied to a tree. The savagery is cute. I find that yes. It's kind of reassuring, you know. You want certain things to be tough. That's their part. Oh, that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the nature mechanism. Yeah, the powerful play. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, the armions are so savage, you know, like if you, If you step on armions, they will all come a cause and just attack onto your feet and they'll just they'll just Acrofise their own life for the good of the thing and they'll be trying to kill your shoes and There's something funny about that to me.

1:40:15There's something like kind of reassuring again unless Unless imagine if you're going through the jungle and you slip and you fall and you twist your knee Yeah, and you fall in just the right way, but you you can't get up Yeah, you can't you're stuck there and then armions find you They will take you apart. There are records of horses that have been tied up and army ants come and they'll take out the whole horse. Imagine the pain of that. It might be raining on us very hard very soon. You want to pause? Nope. I think we'll stay here until the ship goes down. We should mention that there's this one source of light and we're shrouded in darkness and now the night shift is going to take over soon.

1:40:57And we are in the Amazon rainforest. What is the rainforest represent to you? When you zoom out, look at the entirety of it. Carl Sagan's pale blue dot resonated with a lot of people that everything you've ever heard of, all the heroes, all the villains, all of your ancestors, every achievement, tragedy, triumph, everything has happened on that one spot. This one tiny, tiny, little rock that has life on it. And to me, the rainforests represent the crown jewel of that. As far as we know, into the best of our knowledge, and with our shrewd scientific brains at their fullest capacity, this is still the only place that we know that has life.

1:41:45And given that, the fact that there are still these tropical towering, complex ecosystems that we are barely understand crawling and full of the most incredible life. It's just, to me, it's so wonderful. It's so incredible. The waterfalls and the birds and the macaques and the jaguars. It's barely believable. If you were to theoretically tell a hypothetical alien, I live on this planet and there are just these places where everything is interconnected. Everything means something to something else. The whole thing is this system that keeps us alive and each tree is pumping air into the river and there's an invisible river above the actual river and the whole thing goes into stabilizing our global climate and each little tiny leaf cutter end somehow contributes to this giant biotic orchestra that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible.

1:42:40That is beautiful. I love that. And so the rainforest to me are the greatest celebration of life and probably the greatest challenge for us as a global society because if we can't protect the crown jewel, the best thing, you know, the most beautiful part, then we're really, really missing the point. Yeah, the diversity of organisms here is the biggest celebration of life. That is at the core of what makes Earth a really special thing. That said, you and I have been arguing about aliens for pretty much the day I showed up. All right, you brought a machine to this fight. Luckily the table is long enough to carry me.

1:43:26See, to you, earth is truly special. Yeah. You don't think there's other earths out there, millions of other earths in our galaxy. When you look up, you know, we were sitting in the Amazon River. Okay. At dark, the storm rolled over. Yeah. And you started counting the stars. Yeah. One, two, and that was once you can count the stars, I was assigned at the storm will actually pass eventually will pass and that's what you're doing. Three, four, five, and it's going to pass. You're not gonna have to sit in that river for like all night. So just a couple hours to keep yourself warm. Okay, each of those stars, there's Earth -like planets around them.

1:44:01Okay. Why do you think there's not alien civilizations there? You can write down a calculation on a napkin. You can cite different Hollywood movies. You can point up to the pieces of light in the stars, but if I talk about, show me a single cell that's not from this planet, it's still not possible. And so I agree with you that the likelihood is there, all indications point to it, it would be fascinating, especially if it was done, and especially, you know, imagine finding a planet of alternative life forms, not necessarily even intelligent. Imagine just a planet of butterflies, whatever, you know, something else.

1:44:39That would be amazing, but I'm concerned with the reality that we have in front of us is that this is the spaceship, this is life. Yeah. And so right now, given that reality, maybe that's, maybe that's the case. Maybe, maybe there are other planets or, or maybe we are the first, maybe life originated here, maybe God, the universe, whatever, maybe, maybe this is it. This is the, this is the, This is the testing ground for something bigger and this complexity and this diversity of life and this life that we have is that important. And I think that part of what we do when we go, oh yeah, but there's other planets where first of all, we're taking an assumption into reality without, I mean, aliens are right now or about as real a Santa Claus.

1:45:32We think they're out there, but we're not sure. Maybe a little more real because it could make sense. No one has an alien. No one's seen an alien. No one's even seen cellular life. And so I'm not, again, if they showed up tomorrow, great. Let's study them. But right now, we have this very simple threat going on where we can't stop killing each other and our living environment. And so while some people can specialize in looking to the stars and to other planets and talk about being an interplanetary species, I'm very much concerned with the fact that here in our home turf, our living environment where the air is good and the rivers are clean and the trees are big and there's macaques flying through the sky and salmon in the rivers.

1:46:15Not only do we have a responsibility to each other and to our children to protect this incredible gift that is our entire reality, seems kind of weird too. At some point, conservation seems kind of ridiculous. Like you're begging people to not pollute the things that keep them alive. It's almost kind of silly at a point. But we have this incredible thing where there are fish in the ocean and in the rivers. They come standard with life on earth. And we're harming the ability of earth's ecosystems to provide for that life. And we are the generation that's going to decide if those systems continue to provide life to all the people on earth and all the generations.

1:46:57And by the way, all the other animals that exist for their own reasons. other consciousnesses that we're just beginning to understand elephants, humpback whales, whatever, families of giant river otters. Not everything can be seen from a human perspective. These are other species that have their own stories. And so I'm more biocentric than anthropocentric in that I think that nature is important, but I also believe that we are special. We are the most intelligent So one I agree with you, there's some degree to which when you imagine aliens, you forget if by for a moment how special and important life is here on earth.

1:47:45Yes. But it's also a way to reach out through curiosity and trying to understand what is intelligence, what is consciousness, what is exactly the thing that makes life under the special. Another way of doing that, and I see the jungle in that same way, is basically treating the animals all around us, the life forms all around us as kinds of aliens. That's a humbling way, that's an intellectual humility with which to approach the study of like, what the hell is going on here. This is truly incredible. Like, are the animals we've met over the last few days, conscious? What is the nature of their intelligence?

1:48:32What is the nature of their consciousness? What motivates them? Are they individual creatures? Are they actually part of the large system? And how large is the system? Is Earth one big system? And humans are just little fingertips of that system, or are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything else is in the emerging complexity of the system. So I think thinking about aliens is a necessary, I like my Tom with a little drop of poison from Tom Ways is a necessary perturbation of the system of our thinking to sort of say, hey, we don't know what the fuck's going on around here.

1:49:10Sure. And aliens is a nice way to say, okay, the mystery all around us is immense. Because to me, likely aliens are living among us, not in a trivial sense, little green men, but the force that created life, I think permeates the entirety of the universe, that there is a force that's creative. Now, the force that created life is a big one. And then the other thing is, what do you mean by that there's aliens living among us? You mean extraterrestrials? Yes. Living among us. Yes. Yes. You believe that. Not like 100%, but there's a good percentage. I don't understand how it's possible for there not to be a very large number of alien civilization throughout just our galaxy.

1:50:13But that's different than saying that they're living among us. If you tell me that there's aliens living five galaxies over and that they're just out there somewhere, I'm kind of more on your side than that they're here. because just like Bigfoot, like we have camera traps. We have DNA sequencing through water now. Like we can, you're telling me, no one found one wing nut of a ship in all, like the Egyptians up until right now. No one in Russia saw like a crash ship took a picture, tweeted that shit real quick. And you know, I think there's no Bigfoot, there's no trivial manifestations of aliens.

1:50:49I think if they're here, they're here in ways they're not comprehensible by humans because they're far more advanced than humans. They're far more advanced than any life forms on earth. So even if it's just their probes, we can not just even comprehend it. I think it's possible that they operate in the space of ideas, for example, that ideas could be aliens. Feelings could be aliens. Consciousness itself could be aliens. So, we can't restrict our understanding of what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that operates via natural selection on this particular planet. It could be much, much, much more sophisticated.

1:51:32It could be in a space of computation, for example, as we in the 21st century are developing increasingly sophisticated computational systems with artificial intelligence. It could be operating on some other level that we can't even imagine. It could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand. We barely understand quantum mechanics. We use it. Quantum mechanics is a way we use to make very accurate predictions, but to understand why it's operating that way we don't. And there's so many gigantic, powerful cosmic entities out there that we detect. Sometimes can't detect dark matter, dark energy.

1:52:13But it's out there. We know it exists, but we can't explain why and what the fuck it is. We give it names Black holes and dark energy and dark matter, but those are all names for things that Mathematical equations predict, but we don't understand and so All of that is just to say that Aliens could be here in ways that are for now and maybe for a long time going to be impossible for humans to understand. So aliens in the strict biological sense like like like like horseshoe crabs, we agree that they're not we haven't found physical aliens. The only way I can imagine finding physical aliens is if alien species are trying to communicate with us humans or with other life forms and are trying to figure out a way to communicate with us such that we dumb humans would understand.

1:53:13Like let's create a thing. Yo, there's a moth. The size of a small eagle. The strike is 15 minutes of attention. It just might, it just might. Big fan of the pod, guess. Okay. Lex, I love you. All right, so what wouldn't it be interesting? It would be really fascinating to me if we found out that there were aliens living among us and we couldn't see them. and what some of the people were calling aliens, the scientists, the religious people were calling angels, and then everybody had this realization that whether you call them aliens or angels, there are these other, there is more way more to the universe than we're realizing.

1:53:55I just, for me, the fact that there's... There's a skull on the table. Yeah, there's a skull on the table. It's not a skull on your hand. There's now a skull in my hand of a monkey with a bullet in its head that I found on the floor of an indigenous community where they eat monkeys I didn't kill the monkey so save your comments, but you know in terms of Of the animals I think I think that when I see space it my feeling and I'm not requiring anybody else to have this feeling But because we know because this is the only place that we know that there's life and we have no idea how it started I just think it's so important to protect it.

1:54:40And for me, it's just as much about our children as it is about the little spider monkeys and the little baby came and that are in the river right now because life is so beautiful. And I think that there's a huge amount of intellectual responsibility that we can transfer off of ourselves if we go, yeah, the rivers are filled with trash and yeah, extinction is happening, but we have to be an interplanetary species anyway because at any moment, this could all end from an asteroid and like everything's going to shit anyway. And so it's like, we're fucking up this planet. And it's like, that's, we're just being angry teenagers who are, you know, going goth for a while.

1:55:19And it's like, what if you just rolled up your sleeves and said, holy shit, wait a second. You know, we can pretty much do whatever we want. We can fly all over the world. We can do heart transplants. We can watch Netflix in the Amazon if we want it to. like we could do all this amazing stuff. We can capture on video or adventures and go back and watch them again and again and again. There's so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to do and we're the richest in history. I mean, we could do everything. We could cross the whole planet in a second and it's like, that's an amazing time to be alive.

1:55:50And if we just don't fuck up the ecosystems and kill all the other animals, we got it made. Yeah, so it is true that we can destroy ourselves in nuclear weapons, but it also is true that that snake that I got to handle yesterday is like one of the most beautiful things earth has ever created. And in that little organism it is encapsulated the entire history of earth and it's beautiful. So both things are true. We should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through the weapons we create and we should become multi -planetary species as a backup for that purpose, but also remember that this place is really, really special.

1:56:34And probably, if not difficult, probably impossible to recreate elsewhere. And by the way, there's something incredibly powerful about a skull. Yeah. You've ever hold a human skull. It'll give you... It'll weigh on you first, because you look into this, the hollow eyes of this face, and suddenly you go, you feel your own cheat. you go, you feel your own skull and you go, holy shit. You go, what is going on? It's like taking acid, you just go, oh boy. And I forgot that I'm a ghost inhabiting a meat vehicle on a floating rock. But even, even a monkey. Yeah. It's like looking at a ancestor, you know, not a direct ancestor, but there's a, it's like a, you know, You look in an apodol at a reflection.

1:57:26Little blurry, but still there. It's still there. And the roots of who we are is still there. It's all kind of incredible. Do you ever think of the tree of life, just kind of like where we came from? Yeah. The jungle is ephemeral. It just keeps its system, it just keeps forgetting. Because it's just churning and churning and churning and churning and churning has in some ways no history. But to create the jungle, to create life on earth, there's a deep history of lots of death, sex and death. A festival of sex and death, life on earth. That's what I've seen this goal. Yeah. There's something, there's something kind of terrifying about that image to me.

1:58:14Like when I hold that every night and then at night you hold that skull and it just reminds you that you're temporary. Yeah, both you and I will one day have one of those. Hmm. Mine will be bigger. Oh my god. The male competition continues. The silverback slaps for lesser male once again. Uh, dear, a lighter. Yeah, bro, you want to light this blunt? Yeah. What are your favorite animals to interact with? I mean my favorite absolute favorite animal to interact with is 100 % elephants which there's no elephants here but I've been incredibly privileged to spend some time with elephants both in India and in Africa and

1:59:03I think that they're so smart and so complex that we do a really bad job of understanding what an elephant really is I think that most Most children probably think of elephants as like something kind of cuddly. Most adults probably think of have a similar misconception of them when you see an elephant. When you see a 12 foot tall bull elephant with bone coming out of its face with huge tusks and those giant, it's an octopus -faced butterfly -eared behemoth that's a survival machine and it'll look at you and just go, do I have to kill you to keep? safe and it's just they're so tough and they have they've dirt on their back and they flower petals and the little hair you realize they have hair all over their body and the power to throw a car over to flip it.

1:59:56Just one of the most impressive animals on earth and I think that I've gotten really good at interacting with wild elephants in a way that's respectful to them and I think that when an elephant allows you to be in its space it's because you're you're showing submissiveness and respect for the elephant space. And they're so intelligent that they're communicating with seismic vibrations through the earth that they have hot, you know, a matriarchal society that they can remember the maps of their ancestors and they know how to find water that they can solve problems. They're such beautiful animals and they're so, oh, talk about aliens, they're so alien looking.

2:00:35These big, weird heads and the trunks with all those muscles and they're so different than us, but yet I actually think that we grew up together. You know, they kind of raised us sibling species that we've been, we've inhabited the same epoch in history and we've relied on the ecosystems that they've created and I think that they have a deep understanding of humans' elephants and I think I see them more like aliens, more like non -human beings that we share the earth with. So I don't see it as we're humans and they're animals. I actually see elephants as sort of a separate society along with humans as one of the dominant species on the planet.

2:01:16So almost every species, especially the intelligence, especially the big ones, are their own societies that overlap and sometimes co -develop. Yeah, I think whales, I think elephants, I think that there's those higher, no one's suggesting that sardines are somehow how to need human rights or something. But I think the elephants need representation in governments because they're they occupy, they influence their landscape, they engineer their environment, they have emotions, they have families, they have burial rituals, they're so like us. And yet we treat them like they're just, just oversized cows that we have to be scared of.

2:01:53They're not, they're not the same as, as domesticated livestock. They're one of the treasures of earth. I mean, look, let's just say little green men showed up. And you said they said, well, what's earth? It's like well, there's mountains, there's rivers. It's like well, how how do I do this? You know, there's mountains rivers. There's there's elephants like it's like one of the first things a baby learns is elephant Even if he's never seen one. It's just so iconic on earth Like you said um um Darren Aronowski Darren Aronowski The elephant walking over the camera. I haven't seen it. You said it's incredible Yeah, so at the sphere the postcard from earth I mean, it's a celebration of Earth.

2:02:32Yeah. In all forms, in one of the critical big creatures in that film is an elephant and steps over the audience and the whole like the whole steer reverberates that power. I mean, some of it is size. Yeah. Some of it is like, how did Earth create this? It is a weird looking creature. But we take you for granted because we've accepted that this Earth can't create this kind of thing, but it is weird, beautifully weird. Oh, it's beautifully weird. I mean, I mean, elephants, there's something really impressive and why is about them. There's also beautiful weird that isn't so that doesn't come with so much grandeur.

2:03:15Like to me a giraffe is beautifully weird. Yeah. But they're just, you know, they're 18 -foot tall camel deer things with, you know, giant necks and They're strange and they're absolutely serenely beautiful, but they don't have that deep intelligence that elephants have. There's something that elephants have. You see in their eyes, how does the intelligence manifest itself? Well, this is the thing. A lot of people, when I was reading Friends to Walls book, a lot of what he was saying was that people give elephants human problems to solve in controlled environments and call it, you know, a study on elephant intelligence.

2:03:56Whereas if you're watching wild elephants and you're in the wild, you're going to be watching them in a way that they're looking, you've pulled up in a safari vehicle or you've pulled over to the side of the road and the elephants are wary of you. So they're not acting natural. But as soon as you start watching wild elephants truly in the wild and comfortable with your presence, you see how they start caring for their babies or how they can get annoyed. I once watched elephants around a water hole and there's this warthog, and I don't know why, but this warthog decided he needed to get in. And there was this young male elephant and he kept turning around to this warthog and just being like, don't make me do it.

2:04:33Now this elephant did not need to hurt the warthog. And the warthog was just like, I need to drink, I need to drink, I need to drink much simpler brewing. The elephant was like, you could just tell he was like, watch this. And he just went, and crushed the warthog, like it was a big beetle and crushed his pelvis and the Warthawg dragged itself away on his front legs and probably went off to die. But this young elephant put out his ears and he like paraded around his tail off and he was like, look what I did, destruction. And it's like that's a very relatable type of, he was annoyed with the Warthawg.

2:05:08And so you see them do these things. I mean the most magical thing and I've spoken about this many times was that I was walking with a herd of semi wild elephants that were crossing through a village in India because elephants have lost a lot of their territory because there's so much so much population in India and so we're crossing through a village which is very delicate because the matriarchs are leading the babies and there's villagers who have no idea what an elephant is and they're watching the elephants cross and the matriarchs back this girl up against a wall and she was terrified standing there with her back against the wall and the elephant just put a trunk out and touched the girl's stomach and then the other elephants came and they all started touching her stomach and the the the the ranger there explains to me just went she's pregnant they know she's pregnant they can smell they can tell and they're curious and they all the all the female elephants came to investigate the pregnant girl and she had no idea what was going on and so it's like that stuff that That stuff.

2:06:06Vah! And it's cool to hear that, you know, with the crushing and the pride of the young elephant, that there's a complexity of behavior, just like with humans. I mean, you know, humans are always pretty. That's the thing, man. Humans are capable of good and evil, and sometimes we attach these words.

2:06:28I love that there's just, it's an orchestra of different sounds. And that one is sex, which... That's a bamboo rat calling out for a mate. I mean, all right. Good luck to you, buddy. Good hunting. You know, humans are capable of evil things and beautiful things, and I wonder if animals are the same. You think there's just different personalities and different life trajectories for animals. Like as they develop and their understanding of social interaction, of survival, of maybe even primitive concepts of right and wrong within the social system. Do you think there is a lot of diversity in personalities and behavior?

2:07:18Just like different people. Is there different elephants? Of course. And what I really like is that you said is there a perception of what's right and wrong because elephants have a code of ethics. And so So as the simplest example is that as young males begin to grow, they start developing these tusks. And those tusks are a tool and they use them. So for Indian elephants, the females don't have tusks and the males do. The females kick the males out of the herd. The females keep all the sisters and the ants and the cousins together, but the males are their own thing. And so here's the thing. If you have, so what you get is these crews of male elephants and the older males, well, this play fighting that goes on around, you know, two young males can play fight, but the older males, they'll kick some ass.

2:08:09They'll show them how to behave. They'll explain who gets to talk to the females, who gets to interact, who gets to mate, who gets the best vegetation to eat. And so there's an order established, and so young male elephants have to be taught how to act. Just like a teenage human has to be taught, you know, you can't just haul off and break in other kids' nose. You got to, there's going to be consequence. Maybe you get suspended. Or maybe that kid will get his friends and beat the living shit out of you. Whatever it is, society regulates your behavior and elephants have a very strict, very predictable sort of, like the males teach the males how to run things and the females, which really have the final say, their matriarchal, they're the ones leading the herd where to go.

2:08:55The males follow where the wise females tell them where to go. So that regulation mechanisms from that emerges a kind of moral system under which they operate. It's right and wrong. For an elephant, yeah. For an elephant. Right and wrong for an elephant is not the same as what's right and wrong for grizzly bear. Grizzly bear, if you're a male grizzly bear and you see a female with cubs, you just kill those cubs and then you can mate with that. You can mate with her and put your own cubs in there. It's like that. It's a whole different type of Ethics. Yeah, the value of Child life is different from species to species some of them hold a sacred some of them not at all And that's why I think I resonate so much with elephants because they're I think they're made I think that we're we are kind of matriarchal at least I grew up matriarchal like women were the force in my life my family and most of my friends as families is women kind of have the final say and And I feel like that's the way it is with elephants.

2:09:52You might be bigger and stronger, but it doesn't really account for much if you're not smarter and more emotionally intelligent. And you know how to take care of the group. Just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions as we were talking about aliens. There's a lot of people trying to understand, trying to study the origin of life. Oh, I love this. First of all, what do you think is life? versus non -life. Like when you look at like ants or even like the simplest, simplest of organisms, we saw a frog in a stream yesterday. That was like a leaf frog. There was like, this flat as a sheet of paper.

2:10:32And it does a lot of weird things. And it found a way to exist in this world. But that's a single living organisms with a bunch of components to it. but there's a life form that exists in this world. What is the difference between that and a rock? What is the essence of that life? This might be an unanswerable question. There's probably a chemistry physics biology way of answering that. Like what to you is that? I think to me, life is something that grows and responds to stimuli, like in basic biology 101. I think, and I'm fine with that. I don't need it to be more romantic in that, But I think it's actually comical how do you get from a rock to an orangutan?

2:11:21You know, and our answer for that is primordial soup. Maybe there was just stuff on earth and then the stuff just got up and started walking. Maybe there just there was nothing happening and then there was all of a sudden there was a cell. And the cell had function and then it complexified and then it started reproducing and found male and female parts and what? Like we are so under equipped to understand how the hell we got here, let alone answer, or even bacteria. I see the summi in very simple mathematical models like something called Game of Life, their cellular automata. You could see from simple rules and simple objects when they're interacting together as you grow that system, complex objects arise.

2:12:15Like that emergence of complexity is not understood by science but mathematics at all. And it seems like from primordial soups, you can get a lot of cool shit. And the force of getting from soup to like two humans on microphones, not understood and it seems to be a thing that happens on earth. I tend to think that it's a thing that happens everywhere in the universe and there's some deep force that's pushing this along in some way. I don't want to simplify it, but there is something that creates complexity out of simplicity that we don't quite understand. That's the thing that created the first organism living organism on earth.

2:13:09That like leap from no life to life on earth as a weird one. That's a weird one. Because you can imagine, I think that what the earth is 4 .5 billion years old, and you can imagine just this, this rock of a planet with like rain and storms and elements and iron and granite and like just random stuff. It's pretty easy to imagine that. But then I remember that book, we think we all have the same book when we were kids and then like they show this like fish like animal, crawling out of the primordial soup and it's like, bro, you just missed the most important part. Author of that book, bro. And I think the first bacteria came in around three, 3 .7 billion years ago, so there's like at least like, you know, A bunch of billion years where there's just nothing or just a planet and then we start seeing fossils of the first bacteria And the bacteria stuck around for long time a billion two billion years.

2:14:13It's just very very long Just bacteria just bacteria, but a lot of them A lot of them there's probably a lot of innovation a lot of murder a Lot of interaction. Yeah Yeah, and then I mean there's a few big leaps along the history of life on earth. You know, the predator prey dynamic, that was a really cool innovation. It's almost like innovations, like features on iPhone. It's like it's nice, like predator prey, eukaryotes, so complex multi -cellular organisms, emerging from the water to land. That was weird. That was a, that was an interesting innovation. There's whatever led to humans that there's a lot of interesting stuff there.

2:15:01I can't even get that far. I can't get from rock and sand to cells. Yeah. That's a huge, I mean, everything around us that has cells is just, it's wild, even, and I could imagine being on another planet and how incredibly valuable this thing would be this, this, it's impossible to replicate. I'm looking at it through the candlelight right now and I can see all of the structures in the sleeve, the incredible structures in the sleeve that look exactly like the veins in my arm, which look exactly like the rivers that are flowing across this landscape. And it's like life has this overwhelming pattern that it uses and it's so beautiful.

2:15:44I just, I just think it's, yeah. When you imagine the days of the lightning and the volcanoes and the primordial soup, it's there's a big gap there and it's fascinating to think about and it's fascinating to see how different people's belief systems lead them to different answers there not to give any spoilers but postcard from Earth or Dernarowski's film the idea there is there's probes that are sent out from Earth all these other planets and each probe contains two humans a man and a woman. And those two humans are in love. So think of a couple in love. They're sent there with all the information, basically a leaf that holds the information what it takes to create life on other planets to recreate an earth and other planets.

2:16:41And the two humans hold all the information for the things that make life on earth special, especially in human civilization is love, consciousness, the social connection. So all that information is in the probe. And the postcard from Earth is those humans waking up remembering all the information that is Earth, that like a celebration of all the things that make Earth magical throughout its history, all the diversity of organisms, all of that. You're loading all that in to create life on that new planet, which is something I think and civilizations are doing this, sending probes all throughout the galaxy, and they just haven't arrived yet.

2:17:21But anyway, that's another... That's so beautiful. And one of the things that I think, I wanna see that so much, and one of the things that I love about Aranovsky's work is the fountain. And what I find so beautiful about that is that now here he's saying, okay, we're sending probes out to other worlds, alien civilizations, and in the fountain, it was sort of what I thought he did so beautifully was braid together those three stories where in one, I don't remember if he's in a spaceship or if that's supposed to be like his soul. The other one, he's a scientist and sort of like comparable times to hours and then he's the Spanish explorer.

2:17:56But either way, there's the tree of life. And it sort of braids together all of the major religions. And it made me think of that quote that you hear where it says, you know, God, what was it? Christ wasn't a Christian and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and Muhammad wasn't a Muslim. They were all just teachers who were teaching love. And it's like the The fountain sort of says, nature is that driving force. And it's our job to understand that the game is love. And that's what the main character and the fountain needs to learn is that it's nature that's going to carry your soul through this thing. And that there's so much you don't understand in the epiphany at the end.

2:18:36Got to love that movie. Got to love that. Among many things, you're also an artist is trying to convert the thing that is nature into a thing that we humans can understand, the complexity, the beauty of it. That's what Darren and Nalski tried to do with those couple of films. That's something that I hope you do. Actually, in the medium of film, too, that would be very interesting. And you do that in the medium of books, for only. How much do you think we understand about the history of life on Earth? I think we got it all wrong. No, I don't know. It seems like they change it all the time. You know, they say they say that Easter Island, you know, when I was in college, they were big on telling you that Easter Island they ruined their environment and They had environmental collapse and that's why there was nobody on Easter Island.

2:19:22It was a cautionary tale We could ruin our environment and now it seems like they've changed their mind on that and then When humans entered North America seems to be hugely up to speculation and you know the the Africa spreading that we all spread out of Africa and than the place of scene over kill extinction theory. And it's like, it seems like every few years they update it, and they change it. And they say, oh, the guy is, no, no, no, no, no, the guy is from 10 years ago, actually my new theory is the best theory. Let's write some books and get me on Letterman. And it seems like there's a new prevailing theory that's really always exciting and edgy about how we got here and where we came from and how we dispersed and maybe even has some political implications.

2:20:01Like how we should use the Amazon moving forward. Like, the Amazon was engineered by people. So fuck it. Let's just cut it down. Yeah, it's a tentative belief that we mostly don't understand anything, but there's an optimism and continuously figuring out the puzzle. Sure. And we offline talked about the the Graham Hancock Flynn double debate on on Rogan. I like debates personally. So Flynn, double represents mainstream archaeology. And I actually like the whole science, the whole field of archaeology. you're trying to figure out history with so little information. You're trying to put together this puzzle when you have so little and you're desperately clinging onto little clues.

2:20:44And from those clues, using the simple possible explanation to understand, and now with modern technology, as Flint was trying to express, that you can use large amounts of data that's like imperfect, but just the scale and using that to reconstruct civilizations There are different practices from the little details of what kind of things they eat, how they interact with each other, what kind of art they create to when they exist to what are the timeframes, all that kind of stuff. And that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding, but still the air bars are large in terms of what really happened.

2:21:23And that leaves room for things like Graham Hancock talks about like lost civilizations, which I like also because it gives you have a kind of humility about maybe there's giant things we don't know about or we got completely wrong and that's always good to like remember. It's confusing to me to imagine like what I don't even know what like what ended the why where the Egyptians go like what happened to see what they were doing so good that so much cool shit. But I mean, I was reading anthropological stuff in the Amazon about tribes that, you know, just through their societal structures and through their hunting practices that didn't really develop practices that worked and kind of bands of people that went extinct before they could turn into larger societies.

2:22:15And there's a lot of people that got it wrong. You know, for every explorer that leaves Borneo and arrives in South America, there's probably hundreds more than just diet, see you get eaten by sharks, you know, avalanche. And it's just so fascinating to me that we, all of us really, past our grandparents, don't really even know where we came from. Like, do you know who your great -great -great grandparents are? I mean, there's methods to try to figure that out, but really, again, the air bars are so large, it's almost like we're trying to create a narrative that makes sense for us. You know, that I'm 10 % Neanderthal, therefore I can bench press this much, and therefore my aggressive tendencies have an explanation.

2:23:00In reality, there's so much diversity of personalities that they far overshadow any possible histories we might have. Your aggressive tendencies don't have any explanation. You're not, you need to, you listen to me right now. Sorry, don't be, don't show me out again. Yeah, man, one of the things you and I talk a lot about is different explorers. Yeah. Who do you think is, I'm just throwing ridiculous question one after the other. Who do you think is the greatest explorer all the time? Oh God. I love Shackleton, but I hate the cold. So I can't, I don't really, I can't even read about it. I hate the cold so much.

2:23:39I can't even go there for fun. I think Percy Fawcett in the Amazon was the goat in terms of just sheer. The last of the Victorian era, you know, march forward, go deeper, just stop it nothing and then eventually take such big risks that you never come back. It's hard for me to relate to that kind of exploration because to me I'm such a soft I wouldn't want to leave my family behind. I wouldn't want to, like even if you told me that I could leave Earth and go exploring and I could go touch the moon, I'd be like, nope, absolutely not. Like the highway is dangerous enough. Like I would never risk dying in space.

2:24:21This guy left his home, went out into the jungle out there with horrendous gear compared to the camping gear we have today. No headlamp and just explored for years on end. Well, let me actually push back. You have that explore. There's definitely a thing in you. Just me having observed you behave in the jungle and in the world, you're pulled towards exploration, towards adventure, towards the possibility of discovering something beautiful, including like a small little creature or like a whole new part of the rainforest, a part of the world that like, is that holy shit, this is beautiful. I think that's the same kind of imperative.

2:25:01So maybe not going out to the stars, but yeah. Like I could see you doing exactly the same thing. So he disappeared in 1925 during an expedition to find an ancient law city, which he and other people believed existed in the Amazon rainforest. So there's that poll like I'm going to go into there with shitty equipment with a possibility of finding something. And they said he ran into uncontacted tribes and started goofing off. I think he started dancing and singing, like the tribes were ready to kill him and he started goofing and like doing a song and a dance and just being ridiculous and the tribes are like what now?

2:25:40And they're like wait, wait, wait, don't shoot him yet. That's a funny one. Yeah. And they actually, he kind of like on a human level used, used humor to save his own life on multiple occasions. To the point where he deescalated the situation was like look we're not here to fight. We're here to, we have a pile of maps. You know, all my guys have Barry, Barry, Dengay, Malaria. Like we're dying out here. If you guys just go on your merry way, we'll go on our merry way and like, incredible. He was so tough. And then that guy from Shackleton's expedition ended up on one of Faust's expeditions and you go, yeah, he's a proven explorer.

2:26:14He's been through the Antarctic and the guy was like, fuck the jungle. Absolutely fuck the jungle. He was like, and there's a great quote where he says, without a machete and something, you know, I don't remember exactly the words he used, but he said, without a machete in this environment, you don't last. Yeah, and you know that now like you you in that tangle to just take three steps that way would I would immediately be taking on I mean, I'm not wearing shoes right now. Yeah, bullet ants venomous snakes spikes through my feet tripping over myself I don't have a headlamp unbelievable risk right there We're sitting on the edge of tragedy Can you explain what the purpose of the machete in this situation is like what is a machete hot as a work how does it allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense and dense environment?

2:27:01So this is the tool that I spend most of my life carrying. This is in my hand for 90 % of my time. And in the jungle, you really need a machete. There's so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through. And like a jaguar and oslo, a lot of these other animals that are more horizontally based and low to the ground. They can make it like when we got stuck in those bamboo patches and we were just hacking through them and it's dangerous. And there's as you hit the bamboo at ricochets and have spikes and then one piece falls and it pulls a train, a vine that has spikes on it and that hits you in the neck and it just the jungler's savage to humans.

2:27:41But if you are an aguti, a little rodent, or a jaguar, or a deer, you can kind of slip through this stuff and the deer have developed really small antlers. They can just kind of weave through, load of the ground. And so for us being these vertical beings walking through the jungle, it really helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonally opposing your movement at all time. So machete is just a very, very useful tool. It could help you pull thorns out of your body. As you saw last night, we can use it to find food. You want machete fishing, you cut a fish head off with a machete by like it was swimming and then you basically, you know machete the water and The other fascinating about that fish without its head it kept moving.

2:28:31So it was just using I guess this nervous system to This swim beautifully. I mean I did this so many courses there about how nature works You can, well, let's explain it, because the way the machete hit this fish, it kind of took his eyes off and his lower jaw was still there. So it was really just like the brain and the top jaw that came off. And this fish, as the dust cleared in the stream, this fish was, I found it very haunting in a very interstellar way. Like it was just the programming was still there, but the brain was gone and the fish was just still moving and it was gonna die, but it was still swimming and it looked like a live fish.

2:29:07It was crazy. And you're still trying to catch it, which is insane. I like to catch it. Because every time I caught it, it would freak out and then I'd jump back in the water. And I'm programmed here from years and years of living in the Amazon that everything can hurt you. So you actually become quite, you know, if a moth lands on you, you flick it because it could be a bullet ant. And so even the fish here, a lot of the fish here have spikes coming out of them. And so even though I know that fish, I know its name. I've eaten them many times. As I was holding it when it would twitch with that explosive power just like the came and I would get that fear response and release it.

2:29:39And so that happened three or four times before I finally said, this is stupid. Even though he's slippery, he hasn't got ahead. I can hold onto him, I put him in my pocket. I put him in my pocket. And then we fried him up. And we ate. And he was delicious. So, and I'm grateful for his existence of his role. And for my existence on this planet, this brief existence that I was able to enjoy, that delicious, delicious fish. So the machete is used to cut through this extremely dense jungle. Well, this is binds, by the way, this rope like things that are extremely strong, and they go all kinds of directions, go horizontal and all of this.

2:30:13I don't even, how treat, we have a tree right above us. That makes no sense. There's like a tree that kind of failed, and then a new tree was created on top of it. That makes, it just makes no sense. It feels like sometimes trees come from the sky, sometimes they come from the ground. I don't really quite understand how that works because there's new trees that grow on old trees and the old trees right away and the new trees come up. Yeah, that's what mechanism. Strangler figs. And so, strangler figs, as you go across the world's ecosystems, that whole belt of, you know, whether you're in rainforests in the Amazon, the Congo, Indonesia, all across the tropics, you have strangler figs.

2:30:57and the amazing thing that this species does, it's become a keystone species across the planet with a hyper influence on its ecosystem wherever it is because they produce fruit in the dry season when the rest of the forest is making it hard for animals to find fruit, to find food. And so the bats, the birds, the monkeys, they all go to the stranglific, they eat the fruit. And the fruit, of course, is just tricking the animals. The plants are tricking the animals into carrying their seeds to another tree. And so they're getting free transportation. Monkey takes a poop on another tree after eating strangly figs, and then that strangly fig sends out its vines, gets to the ground, and then as soon as it begins sucking up nutrients, out competes that tree for a light, grows hyper -drive around the trunk of that tree, and then eventually that tree will die, and the strangly fig will win because it got a boost up to the top.

2:31:53Whereas these little trees down here, they're going to have to wait their turn. They have to wait until a tree falls until there's a light gap and then they have enough food to grow quick. And so this whole thing is an energy economy. Everything is just trying to get sunlight. And so strangler figs, yeah, top down trees growing, or parasitic top down octopus trees growing over other giant trees. And you've seen the size of some of the trees here. So, you know, back to Percy Falls in an exploration. What eating goes like for him back then, a hundred years ago. Oh damn. Go into the jungle. Well, see, the thing is, those guys didn't go with the locals.

2:32:28They came down here with like mules and they tried to do it their way. Yeah. And so he's one of the people that wrote about the Green Hell, the jungle as the oppressive war zone, where there's nothing to eat and everything is killing you. And it's, I think that that image is so wrong, wrong because as you saw last night we could go if we went out with JJ right now we would Meshady fish some fish we could start a little fire we do it all inshorts like to to JJ it's green paradise and it's intense but but if you know what you're doing which the local people surely do well then just beneath the sand there's turtle eggs that you can eat and inside the nuts on the ground there's grubs that you can eat and if you really needed to you could just jump on a came in and eat that because the tails are pretty full of meat and it's like there's actually unending amounts of food here.

2:33:27And so it's they were pretty, you know, they were strange. If you're able to tune into that frequency, I feel like you and JJ are able to tune to the frequency of the jungle that is a provider, not a destroyer of human life, right? like I think to be collaborated with not fought against. Yes, but we're coming at that with our modern lens because we're coming down here with I've survived how many infections in the jungle where those probably would have killed me before. So my dead ass opinion of the jungle would have been overwhelming and collective murder as Herzog says. And so Percy Fawzett was coming down here with this view of it's trying to kill us at all times.

2:34:13We are flying down here and coming out here with our superior medicines and our ability to survive infections And and so it's it is different for us. It is different We're we're we're coming at this very very different, but false it To me was like the last of like the real swashbucklers like the really Batchit crazy explorers that just went out into the into the dark spaces on the map And it's very hard for me to identify with him, but with, for instance, Richard Evans Shulties from Harvard, that's someone where you go, okay, now we're getting to the point where I can start to understand. Jimmy, just like the conquistadors, and they tell you the conquistadors showed up, you know, they killed, the Spanish killed 2000 Inca on the first day, and then they marched to this city.

2:35:01And they're like, when I hear about that, can you imagine yourself just like slaughtering a bunch of women and children and soldiers and then just like drinking some wine and doing it again to my guy. I can't actually wrap my head around that. Yeah, it just seems like an entire different world. No. Like different world. Different value system. Different value system. Different value system. Different relation with violence and life and death I think. We value life more. We value. We resist violence more. Yeah. Like I just, I can't. Like if we saw a car accident. I feel like if I saw a car accident, or if you see a little bit of war, some violence, it affects you.

2:35:40These people were so comfortable with those things. It was so normal part of their, the Spartans, the command cheese. They became so comfortable with war. To the point that it became what they did. And they celebrated it too. And they celebrated it. And direct violence too, like taking that machete and murdering me, or if I got to the machete, first me murdering you. Not a chance pitch. All right. And then I would put on Instagram as a show. On a show. And the number of DMs I would get from murdering you with a machete. Meanwhile half the world right now is messaging me saying, my DMs are filled with take care of legs, don't lose legs, make sure legs comes back safe.

2:36:22Lex is a national treasure. We love Lex. Make sure he holds his snake. The amount of love that is out there. Meanwhile I emerge from the jungle of blood, ramen with a machete, and I take over Instagram account. He's very humble. He doesn't want to hear about the love. All right, so what do you think makes a great explorer? Whether it's Percy Fawcett, Richard Evan Shulteys, by the way, say who Richard Evan Shulteys is, he's a biologist, so that's another lens through which to be an explorer. Yes. To study the biology, the immense diversity of biological life all around us. Richard Evan Shulteys, I know about him from reading way, David's book One River, which is this big hefty, you know, five or six hundred page home about the Amazon.

2:37:08And it covers two stories. It's Richard Evans Shulties. And I think it's in the 40s. I think it's like pre -World War II era where he's in the Amazon looking for the blue orchid and the cure for this and that. And he's pressing plants. And he's going to these indigenous communities where they still live completely with the forest. And they drink ayahuasca and they talk to the gods. And he learns about how they believe that the Anaconda came down from the Milky Way and swam across the land and created the rivers. And sort of he came down and even though he was a Western scientist from Harvard, he embraced the indigenous perspective on the world, on creation, on spirituality.

2:37:49And he sort of resigned himself and gave himself fully to that and spent years and years traveling around parts of the Amazon that had hardly been explored and certainly never been explored in the way he was doing it, in the ethnobotanical spiritual way of what medicinal compounds are contained in these plants and how do the local indigenous people use and understand them. For example, you know, if 80 ,000 species of plants in the Amazon rainforest and 400 billion trees in the Amazon rainforest, the statistics of likelihood that through trial and error that humans could discover ayahuasca. It's astronomical that one of these trees and a root, when put together, allow you to go access the spirit realm and see hallucinogenic shapes and talk to the gods.

2:38:43That's almost enough to inspire spiritual thought itself. The fact that trial and error, it would take millions of years or something. I forget what the figure is, it's incredible. Richard Evans Shulties was one of the first people that came down and saw that. And then one river is where Wade Davis comes back. I believe in the 70s and the heartbreak of the book is that all of these incredibly wild places with naked native tribes and these intact belief systems, Wade Davis comes back in a lot of the same places that Shulties went. Now there's missionary schools and they're wearing discarded nightgies and you know, whatever.

2:39:27I don't know if there's nightgies in the 70s, but like Western stuff has made it in. They've been contacted, domesticated, forced into Western society and you know, a lot of them then forget the thousands and thousands of years that have gone into creating the medicinal, botanical knowledge that the indigenous possess about how to cure ear infections and how to treat illnesses from the medicinal compounds flowing through these trees is lost in a single generation with modernization. Yeah, he wrote the plants of the gods, their sacred healing and hallucinogenic powers. That is interesting. You mentioned how to discover that.

2:40:10Like how do you find those incredible plants? Those incredible things that can warp your mind in all kinds of ways. Of course, physically heal, but also like take you on a mental journey. That's interesting. So you don't think trial and error is possible. I was reading about Ayahuasca in their state and say they were saying statistically, if you know, if a bunch, if you put a thousand humans in the Amazon and gave them villages to live in because humans are communalists, species, it would take tens and tens of thousands of years, or perhaps even centuries before even the possibility. It's like that thing, you know, a bunch of chips on a keyboard, they write hamlet.

2:40:50It's like astronomical odds to get to, oh wait, this and this, dosed together. And so what the local people believe is that the gods revealed this secret through the jungle to us as a link to the spirit world and that that's how we know this because if they didn't remember it from their ancestors we would have no idea how to get this information from the wild. So I would likely do Iowaska. What do you think exists in the spirit world that could be found by taking that journey? I think that ayahuasca is, I can only speak from personal experience. And for me, it was as if your brain is a house you've lived in your entire life and it's a big house to mention.

2:41:47And there's many, many rooms that you didn't even know exist hidden rooms behind the bookshelves under the floorboards, rooms that you had no idea were there. and some of them are fantastic and some of them are terrifying basements. And Ayahuasca takes you on a journey through that at its most effective. You sit in front of the shaman with the candlelight, with the sounds of the jungle, and you drink the substance. And after that what happens is the journey is all inside. and the shaman supposed to be able to guide you through that. But in my experience, you're so deep inside, like falling through nebulous, out in space, no physical form or crawling through the jungle.

2:42:37Like it's like, it's really, really powerful. Like it's not like the recreational drugs that everyone does. Like where you go, I did mushrooms and I could see, so I could see music. Like, and I was talking to my friends, but no, no, no, no, like you're face down on the floor, or usually vomiting, sometimes shitting, having dialogues with the creator. And that can be traumatizing as well as amazing. It's a really good way of looking at it. It's a big house and you get to open doors so you've never had before and discover what rooms are there inside you. You ever think about that? That there's parts of yourself you haven't discovered yet, or maybe you've been suppressing.

2:43:18How much are you exploring the shadow? Oh boy. So say you mean Carl Jung and Jordan Peterson are in a deserted island together. Fuck, I didn't even make my bed today. There's no bed in an island. Great.

2:43:35I want to see you and Jordan Peterson do eye oeska together. I think I think that's the thing. eye oeska to me, you know, I've kind of told you about like I've experienced some things because it really made me believe that there's a benevolent force around us. But to me, Iowaska was a ride through the scariest parts of the universe to sort of be like, here's what it could be like. That's where I came up with my idea that deep space or just outer space is just the outside of the video game. And this is it. Because when I was on Iowaska, I was one of the jungle creatures. and I wasn't Paul and I didn't have a name.

2:44:21And for a long time I saw many things and I arrived at this spot in the jungle where there was a big tree and all the animals were there and they were all, not in words, not in any language that we can understand, but they were all discussing what to do about the threat and it was all leaving, it was all flying up and it was fire and the jungle was being destroyed and it was like, and then after that it was just space and stars and silence, like crushing vacuum silence. for years and that was terrifying that fucking terrifying when i came back and i had hands man i can remember my own name you grounded things are simpler your back inside the video game what are the chances you think we're actually living in a video game when you say a video game it implies that there's a player who's the player is god no there's a main player usually that's not gonna be god god is the thing that creates the video game.

2:45:16Oh, so then we're just... And there's somebody's RMPC's, like I'm an NPC. Genuine... Jesus Christ. Yeah, character. Yeah, you created me. Let's see. Is this like Halo where you can kind of kill the NPCs? Because... I see how you put the machete behind you. Okay, I think I'm just gonna take a stand here. I think that because people... I'm just gonna just sick of fucking playing it halfway. I think that because people live indoors, in climate controlled, boxes, in cities, far away from nature, they've completely lost track of everything that's real. And they've started to think that we're living side of assimilation.

2:45:48Notice that nobody carrying an alpaca up a mountain thinks that we're living inside of a video game. They all know that it's real because they've had babies on the floor of a cold hut. They understand the consequences of life. They understand the fish and how hard it is to get them and the basic rules of the wind and the rain and the river and that we all have to play by those and that it's and you talk to a talk to a grieving mother and ask her if she's living inside a video game. And it's like, the people, to me, this whole thing of, are we living in a simulation? To me, that's a, that's the, that's the, that's the infirmary of, of society, starting to, that's starting to, to, to, to, to parody itself.

2:46:28It's people going, I have no meaning in my life anymore. So is this even real? And again, go ask the Sherpa, go ask the Eskimo. They're not, they're not working. You forget what fundamentally matters in life, what is the source of meaning in a human life. If you talk about such subjects, nevertheless you could, for a time, stroll in the big philosophical questions. And if you do it for sure enough of time, you won't forget about the things that matter. that there is human suffering, that there is real human joy, that is real.

2:47:06Our time in the jungle was very hard. Did you suffer enough to know that it's real? Yeah, I... Man, I was hoping we were in a video game that whole time. So that's actually a really good way to... There was this moment that I watched where you were washing a shirt in this pathetic puddle because we had no water and because we had walked all day and tripped all day and gotten thorns in our hands and our feet and our legs and we were lost in the jungle and it was nighttime and we didn't know if a big tree was going to just fall on us and mouse trap kill us and there's a lot of uncertainty but I watched something very special happen to you and that was I saw you crouching by the side of this puddle wasn't even a flowing stream So we couldn't drink it and you were just trying to wash the sweat off of your shirt and you you looked at me and you just said The only thing that I care about right now is water Mm -hmm And I feel like in that moment we were united in the in the simple reality of the fact that We were so thirsty that it hurt and that it was a little scary Yeah It was scary, but also there's like a

2:48:26A joy in the interaction with the water because it cools your body temperature down and there's like a faith in that interaction that eventually will find clean water because water is plentiful on earth. It's kind of like a delusional faith that eventually will find. It was just like a little celebration. I think the cooling aspect of the water, because the body temperature is really high from traversing the really dense jungle, and just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing else really is. Now, it was a little celebration of life, of life on Earth, of Earth, of the jungle, of everything.

2:49:12It was nice, it was a nice moment. I think about that. I had a couple of those, There's one in the puddle and one in the river. One was full of delusion and fear and the other one was full of relief and celebration.

2:49:30Yeah, there's this thing that they say where all the pleasure in life is derived from the transitions. When your cold, warm feels good, when your hot, cold feels good, when your hungry, food feels good. and when you're that thirsty, water becomes God. And it's all you want. And also, and also the other thing is that when we're out there, it felt so good to be so lost and so tired and so like we're doing levels, like how would you describe the physicality of what we were doing, the level of physical exertion? Well, it's something that I haven't trained, I don't even know how you would train for that kind of thing, But it's extremely down the jungle.

2:50:14So every single step is Like completely unpredictable terms of the terrain your foot interacts with so the different variety of slippery That is on the chunk of floors fascinating because some things I mean the slope matters But some roots of trees are slippery some are not Some trees in the ground already rather through so if you step through you're going to potentially fall through so it could be a shallow hole. It could be a very deep hole with some leaves and vegetation covering up a hole where if you fall through you could break a leg and completely lose your footing or fall rolling down hill and if you roll down hill I'm pretty sure there's a 99 % probability that you'll hit a thing with spikes on it.

2:51:03So there's so many layers of avoiding being dangerous of the small dangers and big dangers all around you with every single step. So there's like a mental exhaustion that sets in. Like just the perception and you're just observing you, you're extremely good at perceiving having situational awareness of taking the information in. That's really important and filtering out the stuff that's not important. But even for you, that's exhausting and for me, it was completely exhausting. Just paying attention, paying attention to everything around you. So that exhaustion was surprising because it's like, there's moments when you're like, I don't give a damn anymore.

2:51:41I'm just going to step. I'm just going to like, and so that's it. You go, I don't care anymore and you reach out and you know, I'm just going to lean against this tree and then what happened? Every time. Every time. Yeah. And then you have to care. Yeah. And then there's just bad luck because there is waspness. There's just like a million things and that is physically, mentally, psychologically exhausting because there's the uncertainty. to when is this going to end? It's up in our particular situation, up and down hills, up and down hills, very steeped onward, very steep onward, no water, all this kind of stuff.

2:52:14It's the most difficult thing I've ever done, but it's very difficult to describe what are the parameters that make it difficult. Because I run long distances very regularly. I do extremely difficult physical things regularly that on some surface level could seem much more challenging than what we did. But now this was another beast. This is something else. But it was also raw and real and beautiful because it's like, it's what those explorers did. Yeah. It's what Earth is without humans. And it, and also just like the massive scale of the trees around us was the humbling size difference between human and tree.

2:52:59It's both humbling in that tree is really old. It's a time difference, lifetime difference, and just the scale, it's like holy shit. We live on an earth that can create those things, it makes me feel small in every way. that life is short, that my physical presence on this earth is tiny, how vulnerable I am, all those feelings are there. And in that, the physical endurance of traversing the jungle, yeah, was the the hardest journey that I remember ever taking. Every step. And then that made making it out of the jungle and then made it the swim in the water that we could drink. I was just pure joy.

2:54:01It was probably one of the happiest moments of my life. Just sitting there with you, Paul and with JJ in the water, full darkness, the rain coming down and all just us all just laughing, having made it through that, having eaten a bit of food before and the absurdity of the timing of all of it that somehow worked out.

2:54:35And how were just three little humans sitting in a river? Just our heads emerged barely above water with jungle all around us. What a life. That was a real adventure. That was a real adventure. That was a real one. Yeah. I'll never forget that. So it's a real honor to have shared that. Of course, we had very different experiences. When you saw a Cayman in that situation, you're like, I have to go meet that guy. It's a friendly. Well, I mean, we were in the river in a thunderstorm. Just next above, we're all laughing or asses off. And I mean, we're in the river with the stingrays and the black Cayman and the Farana and all the electric eels and everything.

2:55:23And it's pitch black out. And then what were we doing? when we were holding our headlamps off and there was those swirling moths, the infinity moths, all making those geometric patterns. And it's like, we were just three ridiculous primates, three friends in a river, just laughing. Yeah. Because we were safer in that river than we had been in there and we were rejoicing that the thunderstorm was compared to the war zone that we'd been living in. The thunderstorm was safe and it really was a beautiful moment. And also that like very different life trajectories have taken these three humans in this one place.

2:55:59Yeah It's like what yeah, wow, yeah, this universe that would like Because we're kind of like those moths You know what I mean like we're we're we'd come from some weird place on this earth and we have all kinds of shit happen to us and Or I'll pursue some shit and some light and we ended up here together and join this moment. Yeah, or something else He just felt absurd and in that absurdity was this like real human joy. And damn water tastes good. Yeah, water is good. Man, water and those, those little oranges, yeah, those things. And then I would just say like, do you feel like I feel like running like no matter how much I run, I feel like the, like you run, you do a workout and then you stop.

2:56:43Maybe people who do ultras feel this, but like, I feel like the, we would, what we woke up, it was like, you know, wake up at dawn, on 6am, let's start walking, break camp, go. And it's like pretty much you just don't stop all day. And it's level 10 cardio all day long. And you're sweating buckets and there's no water. It's like you would never put yourself through that voluntarily. You could, you would never have the resolve to continue torturing yourself, except for that we were trying to make it to freedom, to get out. And it's like the obsession of that with the compass and the machete and the navigating fuck.

2:57:23I think there's something to be said about like the fact that we didn't think through much of that and we just dived into it. I think there was like, we were like laughing and enjoying ourselves moments before and once you go in you're like, oh shit. Oh shit. And you just come face to face with it. Yeah. I think that's what, you know, whatever that isn't humans that goes to that, that's what the explorers do. the, you know, and the best of them do it to the extreme levels. Well, I think that what we did was to a pretty extreme level because we left the safety of a river of knowing where we were and voluntarily got lost in the Amazon with very little provisions on a very, now that we're back, now that we experience what we experienced, I really can't stop thinking about how fucking stupid it was that we did that.

2:58:11Yeah, because if we had gotten lost, Pico was saying to me, even if you guys had one of you had broken your leg, it's, you know, days in either direction. Even if they had sent help for us, help would take how long to scour all that jungle. Sound doesn't travel, even a helicopter, even if they looked for us, they wouldn't be able to see us. How would we signal for help? Can't really build a fire. And so it's like if anything had gone wrong, if we'd gone a few degrees different different to the West would have taken us two more days If we'd if we'd gotten injured It'd be it'd be carried through that Yeah, and so it somehow only afterwards am I really going wow thank god we got out of this Thank God after I see so many people going make sure that nothing happens to Lex Friedman Yeah, I'd be the deadest mother fucker on earth That's it.

2:59:05It somehow works out. It does seem to somehow work out. Let me ask you about Jane Goodall, another explorer of different kind. What do you think about her? About her role in understanding this natural world of ours? I think that Jane is like a living historical treasure. Like I think somehow she's alive, but she's already reached that level where it's like Einstein, Jane Goodall. Like there's these incredible minds. And growing up as a child, my parents would read to me because I was so dyslexic I didn't learn to read until I was quite old. And my mom was a big Jane Goodall fan. And all I wanted to hear about was animals.

2:59:48And so I would get read to about this lady named Jane Goodall, this girl who went to Africa and studied chimps and who broke all the rules and named her study subjects. even though that wasn't what she was supposed to do. And she became this incredible advocate for Earth and for ecosystems and for, and she seemed to realize as her career went on that teaching children to appreciate nature was the key. Because they're going, you know, with that thing, she says we don't so much inherit the Earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our children. We're just here, we're just passing through. And so if we destroy it, we're dimming the lights on the lives of future generations.

3:00:32And so she's been really, really cognizant of that. And she's been a light in the darkness. She's sort of in terms of saying that animals have personalities and culture and their own inalienable rights and reasons for existing and that human life is valuable. She's very big on that every day. We influence the people around us and the events of the earth. even if you feel like your life is small and insignificant that that that you do have an impact. And I think that's a really powerful little candle out there in the darkness that Jane carries. What are you thinking about her field work with the chimps?

3:01:10Bad ass. The fact that she did what she did at the age that she did at the time that she did is incredible. It's actually incredible. She has that explorgin and she also has that relentless relentless is like this incredible quality. She just, you know, she travels 300 days a year, educating people, talking around the world, trying to help bolster conservation now before it's too late. And traveling 300 days a year is not fun. Traveling at all can be not fun. So I started reading the River of Dau, but could be recommended to me, until you were supposed to. Yeah. So that guy has bad ass on many levels, But I didn't realize how much of a naturalist he was, how much of a scholar of the natural world he was.

3:01:56So that book details his journey into the Amazon jungle. What do you find inspiring about Teddy Roosevelt and that whole journey of just saying fuck it? Of going to the Amazon jungle, of taking on that expedition? Well, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, you could write volumes on what's inspiring about him. I think that he was a weak, asthmatic little rich kid that wasn't physically able that had no self -confidence. And he had pretty severe depression. He had tragedy in his life. He was very, at least for me, he's been one of the first historical figures where he wrote about the struggle to overcome those things.

3:02:43and to make himself from being a weak, as mad as a teenager, to sort of strengthening himself, and building muscle and becoming this barrel -chested lion of a guy who could be the president, who could be an explorer, and one of the rough riders. And just everything he does is so hyper -ballically, you know, incredible, to come out of war and have the other people you fought with go, So this guy has no fear. I mean, he must have just been a psychopath and had no fear. And then proving it further was that thing where he was gonna give a speech to a bunch of people and he got shot in the chest. Yeah, and went through his spectacle case and through his speech.

3:03:26And even though the bullet was lodged in his chest, this man said, don't hurt the guy that shot me. I believe he asked him why to do it. And then as he's bleeding and in the rain, said, no, no, no, I'm not going to the hospital. I'm going to keep going with the speech. What a badass. That's incredible. But going to the John Gole, on many levels, is really, is really difficult for him at that time. There's so many things that, so many more things, even than now, that can kill you, all the different infections, everything. And the lack of knowledge, just the sheer lack of knowledge. So that truly is an expedition, a really, really challenging expedition.

3:04:08So there's lessons about what it takes to be a great explorer from that, the perseverance, how important you think perseverance and exploration, especially through the jungle. I think it's all there is. If you hear about the people and I think that that is a tremendous metaphor for life because whether you hear about that plane that crashed in the Andes and the people were alone and freezing and they had to eat each other and some of them made it out. Some of them kept the fire burning and Teddy Roosevelt voluntarily after being president through himself into the Amazon rainforest and survived, came so close to dying but survived.

3:04:49And so perseverance is all of it. I mean, that's I think that's our quality as a human. So they also mapped, so on the biology side, it's interesting. But they mapped and documented a lot of the unknown geography and biodiversity. What does it take to do that? So when I see them move about the jungle, you're always like, you capture and create your take a picture right down like so you can find new creatures, find new things about the jungle, document them sort of a scientific perspective on the jungle. But back then there was even less known, much less known about the jungle. So what, what do you think it takes to document to map that world and you on explored wilderness?

3:05:29I mean, they're clearly pressing botanical specimens. They're probably shooting birds and Roosevelt knew how to preserve those specimens. I mean, he really was a naturalist. So he knew exactly. So if you've seen these animals, to them, whereas we'll take a picture and identify it, they were harvesting specimens, taking them with them, drying them out. For them, it was totally different and it could be the first, you know, there's, I don't know, I forget what JJ said, there's something like 70 species of ant birds here. And it's like, so how likely are you to be the first person to ever see this one species of bird?

3:06:06And so for them, you have this bird. and so perfectly preserving that specimen. And I think a lot of non -scientific people don't realize that every species from blue whale to elephant to blue jade, asparo, whatever, whatever it is, whatever species we have on record, they're a scientific specimens. And the first people to see them, shot them. Mm -hmm. And that's the museums are filled with these catalogs, preserved birds that these explorers brought back from New Guinea and South America and Africa and then put into these drawers and now we labeled them and we saw this is, you know, this is red and green because this is scarlet macaque.

3:06:47This is brown -crested ant bird and this is just, they're just categorized. That book of birds you have, like encyclopedia birds. Yo, what? The human achievement in these pages. So people listening, Paul, just flipping through a huge number of pages. These are just, Is this in the Amazon or is this in Peru? This is just here. This birds of Peru. Ha ha ha. Dude, pages on pages of two cans and arasaries and hummingbirds and antbirds and smokey brown woodpecker and tropical screech owl, which we just heard by the way. It's endless. Who knew there were so many birds? I had no idea there was so many birds.

3:07:29Documenting all of that, I mean, there's also, which we got to experience and you're pretty good at it also is actually making, understanding and making the sounds of the different birds. What's your favorite birds on to make? Ungulated tinomu, because in the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk, they're usually the ones that make up what is considered by many to be the anthem of the Amazon. Can you do a little bird for us?

3:08:02That's what an ungulated tinomu sounds like. And it's usually like, oh, it is getting to be afternoon. It's kind of, it's almost like hearing church bells on a Sunday. It's like you just, there's something about it. You go, ah, there he is. And like you were saying, it's a reminder, oh, that's a friend of mine. Yeah. Surrounded by friends. I have so many friends here. Where does it take to survive out here? What is the basic principles of survival in a jungle? Cleanliness. I mean, really, we talked about this, but like, you know, keeping, I have so many holes in my skin right now. Look, I have a mosquito.

3:08:39There we go. I have so many spots that I've scratched off of my skin because a mosquito bites me and then I scratch it or the other big one is that I worry that I have a tick. Not deliberately, not with my thinking brain, but my semi -in -brain just wants to find and remove ticks. And so I scratch, and then if my fingernails get too long, I remove my skin, and then those beget, those get infected in the jungle. So, staying hyper clean, using soap, like basic stuff, keeping order to your bags, order to your gear, things in dry bags. make sure, you know, we did, we, we explained that we got in the river during a thunderstorm.

3:09:24We didn't explain why we did that because the thunderstorm came when we had eaten dinner, but we hadn't set up our tents. And so we decided to cover our bags with our boats that we had been carrying, our pack refs that we had been carrying in our backpacks. So all of our gear would stay dry. So the only thing we could do was either sit in the rain and be cold or sit in the river and be warm. And so keeping our gear dry, momentary discomfort for future, you know, that to me was an incredibly smart calculation to make. It's you really just, you got to be smart out here. You can't, you know, not running out of a headlamp while you're out on the trail and being stuck in that darkness.

3:10:04Yeah. It really takes just being a little bit on your toes. And I find that that necessity of being on your toes is a place that I like to live in. It's just the right amount of challenge here. So keeping the gear organized and all that, but also being willing to improvise. I've seen you improvise very well because there's so much unknowns, so many chaos and dynamic aspects that like planning is not going to prevent you from having to face that in the end of the day. No, it's been really funny watching you sort of shed your planning brain. Like day one, it was very much like, so are we gonna, and then I could tell, I could see your brow sort of furrow when you, I would go, I don't know what time we're gonna get there, and you'd go, well, just tell me.

3:10:51And I'd be like, I don't know what the jungle's gonna let us do, you know. Let's record the podcast tomorrow. Okay, but if it, you know, if it rains, if it gets windy, if a friage comes, if there's a Jaguar with rabies like anything could happen. Landslide like anything. Literally, I mean, the thing you mentioned, trees falling, that's a thing in the jungle. That's a major thing in the jungle. Holy shit, first of all, a lot of trees fall. Yeah. And they fall quickly and they could just kill you. They fall quickly. They're huge. We're talking about trees that are like, the size of school buses stacked and connected to other trees with vines.

3:11:31so that when they fall, this millennium tree, this thousand -year -old tree, boom, it shakes the ground, pulls down other trees with it. So if you're anywhere near that, for a few acres, you're getting smashed. That's the end of you. And so the jungle at any moment that you're out there could just decide to delete you. And then the leaf cutter ants in the Armenians and the flies and everything, you'll be digested in three days. You'll be gone. Gone. No bones, nothing. What do you think would eat most of you? I would hope that that like a king vulture with a colorful face would just Just get in there like right in the ass just like nature's metal Just like when they like walk in through the elephants ass.

3:12:09I'd want that on camera trap I think that would be a great way to go and we slowly look up and just kind of smile Yeah, just rip out your intestine and just shake it Victoria's over your dead body well, but also honor a friend That's another job. Yeah, sure, but you know, you just, you look so, you know, you're white naked ass laying there in the jungle. You'd be like face down, shoot. That's why you always have to look good. Any moment of training falling, you know, to voltage, just swoops in and eats your heart. That's right. We talked about alone this show a bit. You know, rock house. Yeah, who is, what, what are you talking about that guy?

3:12:44Rock house, Roland Wilker from season seven. He built a rock house. He killed the muscox with bone arrow. and then finished it with a knife. And it had the GoPro to mount it, you know? So it's documented, that's a really mind blowing. I mean, so for people who don't know that show, is you're supposed to survive as long as possible. On season seven of the show, they literally said you can only win it if you survive 100 days. And that's, there's a lot of aspects of that show. So this is difficult one of which is it's in the cold. The others they get just a handful of supplies, no food, nothing, none of that.

3:13:26So they have to figure all of that out. And this is probably one of the greatest performers on the show, Roland Wilker. He built a rock house shelter. So what I mean, what is survival and tale? It's building a shelter, fire, catching food, sustained warm, getting enough energy to sort of keep doing the work, it takes a lot of work. Like building the rock house, I read that it took 500 calories an hour from him. So he had to feed himself, right? Quite a lot. You're lifting 200 pound boulders and still the guy lost, I read 44 pounds, which is 20 % of his body weight. So that's survival. What lessons, what inspiration do you draw from him?

3:14:16I think he was fun to watch because he had this indomitable spirit. He was just, he wasn't there to commune with nature. He was there to win. And he was like, to me, that's the pioneer mentality. He was just, he was, I'm a hunting guide. I'm out here. I'm going to win that money. I'm going to survive through the winter. He wasn't worried. I feel like so many people are like, they worry second guessing themselves. Am I in a video game? I don't know. So what's my, you know, just questioning their entire existential identity. And this guy was like, you know what? There's a musk ox over there. I'm gonna shoot it.

3:14:50I'm gonna stab it. Now I'm gonna make a pouch out of its ball sack and I'm gonna live off that for the next few months and a win a half million dollars. And that's an amazing amount of pragmatic optimism that I just enjoyed. Every time he would go, we got to get back to Rockhouse and it became, even though he's all alone, he had a big smile on his face. And what made that season so great was that it was him and then it was Callie and and Roland had You know the muscle and could make rock house and then Callie was was the opposite She was this girl who yes, she could hunt with her bow and she knew how to fish and And she wasn't using raw power But what was so endearing about her was that how much she loved being out there as hard as it was and as isolation isolationist as it was was she was smiling every time, every time the show cut to her.

3:15:42She was like, hey everybody, it's morning. Can you believe the frost? Like you've been out there for a hundred days. Amazing, Opti. I think it was really an amazing show of that the game is all here, the game of life, the game of alone and the game of life, because it's the same thing. Yeah, she maintained that sort of silliness, the goofiness off the door, when the condition got really tough. And she had a very different perspective as, you know, Roland didn't want any of the spirituality. It's very pragmatic. And from Cali, it's very spiritual connection to the land. She said something like, she wanted not only to take from the land, but to give back.

3:16:23I mean, there's this kind of poetic spiritual connection to the land. It's such a dire contrast from Roland. But she's still about it. I mean, to survive no matter what, no matter the kind of personality you have, you have to be a badass. I think she took up a porcupine quill from a shoulder. That was crazy because I think it went in somewhere completely different and it migrated to her shoulder. And the way they understood that is because they have, I said that's impossible. Yeah. Because I remember that. She's like pulling up her shirt and she's like, there's something and then she like pushes it out.

3:16:58Yeah. And I remember like, I was like, hold up, hold up, hold up. How? Yeah. And it was because the barbs, once it goes in, as you move and flex your body, it moves a little bit each time and it gets migrating. I didn't even think of that shit. Plus, if I remember correctly, I think she caught two porky pies. The second one was like rotting or something or if it infected, it had an infected body, whatever. It had spots on it. Yeah. She chose not to eat it. No, and then she chose not to eat it at first and then she decided to eat it eventually. Yeah. I forgot that. Yeah, and she, that was an insane, sort of really thoughtful, focused, collective decision, waiting a day and then saying, fuck it, I need this fat.

3:17:43And that was the other thing, it was like fat is important. Oh yeah. It's like meat is not enough. You learn about like what are the different food sources there. Apparently there's like, rabbits, starvation is a thing because we have too much lean meat And it doesn't nourish the body fat, it's the thing that nourishes the body, especially in cold conditions. So that's the thing. Yeah, she was incredible and I thought, as as as as as brush and sort of fun as Roland was, she represented a much more beautiful take on it. And it was really heartbreaking when she lost, because I mean, and like you said, still a badass.

3:18:27Yeah, it's kind of like forest griffin versus Stefan Stefan Fona like it was like it doesn't matter who won Yeah, you guys beat the shit out of each other like and she didn't really lose right so she got she got evacked because her toe was Going frostbite frostbite a hundred days. You think you can do a hundred days

3:18:49Honestly, I've done a I've 18 years in the Amazon man, I just at this point it's I Could I wouldn't sign up for another hundred days, you know at this point? I don't I don't have that to prove I've survived in the wild and I Wouldn't want to voluntarily take a hundred days away from everyone I know Yeah, the loneliness aspect is tough. We're not meant for that I really love the people I have in my life and I wouldn't I wouldn't want and you see on the show. A lot of the people, big, tough, ex -Navy seals who are survival experts who know what they're doing, they get out there and they go, you know what?

3:19:29I miss my family. And they go, it's not worth it. They have this existential realization. They go, we're only got, I only got so many years here. Like, let's, let's, this is crazy. It's just some money. Fuck it. And they go home. You know, it's funny because you sometimes feel yourself in the jungle when you're alone. And there's another guy, Jordan Jonas, Hobo Jorro. He's the season six winner. And he said that the camera made him feel less lonely. I've heard of him from multiple channels. One of the things is he spent all of his twenties in living in Siberia with the tribes out there. her, her dog, happy people.

3:20:16And so he actually talked about that it's one of the loniest time of his life because when he went up there, he didn't speak Russian and he needed to learn language. And even though you have people around you, when you don't speak that language, it feels really, really lonely. And he felt less lonely on the show because he had the camera and he felt like he could talk to the camera. There is an element when you have in these harsh conditions, if you record something, you feel like you're talking to another human through it, even if it's just a recording. I sometimes feel that, like, maybe because I imagine a specific person that will watch it, and I feel like I'm talking to that person.

3:20:58I noticed that when things got especially hard, and they did get especially hard when out in the wilderness that you would begin filming to share that struggle. But I also think that I've used that at times where yeah, you go, well maybe if I, because if you can tell someone else about it, then you're on the hero's journey. And then it sort of has to make you braver. And it changes how you, because I'm cold and I'm tired and I'm hungry and this hurts and that hurts and I don't know when we're going to make it and how is this going to go and almost you know well guys we're we're here we're going that way and and uh and then you're like well I gotta keep going because you like they're still out there if you forget you have to step off that's one of the reasons I want a family I think when you have kids yeah you have to be like you have to be the best version yourself like for them all my friends with kids that I've seen them go through where until you have a family, you're just playing around, man.

3:22:03I mean, you could do important work. You can have skin in other games, but it's once you have a little tribe of humans that depends on you. If you take that seriously, if you want to do that right, it's one of the hardest things you could do. And it just changes everything. How is your life changed since we last met? that speak about changing everything. Do you've been for people that don't know pushing jungle keepers forward into uncharted territories, saving more and more and more and more rainforests? There's a lot, I could ask you about that. There's a lot of stories to be told there. It's a fight.

3:22:46It's a battle. It's a battle to protect this, this beautiful area of rainforest of nature. But since we last met, you've made, you've continued to make a lot of progress. So what's the story of jungle keepers leading up to the moment we met and after and everything you're doing right now? 18 years ago when I first came to the jungle, I was a kid from New York who always dreamed since I was six years old, maybe even younger, of going to a place where animals were everywhere and there's big trees and skyscrapers of life. And so being dyslexic and not fitting in in school and reading about Jane Goodall and having Lord of the Rings be one of the things I grew up on, I just chose to come to the Amazon and the first person I met was this local indigenous conservationist named Juan Julio Durán who was trying to protect this remote river, the less Piedras River, which in history, apparently faucet referenced either the last PA dross, but he called it Ta -wa -manu and said, don't go there.

3:23:56You'll surely die from tribes. And so there's very few references to this river in history. It stayed very wild because it's been a place that the law hasn't made it, that the government hasn't really extended to, like, you know, we sort of passed the police limit. And so JJ was out here ages ago trying to protect this river before it was too late. And when When I met him, I was just a barely out of high school kid with a dream of just seeing the rainforest, let alone seeing a giant anaconda or having any sort of meaningful experience or contribution to the narrative, and somehow, over all the years, that we began working together and sparked a friendship and began exploring and going on expeditions and bringing people to the rainforest and asking them for help and manifesting the hell out of this insane dream that we had.

3:24:48I mean, we didn't even have a boat. We would take logs down the river. We would have to cut a tree down every time we wanted to return to civilization. We'd have to cut down a balsa tree and float down the river. It was it's madness like it's madness. It's pure madness and I don't know what made us keep going but along the way people showed up who cared and who wanted to help. And if it was a movie it wouldn't even necessarily be a good movie because you'd go, oh please, you're just telling me that you just kept doing the thing and just magically people showed up. But yeah, that's what happened.

3:25:21That's exactly the way it went. We kept doing the thing that we loved. We said, it doesn't matter if we don't have funding or a boat or gasoline or friends or anything, we just kept going. And along the way, we found someone who could help us start a Ranger program. And then we found Daxisilva who helped us fund the beginning of jungle keepers. And then people like Mosin and Staphon who were there making sure that this thing actually took flight off the ground. And then right around the time that we were wondering what was going to happen. And if we're all going to have to quit and get real jobs.

3:25:56And if we could actually save the rainforest from the destruction that was coming, Lex Friedman sends me a DM. them and honestly changed the entire narrative. Because up until then we had been playing in the minor leagues, pretending, trying real real hard and the listeners of your show. In the moments after you published your episode with our conversation, began showing up in droves and supporting jungle keepers, putting in 5, 10, 100, a thousand. We started getting these donations and the incredible team that I work with, we all went into HyperDrive, everybody, everybody started going nuts. We all started spending 16 -hour days working to try and deal with the title wave that Lex sent towards us.

3:26:47Just because so many people knew that we were doing this, that was an indigenous led fight to protect this incredibly ancient virgin rainforest before it was cut and people resonated with that. So we got this this this huge swell of support. And this year we've protected thousands and thousands of more acres of rainforests because of that swell of support. So current 50 ,000 acres, what's the goal, what's the approach to saving this rainforest? Since we printed this, it's gone up to 66 ,000 acres. It's... And as you know, in each of those little acres are millions and millions of animal heartbeats and societies of animals.

3:27:29And the goal here is that we're between Mono National Park, Alta Puders National Park, the Tambopada Reserve. We're in a region that's known as the biodiversity capital of Peru. One of the most biodiverse parts of the Western Amazon. And we're fighting along the edge of the Trans Amazon Highway. And so it's just a small group of local people and some international experts who have come together and use these incredibly out -of -side -of -the -box strategies to sort of crowdfund conservation. To go look, we know that this incredible life is here. We have the scientific evidence, we have the national park system.

3:28:10If we can protect this before they cut it down, we could do something of global significance. All these jaguars, all these monkeys, all these undescribed medicines, the uncontacted tribes that we share this forest with, could all be protected, and people have stepped up and begun to make that happen, and it's people from all over the world, and it's incredible. But what's the approach? So, trying to with donations to buy out more and more of the land and then protect it. So, the approach is that currently the government favors extractors. So, if you're a gold miner or a log, an illegal logger, or you just want to cut down and burn a bunch of rainforests and set up a cacao farm, the government's fine with that.

3:28:55It doesn't matter. You're not really breaking the law if you destroy nature. So as long as you're producing something from the land, they don't see it as a loss that the nature was destroyed permanently. Yeah, it's just wilderness, it's sort of just beyond the scope of. It's not, it doesn't, or the local people that technically own the land out here, the local indigenous people. For instance, we fought this year to help the community of Puerto Nuevo, who's been fighting for 20 years to have government -recognized land. These are indigenous people in the Amazon, fighting to protect their own land.

3:29:27And you know what it was that was holding them back? They didn't understand how the system of legal documents worked to certify that title land. They didn't really have the funding to go from their very, very remote community into the offices. And so, jungle keepers helped them with that. And so really all we're doing is helping local people protect the forest that is their world That's it if people donate How will that help If people donate to jungle keepers what what you're doing is you're helping Someone like JJ who's an indigenous naturalist who has the vision who has seen forest be destroyed He's trying to protect it before it's too late.

3:30:10You're saving Mahogany trees, ironwood trees, k -pop trees, skyscrapers of life. Just monkeys, birds, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, this entire avatar on earth, world of rainforests that produces a fifth of the oxygen we breathe in the water we drink. This incredible thing, as far as I know, it's the most direct way to protect that. So the fact that we have large funders who give us $100 ,000 to protect this huge swath of land and that goes through things like this and through Instagram, it goes directly to the local conservationists who work with the loggers to protect that land before it's cut.

3:30:52But one of the most impactful things that has happened this year in the wake of our last conversation was that I got an email from a mother and she said, you know, I'm a single mom and I work a few jobs and I can't afford to give you a ton of money, but me of my kids look at your Instagram often after dinner and they really want to protect the heartbeats. They really want to protect the animals and the rainforest. So we give $5 a month to jungle keepers. And it was to me that was so impactful because I used to be that little kid worried about the animals. And I saw how a few million raindrops can create a flood.

3:31:28Yeah, I ask that people donate to jungle keepers. You guys are legit. That money is going to go a long way. JungleKeepers .org. If you somehow were able to raise very large, so the rain drops would make a waterfall. a very large amount of money. I don't know what that number is, maybe $10 million, $20 million, $30 million. What are the different milestones along the way that could really help help you on the journey of saving the rainforest? If we did, let's just say some company organization, or if enough people donated it, Let's just say we got that 30 million. That money would go directly into stopping locking roads into creating a corridor, a biological corridor that connects the uncontacted indigenous reserves with other tribal lands, with Mono National Park, with the Tambopata, which establishes essentially the largest protected area in the Amazon rainforest.

3:32:37And what makes this groundbreaking is that we're not doing this in the traditional way, we're doing this, take it to the people. And that's what's been so exciting is that you know when he started this when JJ started this 30 years ago He had no idea his father wanted him to be a logger He didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old. He grew up bathing in the river He had no idea that a bunch of crazy foreigner scientists were gonna show up and Some guy and a James Bond suit was gonna come down here with microphones and And that all of a sudden the world would know that he was on this quest to protect this this incredible ecosystem and all those little aliens.

3:33:15Well, that's all the important things to remember that the people that are cutting down the forest, the loggers are also human beings, their families, they're basically trying to survive and they're desperate and they're doing the thing that will bring them money. So they're just human beings that the core of it if they have other options, if they have other options, they will probably choose to to give their life to save in the community, to first and foremost, providing for their family. And after that, save in the community, helping the community flourish. And I think probably a lot of them love the rainforest.

3:33:55They grew up in the rainforest. Yeah. Let me look at Pico. Pico used to be a logger, full -time logger, long -time logger. Now he loves conservation. I'm a very conservationalist. It's like, yeah. You know? It's all about just providing people options. There's some dark stuff on the gold mine stuff you've talked about. You showed me parts of the rainforest where the gold mines are, and they're just kind of erasing the rainforest. Yeah. So at the edges, this one, the mining happens. And it's this ugly process of there just destroying the jungle just for the surface layer of the sand or whatever that they process to collect just little bits of gold.

3:34:44And there's also very dark things that happen along the way as the communities around the gold mines are created. So the entirety of the moral system that emerges from that has things like prostitution, one -third of the of the women that are drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution are miners under you know under 17 years old 13 to 17 year old. There's just a lot of really really dark stuff. I think that we have a rare chance to do something against that darkness. I think that this is an example of local people who have taken action, done good work, been good to the people that have visited, harnessed a certain amount of international momentum, and now we're on the cusp of doing something historic.

3:35:43And so for the children in the communities along this river, it won't be being a prostitute in a gold mine, it'll be becoming a trained ranger. Like last month, our ranger coordinator and one of our, one of our female rangers went to Africa for a ranger conference. And it's like we're beginning to, this is someone from a little tiny village with that tuts up river. She went to Africa to talk about being a professional conservation ranger. And it's like, that's changing lives. And her daughters then, she's married to Ignacio, the guy. like, their kids are gonna grow up, seeing their parents walking around with the emblem on and go, oh, I wanna.

3:36:28And then people like Pico and Pedro and all these guys that work here are gonna go, well, we have to protect this forest. And then they start getting fascinated about the snakes. And then they start caring about the turtle eggs. And then all of a sudden, they have a way of life and nobody needs to go be, nobody needs to go steal anybody's kids to be a prostitute in a gold mine. That's horrible. And so it's really a it's a win -win for the for the animals for the river for the rainforest for people were improved its biosensric Conservation it's it's just making everything better Yeah, I've read in an article It said an estimated 1200 girls between ages of 12 and 17 are forcibly drafted into child prostitution Around the communities in the gold mines at least one third of the prostitutes in the camp are under age The girls had ended up in the camp after receiving a tip that there were restaurants looking for waitresses and willing to pay top dollar.

3:37:24They jumped on and bust together and came down to the rainforest. What they found was not what they were expecting. The mining camp restaurants served food for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time, it was the girls themselves who were on the menu. Literally at the end of the road, and without the money to return home, the girls would soon become trapped in prostitution. It's interesting to me that the most devastating destruction of nature, the complete erasure of the rainforest, burned to the ground, sucked through a hose, spit out into a disgusting mercury puddle, like the complete annihilation of life on Earth goes hand in hand with the complete annihilation of a young life.

3:38:13It's like it's all based around the same thing. It's the light versus the dark. That's the destruction in the chaos versus a move towards order and hope. And it is incredibly dark and this region is heavy with it. Well, I'm glad you're fighting for the light. Is there like a milestone in your future that you're working towards like financial internal donations? There is. And in the next year and a half, as you saw in your time here, there's there's roads working around the general Heapers concessions. All the work that the local people are doing to protect this land is trying to be dismantled by international corporations that are subcontracting logging companies here.

3:39:05And really what we need is $30 million in the next two years to protect the whole thing. You've seen the ancient Mahogany trees. You've seen the families of monkeys. You've seen the Cayman and the River. All of this is standing in the pathway of destruction. That road, they're going to come down that road and men with chainsaws are going to dismantle a forest that has been growing since the beginning. This is so magical. Do you see the snake over there? Yeah. Do you? Okay. I'm just gonna, don't move. I don't want you to move. I'm gonna just, this is one of the most beautiful snakes in the Amazon rainforest.

3:39:41This is the blunt headed tree snake. Oh my god. Favorite snakes. I've been hoping that you would get to see this snake. I have been praying. Oh boy. Okay. Okay, let's just go right back into this. Look at this little beauty creation. Let's keep you away from the fire. Look at this little blunt headed tree snake. Wow. Such an incredible. So tell me about this snake. Harmless little snake. if you put your hand out, it'll probably just crawl onto your hand. Just be real careful with the fire. So look, I'm just gonna put them like this. We're gonna... Yeah, let's just snake safety. So he's a tree snake.

3:40:31Yup, nice and slow, nice and slow, nice and slow. So you nice and slow, just really so just be the tree. Be the tree that he climbs on. And this is like, again, this is a snake that's so thin and so small. There you go. There you go. Nice and slow. Just be the tree. Let him crawl around. So he's going to try and do all this stuff.

3:40:56Let me see if I can just calm him down for a sec. Let me just see. He's very active little snake. So see like the snake the other night. Okay, just come. Look at this. I can see the light through his body. To me, this is an alien. This is this strange little life form. His eyes are two thirds of his head. I'm not joking. You look at their skull. He's so tiny. He's so tiny. People listening, there's a snake in Paul's hands right now. It's very, it's long, of course, but very skinny, very, very light. And also for everyone listening, the odds of that But as we're sitting here doing this podcast that a snake would just be crawling by in the jungle might sound like something that would happen, but the density of snakes in the Amazon rainforest makes this a very unique experience.

3:41:55Can you tell me a little bit about the coloration scheme? Yes, a little bit brown. Yeah, just to describe this as we were talking here, it's just a sort of banded white and brown snake with this tiny little head about the size of my pinky nail. Um, two thirds of this snake's head is made up of its gigantic eyes. It's got a small mouth and it's, it's about about a third as thick as a pencil. It's basically a moving shoe string. It's incredibly, incredibly thin. The only thing I am thinking like so is if we have Dan come and just do some shots of. Yeah, that's true. Dan! So what are we looking at?

3:42:46The snake that was crawling behind us in the jungle that we were talking about jungle keepers and what we could do. And the snake just showed up at that moment. And this is a very active little snake who's out for a hunt tonight and wants to find something to eat. So this is a blunt headed tree snake, totally harmless little, literally a moving shoe string, super beautiful little animal. When you talk about aliens to me, this is, this is an alien. Like, what are you thinking? What are you doing right now? What do you think about the fact that we were handled, being handled by these giant humans?

3:43:26And as you were saying, it reaches up to the leaves. Yeah, this thing just naturally knows to go look you just put him anywhere near leaves and he's like I got this he just wants to go right up into that tree I just want you to try holding him and uh real gentle just be the tree yeah and just just kind of do the same thing you learned last night just nice and gentle yep and see he's holding on to my finger right now he's just going up there you go perfect nice and easy he's a little erratic he's a little goofy

3:44:02Maybe his camera shy. Maybe a fan of the podcast.

3:44:13And gigantic eyes, relative to his body size. Oh, Jays. Hello, Moth. Traffic. Traffic in the jungle. And then for everyone listening, as we're handling the snake that we found And that was crawling by us, like literally by our shoulders as we're talking a bat flies through no joke eight inches from Lex's ear, like just zips past his head as he's holding a snake while we're sitting here in the jungle. It's just we're just in it now. Now he's going to try and back up. And how do you? Yeah, why don't you want to encourage him to come back this he's he's weaved this way. He's just trying to back up.

3:44:56Yeah, I did release. Oh, release. OK, we're going to, this is what I'm going to do. We're going to say thank you, Mr. Snake. Thank you, Mr. Snake. Thank you, Mr. Snake. Back up into the tree. Here we go. There you go. There you go. There you go. And then resume normal podcasting now, because we really are in the jungle. We really are in the jungle. That's one of my favorite snakes. That's one of my favorite little aliens on this planet. Mm -hmm. Look at that. And it's going on some long journey. It's gonna - On the edge of the canopy. Carry the rest of the night. So that little snake is one of the millions of life forms hard -beats that you're trying to protect.

3:45:49Exactly. exactly. To me, after almost 20 years down here, the people here have become my friends, the Cayman on the river, the monkeys. When I fall asleep at night, I think about all the different heartbeats, all the different little creatures here that when they bulldoze as far as when they chop down these trees that they vanish, that we take away their world. And in that very evolutionary historical sense of remembering the primordial soup, it's like this, this little creature is surviving out here somehow and we have the chance to save it. And even if you don't care about the little creature on the pale blue dot, each of these little creatures contributes to this massive orchestral hole that creates climactic stability on this planet.

3:46:42and the Amazon is one of the most important parts of that and each of these little guys is playing a role in there. So one of the other fascinating life forms is other humans but living a very different kind of life. So, uncontacted tribes. What do you find most fascinating about them? What I find most fascinating about the uncontacted tribes is that while me and you are sitting here with microphones in a light, somewhere out there in that darkness, in that direction. Not so far away is the crowflies. There are people sitting around a fire in the dark, probably with little more than a few leaves over their heads who don't even have the use of stone tools, who only have metal objects that they've stolen from nearby by communities.

3:47:37They're living such primitive, isolated, nomadic lives in the modern world, and they're still living naked out in the jungle. It's truly incredible, it's truly remarkable. And I think that it's because they can't advocate for themselves, they can't protect themselves. It's sort of like, well, we can let them get shot up by loggers and get their land get bulldozed while they hide. They have no idea that their world is being destroyed. But they're sort of the scariest and most fascinating thing out there right now in the general. What do you think they're, because you're spoken about them being dangerous, what do you think they're relationship with the violences?

3:48:18Why is violence part of their approach to the external world? So from the best I understand it, that at the turn of the century, industrial revolution, We had sudden immense need for rubber, for hoses and gaskets and wires and tires and the war machine and the only way to get rubber was to come down to the Amazon rainforest and get the local people who knew the jungle to go out into the jungle and cut rubber trees and collect the latex. And Henry Ford tried doing Ford Landia, tried having rubber plantations but leaf blight killed it. And so you had this period of horrendous extraction in the Amazon where the rubber barons were coming down and just reaping and pillaging the tribes and making them go out to tap these trees.

3:49:10And the un -contacted tribe said, no, they had their six foot long, long bows, seven foot long arrows with giant bamboo tips and they moved further back into the forest. They said, we will not be conquered. And since that time, they've been out there, and it's confusing because in a way, they're still running scared a century later. And their grandparents would have told them, you know, the outside world, everyone you see in the outside world is trying to kill you. So kill them first. So can you blame them for being violent? No. Is this river still wild? Because loggers were scared to go here for a long time, for almost a century late.

3:49:50That's why this forest is still here. Yes. And so is it a human rights issue that we protect the last people on earth that have no government, no no affiliation, no language that we can explain. We don't know what their medicinal plant knowledge is. We don't know their creation myths. We know nothing about them. And they're just out there right now with Poe's and Arrows living in the dark, surviving in the jungle naked without even spoons. Forget about the wheel, forget about iPhones, they got nothing and they're making it work. We don't know their creation myths. So they have a very primitive existence.

3:50:30Well, do you think their values...

3:50:35or so do you think they're nature similar to ours? And how do their values differ from ours? This is complicated because the anthropologist in me wants to say that they have a historical reason for the violent life that they have. They experienced incredible generational trauma some time ago and that, and because they've been living isolated in the jungle that has permeated to become their culture, they've become a culture of violence. but yet the the the contacted modern Indigenous communities that we work with that are my friends that work here just the other day we were speaking to one of them who was pulling spikes out of your hand while he was explaining that he tried to help them the brothers Los Armannos he tried to help them he tried to give them a gift and what did they do they shot them in the head yeah he said there are brothers and he tried to give them a bananas.

3:51:42Plantains. Plantains. Boat full of plantains. And they shot at him. They shot three arrows at him. And one of them actually hit him in the skull and put him in the hospital and he got helicopter evacuated from his community. And so he's brave for surviving, but he's a lucky survivor. They are incredibly accurate with those bamboo -tipped arrows and those arrows are seven feet long. So when you get hit by one, they come out of velocity that can rip through you. And the range on a shotgun is way shorter than the range on a longbow. You're talking about a couple hundred meters on a longbow. And they're deadly accurate.

3:52:25They can take spider monkeys out of a tree. And so there's stories of loggers. And I've seen the photos of the bodies of loggers who attract, who attacked one of the tribes. And the tribes hadn't done anything, but these loggers came around a bend. They started shooting shotguns at the tribe, and the tribe scattered into the forest, and as the loggers boat went around a bend, they just started flying arrows. Took out the boat driver, boat skidded to the side, and then everybody was standing in the river, and you can't run, and the tribe just descended on them, and just porcupined them full of arrows.

3:52:57Shotgun versus bow. There's a shotgun shell here, by the way, Yeah, from the from the vloggers. Yeah, we picked that up yesterday. Was that yesterday? Yes, I don't know. I don't know. One of the things that happens here is time loses meaning in some kind of deep way that It does when you're in a big city in the United States for example and their schedules and meetings and all this kind of stuff It transforms the meaning your experience of time your interaction with time the role of time, all of this. I've forgotten time and I've forgotten the existence of the outside world. And how does that feel?

3:53:47It feels more honest. It also puts in perspective like all the busyness, all the It kind of ticks the ant out of the ant colony and says, hey, you're just an ant. This is just an ant colony. And there's a big world out there. Yeah, it's a chance to be grateful to celebrate this Earth of ours and the things that make it worth living on, including the simple things that make the individual life worth living, which is water and then food. And the rest is just details. Of course, the friendships and social interaction, that's a really big one actually. That one I'm taking for granted because I didn't get a chance yet to really spend time alone.

3:54:36I'm when I came here, I've gotten a chance to hang out with you. And there's a kind of camaraderie, there's a friendship there that if that's broken, that's a tough one too. And he spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle. Yeah, we get a loan on here. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the first 15 years we were doing this, we... There would be times that JJ would be busy in town with his family, and I would, for sheer love of the rainforest, I would have to come alone out here. And we didn't have running water, I didn't have running water, I didn't have light cell ahead, it was a couple of candles and the darkness and a tent, and I was 20 -something years old, living in the Amazon by myself.

3:55:21You're boat sunk. And yeah, it's incredibly lonely. I had to learn through experience because I thought there was a period, I think when you're, you know, you're young, as a young man, I had this thing like I wanted to prove that I could be like the explorers. I wanted to prove that I could handle the elements that I could go out alone, that I could have these these deep connective moments with the with the jungle and it's like I did that and that's great. And you know what the kid from into the wild learned right before he died in that bus That if you don't have somebody to share it with Doesn't matter

3:56:02But I some kind of like even just Deep human level like even if you have somebody to share it with You ever just get a alone out here just like this sense of like existential dread of like what you know the jungle has a way of Not caring about any individual organism. It's just kind of churns It's like it makes you realize that life is finite quite intensely Hmm.

3:56:43Yeah, for me, it's comforting being out here, because I find the rat race, the national narrative, the need to make money that's a worry about war, to be outraged about the newest thing that that politician said and what that actor did. And it just, there's always just this, just unending sort of media storm and everyone's worried and everyone's trying to optimize their sunlight exposure and find the solution and buy the right new thing. To me coming out here, first of all, I mean something out here because I can help someone. I can help people. I can help these animals. And so I find my meaning out here.

3:57:27But also, you know, there's the losing the madness over the mountains. Its nature has always been for many people, where things make sense. And to me, I think I'm a simple analog type of person that it makes sense that when it rains, you get in the river to stay warm and you wait for the dawn and you see a little tree snake. and you say it just makes more sense. And I think that the overwhelming, teaming complexity that is inside the ant mound of society can be dizzying for some people. And I think that maybe it's the dyslexia, maybe it's just that I love nature. But now, when I land in JFK, I feel like a frightened animal on the island.

3:58:17Like it's as if you released like a Some animal that had never seen it until like into time square and you can just imagine this dog with its ears back running away from Taxi's and just just cowering from the noise and it's just hustle and bustle and people are brutal and how much you want it for Oh, they're getting the car. Yes screaming over the intercom and just everything everything sensory changes and Let's get home. Okay, let's go. You got a meeting. You got to get to the next place. You got to give a talk. You got to say out out here when we finish up here. What are we going to do? We're going to eat some food.

3:58:53Maybe go catch a crocodile, go walk around the jungle and I like it's slower. It makes sense. And there's that again, there's that deep meaning of that here where we can be the guardians for good. We can be we can hold that candle up and and know for sure that we're protecting the trees from being destroyed and it's that simple thing of just this is good There you go. It's simple in society I feel like everyone's always losing their minds and forgetting the most basic of fundamental truths and out here You can't really argue with them You know when we needed water It was like shit if we don't get water we're fucked And that's to me, that's where the camaraderie comes from because no matter what, we'll be, we could go to the most fancy ass restaurant, the biggest, most famous people in the world, it doesn't matter.

3:59:44We still remember what was like standing around on the jungle going, fuck, we're scared, we don't have water. We got reduced to the simplest form of humans, and that's something, and we survived, and that's cool. And you take all those people in their nice dresses and their fancy restaurants and you put in those conditions, they're all going to want the same thing as water. Yes. So the same thing. All the beautiful people. How is your view of your mortality evolved over your interaction with the jungle? How often do you think about your death?

4:00:20Well, I don't need more because I've come to believe that there is a benevolent God, Spirit, Creator, taking care of us, and I don't think about my own death. We have a little bit of time here, and we clearly know nothing about what we're doing here. And it seems like we just have to do the best we can. And so it doesn't scare me. I've come close to dying a lot of times. and I just don't think, you don't wanna have a bad death, first of all, you don't wanna be a statistic, you don't wanna find out, you don't wanna like try out, be the first to try out a new product and oops, it crushed you. You know, that's a terrible way to go.

4:01:09Or the people that used to, you know, the gold rush they were using Mercury and they were all getting, or lead, it was lead poisoning. And it's like, oh, a few million people died that way. And it's like, you wanna, you wanna a good death, You know you want to stare down the eyes of a tiger or hanging off the edge of a cliff saving somebody's like Something something something worthy warrior's death But if riding a 16 foot black camein just boots on screaming. Yeah That'd be fun. That'd be a good one a Lot of people say that you carry the spirit of Steve Irwin And in your heart in the way you carry yourself in this world I mean, that guy was full of joy.

4:01:53If I have a percentage of Steve Irwin, I would be honored. But I think there's only one Steve. I think that he occupied his own strata of just shining light. Everything was positive, enthusiasm, love, and happiness, and save the animals, and do better, and let's make it fun. and that was so infectious that it sort of transcended his TV show, it transcended his conservation work, it transcended business and entrepreneurship, it just through sheer magnetism and enthusiasm. He just, I mean, everyone knew who Steve was. Everyone loved Steve. We still all love Steve. And so it's just amazing what one spirit can do.

4:02:40So if anybody, you know, makes that comparison, I get really uncomfortable because to me, Steve Irwin is like, just the goat. And so I'm okay with that. Well, I at least agree with that comparison. Having spent time with you, there's just an eternal flame of joy and adventure too. Just pulling you. A dark question, but do you think you might meet the same end, giving your life in some way to something you love? That is a dark question, but I think most likely I'll get whacked by loggers. I think that loggers are gold miners. They'll take me out. I don't picture myself going from animals, but that would be heartbreaking too.

4:03:30Yeah, it would, but yeah, at the same time, though, like the Kurt Cobain value of that, if I died doing what I love to protect the I'd be so worth so much more a lot like we'd get the 30 million if I died tomorrow for sure So we've already talked about this my friends I'm like if I get whacked yeah do the foundation make the documentary protect the river protect the heartbeats Call it the heartbeats jungle keeper the heartbeats You know be ready for it because these these things do happen people get pissed if you get in their way and as many Happy people is and who whose lives were changing there's also going to be some jealous shitty upset people who are mad that they can't make prostitutes out of young girls and keep destroying the planet.

4:04:07And so they might just erase you. Me. Well, I hope you like a clean eastwood character. Just impossible to kill. I'll tell you squinted your eyes.

4:04:27on cue. Who do you think will play you in a movie? God, somebody with the right nose. Yeah. Somebody who can live up to this shnazol. Yeah. All right. Italian. Yeah. It's funny. Do you think of yourself as Italian or human American? That's the thing. I don't, you know, My life has been the United Nations of whatever. Like I just, to me, I just, I don't, that's the other thing, you go back to society and everyone's obsessed with race. To me, I'm like, look, leopards have black babies and yellow babies. One mother, like they're all leopards. And I'm so colorblind and raceblind and everything else I've lived in India, my friends of Peruvian, my family, we got Italian, Filipino, just everything.

4:05:17And so I'm so immersed in it that when I find it very jarring and disconcerting how much time we spend talking about different religions and just the differences in humans. I'm like, dude, we're talking about whether or not our ecosystems are going to be able to provide for us. We're talking about nuclear, what we're talking about, this is pretty serious shit on the table and we're over here arguing over like shades of gray of it's it's so trivial and that should drives me crazy and and as does the outrage where it's like no you you you have to care I've been I've been criticized for not caring enough about that and I'm like I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you who cares what the hell I am who gives a shit with the hell I'm a human we're all human yeah it's not that easy but it's kind of fun sometimes and and we're at a better time and Like when you think about like the Middle Ages, like even if you were a king, you still didn't have that good.

4:06:13You didn't have pineapples in the winter. You didn't even know what the fuck a pineapple was. We have pineapples whenever we want them. We can fly on planes to other countries. Well, let's clarify. We, you mean a large fraction of the world, you know, I mentioned to you one of the biggest things I've noticed when I immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States is the How plentiful bananas and pineapples were the fruit section the produce section of the Didn't have to wait in line had to go shoot a store could just eat as many bananas and pineapples and cherries and watermelon as you want That's not everybody has that.

4:06:55Oh, yeah, that's true. Not everybody has that put but but everybody could be that king now But put put a growing number of people today can feast on pineapple can feast on pineapple and have toasters and New distracting apps all the way until the grave. That's the thing that I also noticed is I don't Think so much about politics while I'm here or we haven't even talked about it Don't talk about the stupid Differences between humans now Except to just kind of laugh at the absurdity of it on occasion. I'm pretty too busy trying to survive glaciers and jungles and avalanches and all kinds of shit.

4:07:36Do you think nature is brutal as Warner Herzog showed it or is it beautiful? I think the brutality of nature is the chaos and I think that we are the only ones and that are capable of organizing in the direction of order and light. So yes, there are going to be hyenas tearing each other apart. Yes, there's going to be war -torn nations and poor starving children, but we as humans have the power to work towards something more organized than that. So there is a force of the nature that's was searching for order for good. It's kind of a unifying theory if you think about it. All of the chaos of history and the wars and the chaos of nature, we through technology and organization.

4:08:34There's so many people, more people today than ever before I think, who are so concerned, who realize that the incredible power, like what Jane Goodall says about how you can affect the people around you, how you can do good in the world, how you can change the narrative of conservation from one of loss and darkness to one of innovation and light. We can do incredible things. We are the masters as humans. And I think that we're on the cusp of understanding the true potential of that. I just think that more than ever, people have harnessed this ability to do good in the world and be proud of it and just change the darkness into something else.

4:09:19When you have lived here and taken in the ways of the Amazon Juggle, how are your views of God? How are your views of God change? Who is God? I've come to believe that again, back to that, that Christ wasn't a Christian, Muhammad it wasn't a Muslim and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist, that like the game, the game is love and compassion. And the universe is chaotic and dangerous and nature is chaotic and dangerous. But we, if this is some sort of a biological video game, the our reality that the test is, can we be good? And we go through it every day. Can you be good to your parent? Can you be good to your partner?

4:10:08Can you be good to your coworkers? It's so difficult. And we see how people can cheat and steal and hurt and destroy and and the incredible impact that it has on the world, the returning, exponential impact that one act of kindness, one act of good can do. And so So I see nature as God. I see the religions as different cultural manifestations of the same truth, the same creative force. Maybe me and you have the same beliefs and your aliens are my angels. Well, thank you for being one of the humans trying to do good in this world. And thank you for bringing me along for some adventure. And I believe more adventure awaits.

4:11:12Thank you for being enough of a psychopath to actually just sign on to come into the Amazon rainforest in a suit. And a year ago when you told me that you were going to do this, I truly didn't believe you. So for being a man of your word and for the incredible work you do to connect humans and to create dialogue and to do good in the world. And for all the adventures that we've had, thank you so much. Thank you, brother. Lex, thanks, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosalie. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Joseph Campbell.

4:11:51The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.