#1052 - Paul Rosolie - Uncontacted Tribes, Jungle Warfare & Being Eaten Alive

28:32I like it. I think that there should be a continuing world. And when I look at the fact that, you know, the Amazon formed in the Eocene 33 to 55 million years ago. And so this cycle of speciation and these trees growing has been happening for millions and millions of years. and for us to break that cycle to the point that it no longer works, you're destroying part of the system on Earth that makes life possible. A fifth of our planet's oxygen comes from the Amazon. A fifth of the fresh water on our planet is contained in that system. And that system produces the moisture that rains back down on the Amazon.

29:10So if you cut too much of it, you destroy the Amazon rainforest. And for that reason, we've lost 20 % of the Amazon. we're the first generation in history that has a planetary crisis on our hands that we can stop so so we're the ones all of history has taken place we're the first ones where we're looking at 20 of the amazon is cut if we go past that threshold there's a tipping point that we don't come back from they've cut too much of the amazon it dries out there's no it's no longer the amazon rainforest so then the tropical sun bakes it human degradation destroys it and then you're looking at post-apocalyptic nightmare.

29:47So it becomes a feedback loop? A snowball feedback loop. Can you just dig into that a little bit more? Sure. So every day the Amazon rainforest trees produce, lift up out of the ground and into the air, 20 trillion liters of water. There's a larger invisible mist river above the Amazon rainforest than is on the ground in the Amazon River. Held in the trees? Floating through the sky. The trees each morning, and so I've seen this from the branches of the tallest trees. And when the sun comes up in the east, you could just see it for a few minutes. It illuminates the mist river that's flowing over the Amazon.

30:26And so there's this invisible particulate mist river that's larger than the largest river on earth flowing through the sky. There's more water in the air than there is on the ground. In the river. Holy shit. In the Amazon. That's the largest river on earth. And at the same time, it's also being fertilized with compounds from the Sahara Desert. So the Amazon and Africa are exchanging nutrients. And so when people say that the earth is connected, you don't realize the degree to which it is. and one of the things the locals down there that we've done is you know you have this this thing we do it's kind of like a a physical form of prayer it's a bit of a a natural sacrament you you cup your hands and you drink from a clear stream you hold your arm in the sunlight and you watch the vapor be lifted off your skin it'll the sun will lift the sweat right off your skin.

31:26And you can see it joining the vapors coming off the leaves. You watch it become thunderclouds in the afternoons and then it rains down and then you drink it again. You're part of the cycle. It's flowing through you. The river and the sky are flowing through you. And so that 20 trillion liters of water that's coming off the Amazon rainforest, which is bigger than the continental United States, it's tremendous. So globally, it's this huge force. And so in the last century, because of chainsaws, deforestation, expanding countries, agriculture, we've lost 20 % of the Amazon rainforest, this system that is the heart of our planet.

32:03And so the scientists are warning now that if we lose more, we could cross a threshold where that missed river, that 20 trillion tons of water, liters of water gets broken. So if that's not coming up off the ground, because there's not enough trees to produce it, then the rain stops. And if the rain stops, the forest dries. And if the forest dries, then it burns. And then we lose the Amazon rainforest. And that's a reality. It's a realistic possibility right now. Is the reason that there is a tipping point here because there's a critical mass that's needed in order for rain clouds to form? I'm trying to work out if you cut 50 % of it, why wouldn't you just have 50 % of the water that would go up and you would need, you would have 50 % of the trees that would need watering.

32:53So surely it would be self-limiting, but it seems like there's a tipping point here. No, what we've seen in practice, in reality, is that there is this tipping point. Even with the 20%, we're starting to see the droughts get worse. And another huge misconception people have is, they say wildfires in the Amazon are out of control. There are no wildfires. There's no fires in the Amazon. Super hard to start a fire in the Amazon. You actually can't start a fire in the Amazon. You could napalm that forest. I mean, there's been times where we're trying to start a fire when we're camping. You start a fire, you try and start an authentic fire.

33:27No chance. All the sticks are wet. You try and find some tinder, you hack into a stick. Even the center of the stick is wet. So then you get the gasoline, you pour it all over your fire. You light that, the gasoline burns, and the sticks are wet. So then you just eat, you have like a ramen noodle pack. You dip it in the river until it's a little moist and cold, and then you just eat it. You just sprinkle the stuff on top. It's great. or you just eat the fish. A lot of times we have fish that we can't cook. So you just eat the fish out of the river, like it's a Snickers. But I mean, that Amazon tipping point, the extinction of species, I truly believe that this is the defining issue of our time.

34:07I think that we were born in the most important time in history. Civilizations rise and fall. Nature has always been a constant that we have existed within. And for the first time in the story of our species as a global society, we have to contend with the fact that we have to decide what the future of Earth is going to look like. Because if we destroy the Amazon past the point that it can be repaired, then we're cursing all future generations with those actions. Who owns the Amazon? Who owns most of the Amazon? 60 % of the Amazon is contained within the territory of Brazil. the next largest country is peru which is where i work and that has the headwaters of the amazon the headwaters is the most important part because you have the edge of the andes mountains and then you have the lowland tropical amazon and the andes cloud forests are considered a mega biodiverse biome that ecosystem is considered mega biodiverse tons of plants and animals The lowland Amazon is also mega biodiverse.

35:09And so at the confluence of those two, where I work, it's also higher up. If you think of the Amazon rainforest, the main river is a tree. And then all the millions of tributaries are the branches. Where I work is on the tip, tip, tip, tip, tip, tip, top of the branches. High tributary. And that's why it's the wildest place on earth because people haven't been able to access it. There's been no access to this place for until now. And so it's still this forest that's been growing since the dawn of time, untouched. And so you think some of these trees were saplings when they were painting the roof of the Sistine Chapel.

35:47Some of these trees were already giants when World War I was happening. When World War II was happening, they were towering 130 foot, you know, you're talking about 160 foot trees. me and you could walk around on the branches of these trees. Some of the branches that come off the trees that I climb are as big as this room. With bromeliads growing with the size of a Volkswagen bug, there's species in the canopy of the rainforest that have never been seen. Because many of the species, 50 % of the life in a rainforest occurs in the canopy. We, think about that, 50 % of the life in the most biodiverse place on Earth occurs in the canopy, which is 160 feet off the ground.

36:35So it's one of the least explored things on the planet. Even if a scientist can climb one tree, you got to know the ropes. You got to get up there. You got to survive the bees and the wasps and the height and the gravity and everything else that's going to happen. And I guess you couldn't even send drones because they're just going to clink, clink, clink, clink, and then fall down. Yeah, and animals hate drones. just looks like a predator it's like a giant wasp they they birds are terrified of them elephants hate drones oh my god spooks them really scares well they're scared of bees elephants don't like bees right like david and goliath relationship well they have it's proper tom and jerry thing they have sensed this is we're now we're moving out of the amazon for a second but But yes, in my experience, they have sensitive skin.

37:22They don't like, even though they can move through thorns, and they actually, in one sense, they have very thick skin, they don't like bee stings. And there's something about the buzzing of bees. They actually are using bees in parts of Kenya on the borderlands of farms. Like marshals. They put bee boxes on the edges of farms to keep the, because the elephants are like, look, we're just not going to go to that. They're the border collies of the elephant world. Yes. The sheepdogs of the elephant world. Elephants just hate them. That's funny. it's making me think about a wonderful analogy that you made about um the ocean and it's almost like the rainforest is the inverted ocean we talk about well how little of the ocean floor has ever been yeah yeah where you're talking about the canopy isn't that cool dude so sick okay so canopy 50 50 of the life of the of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy and so a lot of the species that are born up there never touch the ground.

38:16What is the bulk of those species made up of? What are the sorts of animals that are in the canopy? I mean, you have spider monkeys, howler monkeys, sake monkeys, capuchins, macaws, harpy eagles. I mean, there's hundreds of species of different birds. I think there's 50-something species of ant birds. There's all the toucans and arasaris and unbelievable amounts of birds, butterflies, dragonflies, millions and millions, just unbelievable amounts of wildlife, undiscovered medicines, orchids, vermeliads, cactuses, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals. It's just teeming. And so you think of, again, back to this sapling that started a thousand years ago.

38:57I think what the world looked like a thousand years ago. And that sapling today is this millennium tree with these giant branches as thick as this room and how many if you time lapse that over a thousand years how many species how many millions of species have lived on and in about one tree one tree and there's 400 billion trees in the amazon how many grains of sand are there on earth you know it's like this this place defies and then and then when you when you see all this magic and you you know the the sky and the river are flowing through you and everything's interconnected and there's this energy exchange and you suddenly understand the sunlight hits the leaves, goes into the trees, the animals eat the leaves and then they hunt each other and everything makes sense and keeps rolling and it all produces oxygen and makes our lives possible because of them.

39:46We're here without them. We couldn't be here. And then you see the bulldozers and the chainsaws and the black smoke, and they're literally erasing all of the beautiful color, all of that avatar riotous grandeur. The cacophony is silenced.

40:04in order to get rid of 20 % of 400 billion trees, that's a big operation. Yeah, but we've taken a century to do it. Right. But still. But it's accelerating now. I mean, you know, that's a high-velocity operation to be able to get that to happen. It must be a really, really big industry. Well, I mean, you have to think, you know, Brazil's formation, the deforestation that's occurred in Peru, the various sources of it. There's illegal gold mining where they have to cut the forest, burn the forest, and then suck the land up through hoses to get the sediment because the gold is not in nuggets. It's in the sand.

40:45So they have to completely destroy the earth. Like... Get tiny shards of precious metal. Tiny, miniscule, almost microscopic pieces of... And you can see this scar from space across the Amazon. You can see the Amazon. It looks like it caught mange. You see human roads moving across the southern Amazon. And so, I mean, just to summarize it for the people that don't know, I've been working with the locals for 20 years to find an answer to this. Because either we say we're going to have ecological collapse, we just give up on it. Because life on Earth used to come standard with fish in the oceans, air, oxygen in the air, and water that you could drink.

41:29And now we're ruining those systems. And so we're the last generation that's going to have a chance to save the Amazon rainforest. And what we've done over the last 20 years is we found a way to do that. How? We started asking our enemies, the loggers and the gold miners, if they'd like to join our team. The people that were cutting down the rainforest ours, we would go have a beer with them. The people that we thought were our mortal enemies that were causing all of the death and destruction and flames and silence. JJ would just go, let's go see how they are. We'd go and sit down and have a beer with them and go, how are you doing?

42:08I go, good. How are you doing? They go, well, we moved down here from another part of the Amazon. There's no trees there. So we came here because you guys still have really old trees. I go, cool. How much you make a day? I go,$15 a day. I go, you like that work? And I go, no, the trees falling is dangerous. We get bitten by bullet ants and stung by things and it's hard and there's no food and$15 a day really isn't worth it once you subtract the gasoline it takes to get all the way five days away from town. Okay. We go, you guys want to be jungle keepers? We'll pay you three times that. You get a really cool t-shirt, you get medical benefits, a steady paycheck and a community and we'll take care of the boat.

42:45And instead of your chainsaw, you have to carry binoculars. It's a lot lighter than a chainsaw. And now you protect the forest instead of destroy it. And they go, where do I sign? And that's it. And so we've been doing that. We've been converting loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers, giving the local people opportunities that they didn't have. Because what we discovered is that the reason they're destroying the rainforest is because they don't have anything else they can do. A quick aside, do you remember learning about the mighty mitochondria back in grade school? Here's a quick refresher.

43:15It's the tiny engine inside of your cells that powers everything you do. But here's what they didn't teach you. As you age, your mitochondria break down. That's what can cause you to feel tired more often, take longer to recover, and wake up feeling like you're never fully recharged, no matter how long you sleep. I started taking Timeline nearly two years ago because it is the best product on the market for mitochondrial health, and that is why I partnered with them. Timeline is the number one doctor-recommended urolithin A supplement with a compound called Mitopure. Basically, it helps your body clear out damaged mitochondria and replace them with new ones.

43:52Mitopure is backed by over 15 years of research, over 50 patents, and nearly a dozen human clinical trials. It was recommended to me by my doctor, and that is why I've used it for so long, since way before I knew who even made the product. And best of all, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee, plus free shipping in the US, and they ship internationally. Until the end of January, you can get 30 % off a one-month supply by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom 30. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom 30. How much of this is bottom up them doing it on their own to then try and make a profit to sell and how much of this is top down a company going in recruiting locals in order to do an operation on behalf of a bigger organization?

44:3550, 50. Right. So the second one is going to be much harder. The second one's going to be much harder. Because if you go and take away worker number three and make him work for you, then guy from the street becomes worker number three. And they'll continue to recruit. But the good thing with that side is that you can put pressure on those companies, right? You can come and - Lobby, restrict. Yeah, that's accessible. Where we are, we're so remote. It used to take two days to get to the research station that I started working at, deep in the jungle. And so when you meet these people, it's the bottom up guys.

45:06It's people that just have a chainsaw and they're driving their little tiny motor through the amazon rainforest they know where to sell the sediment or sell the tree or sell the whatever it is that they're going back with yeah i mean jj grew up his father his brothers they would go out for three weeks at a time they'd go 10 days up river they'd find mahogany trees they'd fell them then they would spend time in the jungle milling them into boards then they would pile the boards in the river on balsa wood that floats and then they would float it down the river they'd put their motor on the wood and use the wood and they would just and they would pilot that down through the Amazon and it would get stuck in places.

45:44They got to get in the water and pry it out. Brutal work. And then when they finally get to town, they get paid practically nothing for that wood. And then when that wood hits the international market and mahogany tree goes for a million dollars. And so the people on these poor people on the ground, they have no, and if you go, what would you do if you weren't logging? And they're like, fish, you know, hand to mouth, live out of nature. And so it's not, there's not a lot of opportunities. And so by giving them the opportunities to protect their forest, to attend classes, to become park rangers, to become boat drivers, chefs, guides, we're just changing the narrative in this place.

46:21And so now we've protected 130 ,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest, which is like, I believe it's nine times the size of Manhattan Island. It's more than half the size of Singapore. And the Peruvian government has taken notice. and they've said if you guys can can protect 300 000 acres we'll sign it over into a national park so we're almost halfway wow we're almost 20 years in 20 years ago i left home because i wanted to see for myself if it really was an emergency in the amazon rainforest like i had heard i wanted to see for myself if what i had heard was true and when i got down there i found something more magical than i could ever have imagined and 20 years later we have an organization and we have a global movement.

47:04And there's people all over the world that contribute monthly, that make it possible for us to pay these rangers and protect this land and keep it safe from the loggers. And we found a way to change the narrative of conservation. Where can people go if they want to help donate money? Well, we have junglekeepers.org and it's the most direct way to save the rainforest. And so I have people tell me that, you know, traditionally with organizations, they say, you know, I made a donation to an organization to protect nature, but I don't know where it went. And so the thing that we started doing was just showing people, this is where your money went.

47:37Land acquisition, Ranger pay, little bit of admin, that's it. And if you look at most of these NGOs, what we started realizing was that - Expensive C-suite, private - Yo, playing their CEOs$500 ,000 a year and the next 10 people$500 ,000 a year. And if you look at the breakdown, their pie chart, 90 % of their donations going towards advertising. You take the top 10 environmental organizations you could name, 90 % of their donations go towards advertising to further their brand. The money that we get, I think 85 % goes to land acquisition and ranger pay, direct action. And so some people will come to us.

48:20Somebody reached out to me on Instagram not that long ago. And he goes, I just made a donation to blank, huge organization that we all know. And he goes, I have no idea where my money went. And it's really driving me crazy. He goes, I saw you on a podcast. And he goes, I really want to help. He goes, what are you working on right now? And I said, well, we're actually in a state of emergency right now. There's a road coming in, the narco traffickers are attacking us. I said, there's like, you know, the sector on the northern boundary of the park. And he goes, well, how big is it? I said, several thousand acres.

48:46I said, but it's like$250 ,000 and we don't have it right now. He goes, I got you. This guy, Michael, he just, he reached out. He goes, it'll be in your account tomorrow. He wired us$250 ,000. He spoke to me for a half hour. We'd never met each other. We took the money, went to the landowner. We said, landowner, do you want this road to come through your rainforest and they're going to completely cut it down? Old guy. He goes, no. He goes, I don't want this. He goes, but they're going to hurt me if I don't do it. We bought it and we got the cops to come in and we completely protected over 5 ,000 acres of rainforest like that.

49:18How much are you fighting against crime? When I think South America, sometimes there's going to be some organized crime floating around in there. You're talking about the dangers of the urchin or the worries of the bullet ant or the jaguar, but what about the modern human concern? That's the scary thing. That's the scary part. The loggers and the gold miners, the local people in Peru, the local people in peru are incredibly kind the people of the madre de dios of peru are rural people i rock up in a in a in a in a raft or in my boat and i they'll they'll let me camp at their house you know it's like these people live in thatched huts they eat monkeys and turtles they're they're wonderful rural people we also have narco traffickers coming in now and they are not local They are not from there.

50:12They heard that there are extremely wild parts of the Amazon where the police can't get to. Deep, deep, deep, deep jungle. And so what they do is they launch expeditions deep into the jungle and they figure no one's going to come out here. But what are they doing? Why would you want to be? Growing cocaine. The what? Growing cocaine. Growing cocaine. Growing cocaine. So it's like farms. Yeah. Plantation. But again, it's the artisanal guys. It's not the big crime bosses. It's like a couple of brothers that got together and went, hey man, you know what we should do? we should go grow some cocaine.

50:42It's the equivalent of being a weed farmer in California like 30 years ago, but doing it with cocaine in the Amazon. Yes. And the difference is like the weed farmers, I feel like, you know, I don't feel like they'll shoot you. There's something about the cocaine grower culture. So this is even though they're more small time, more grassroots, they're still kinetically protected. Yeah. And so when it comes to the uncontacted tribes, when it comes to us, they've made it very clear. if we get the chance we'll kill you they say it the they've we the the cops actually intercepted uh one of the people they arrested they said that gringo and jj they said to anyone on our network if you see them take them out talking about you yeah oh yeah how does that make you feel very unsafe and it's very stressful trying to do anything because it used to be that we'd drive around with our boat i would just have machete no shoes just be driving on my boat through the the Amazon, and now you have to be very careful.

51:41And then, you know, even passing through a city, you can't sit down. I can no longer sit down in a cafe and have a coffee. You know, you just think someone's going to come up behind you. You can't do it. That's how much of a hit list you're on now. Oh, yeah. No, I travel with a huge security team when I'm there now. The security team is not to protect you from the animals of the Amazon, or even necessarily the uncontacted tribes, or... None of those things are going to try and shoot me in the head. It's just the narcos. And so, yeah, I have a circle of armed men around me at all times, outward facing.

52:16Because of the... You're like the president. You're like... Yes, a very... No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not at all. But no, I hate it. And so the good thing is that the Peruvian police have been working on this narco problem. And really, they just came in, and so they're starting to just move them out. There was a small group of them and they're starting to move them out. So we're hoping that that calms down. Because again, it's when people hear, oh, you're 50 % of the way to making this national park. That's incredible. Then they hear narco traffickers. And it's not even like they're the ones in the Amazon rainforest.

52:49And they go, you're going to fail. Nobody can beat the narcos. And they stop donating. It's a bit of a buzzkill. They stop helping us. And which I think isn't like, I mean, cowardice on a level they can't even imagine. It's like, it's not like I'm asking you to come fight. I'm just saying, just help us. and they're like, no, it's a lost cause. It's like, no, we're fighting. We're not giving up. Why should you give up? What is, is there a time in your mind that sticks out as the most fear that you felt the most afraid that you've ever been? I wonder whether it's come from threats from humans or threats from jungle or threats from something else.

53:30The most afraid I've ever been. I mean, I can give you the most afraid I've ever been from an animal. I can give you the action version, but the most afraid I've ever been was when I was young and starting out and didn't know. I was dreaming so badly that we'd be at this point one day. I saw it 20 years ago. I wanted to do this. And at that time, if you wanted to protect species and save rainforest, you had to be a conservation biologist. And I didn't have the grades for that. I hadn't even finished high school. Did you go back to college in the end? I did. I did. I finished college. You kept the promise to your parents?

54:07Yes. By the skin of your teeth? By the skin of my teeth. I would show up late to a semester because I was raising an anteater. Didn't I hear that you nearly died because of raising an anteater? Well, I got a really bad staph infection. I got a MRSA infection across my whole body. My whole face was rotting off, but I kept, I have this really bad habit of trying to walk it off. You know, horrific things. I almost chopped the tendon that connects your kneecap. I chopped most of that tendon And I was like, I'll walk it off You know, the stingray went, I'll walk it off So I got this horrific infection And I kept going, at some point it's got to get better, right?

54:41No, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection Will eventually kill you And so I was taking care of From an anteater? Absolutely not From a hospital I had dengue fever and I'd gone to the hospital to get a shot So what's this got to do with the anteater? It just happened while you were looking after an anteater? Well, because the only reason I didn't go home and get help was because I had this baby anteater that needed me. So I kept letting the infection get worse weeks and weeks and weeks. My body was just - So that you could look after the anteater. She needed me. You know who else was a massive fan of anteaters?

55:12Salvador Dali. Yes, that picture of him coming out of the subway. Do you know why he said that he loved walking an anteater through the streets of Paris? No, I do not. He said because anteaters are never in fashion. He just loved the idea of - Yeah. I'm researching him for my next live show. The number of stories that he's got, and one of them being, yeah, he walked an ante to through the streets of Paris because he said they're never in fashion. He also sued a man for dreaming about him and said, because the subconscious belongs to me. Oh, boy. So cool. So sick. Anyway, so you've got the worst mercer of your life.

55:45And you were young. Yeah, I was 19 at the time. And I remember writing a journal entry to my parents and being like, goodbye. Thank you for everything. Sweet life. Yeah. I really was sad. I also said, even if I live, I couldn't imagine I'd ever have have a normal face. So I really thought it was the end. So I've lived through my own death many, many times in many different ways, whether it's being chased by an elephant or laying on the side of the, that time I had to wait three days just for a boat to come by. That's how remote in the jungle I was and there was no one else. So when I finally realized I was in trouble, I said, I got to get a boat.

56:17Well, there was no boats. So you lay by the side of the river and you have all these pustules of infection boiling out of your skin. And so the flies are feasting on you. And I lay I lay in that state for several days before I, the only boat coming down river was a poaching boat stacked with the carcasses of animals. So more flies, dying spider monkeys, crocodiles, macaws, all things destined for the illegal pet trade. And I laid on that boat for two days on the way back to town, finally got to the remote, the first town with a telephone and called my mother. And I said, you got to get me out of here.

56:53She got me a plane ticket. And the next day I got on a plane, everybody moved away from me at the airport. It was like, it was like fish moving away from a shark. People would look at me and they'd hide their children. I mean, I was leaking out of my face, yellow and green pus. I had my hood up like a freak. And I, I, I arrived, somehow they let me on the plane and I arrived at JFK. You know, the, the Port Authority cop looks down and he goes, okay, Paul Rosely. He goes, yeah, where were you traveling? He goes, holy shit, dude. He goes, what happened to your face? And I was like, that's why I'm home.

57:25I need to go to a doctor. And he just stamped it. He goes, go, go, go, go. He was like, please go. And I went to the hospital and spent like four or five days on full IV antibiotics to kill the infection and bring me back. And the doctor said, if you'd waited just a little longer, a few more days, they said, we wouldn't have been able to bring you back. The infection would have been so established. But, you know, in those early days, my reasons for doing these things were, I wanted so badly to be, to follow in the footsteps of someone like Jane Goodall or some of the conservation heroes like Alan Rabinowitz, people who have made national parks.

58:06and I wanted to save these things, but I also just selfishly wanted to have adventures. I felt so meaningless as a kid, feeling like, oh, so I'm going to finish this and I'm going to get a good job. And I was like, but there has to be like, I want the story. I want to go out on an adventure. I want to find some stuff. And so the Amazon was that. The Amazon was just horizon to horizon of jungle. And they said, there's these uncontacted tribes out there and there's animals you've never heard of and there's all these rivers that no one's explored. And so I said, this is where I can live out my life here, even if I can never hold down a normal job.

58:41And if I can't be a conservation biologist, at least I could just go on amazing adventures. And so... that's how it started but that was the scariest part to me was that longing of knowing what i really wanted and thinking I would never, ever have it. Knowing that I wanted to be an author one day, you know, and writing these little chapters, you know, in my journal and thinking no one's ever going to read this. No one's ever going to, you know, and I even had people, you even have people in your life that say, I even had someone, you know, tell me, say, you're crazy to publish a book. You know how hard it is to publish a book.

59:14They're not going to, that's never going to work. And you have people, you know, you notice the people who encourage you and who disparage you. my friends my housemate george calls them sofa friends and treadmill friends some people after you've spent time with them you need to go and lie down on the sofa and some people after you've spent time with them you want to go and run on a treadmill yeah and his goal is to spend as much time around treadmill friends as possible and a little time around sofa friends as possible to get rid of the sofa friends yeah this episode is brought to you by shopify look 2026 is the year that you're finally going to launch that business you've been thinking about for ages because, as you've heard me harp on about, making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.

59:52Telling people you're going to do the thing still isn't doing the thing. But here's the good news. Shopify makes it unbelievably easy to actually do the thing. They make it very simple to create your brand, open for business, and get your first sale. They've got thousands of customizable templates. So all you need to do is drag and drop. You don't need coding skills or design skills. You can manage things like shipping, taxes, payments, all from one simple dashboard. And when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36 % better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms.

1:00:18And with ShopPay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Shopify takes all of the messiness of running a business off your plate so that you can focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. And right now, you can sign up for a$1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to start selling today. Well, you've also got a new book, which people can go check out. I have a copy of this for you. Oh, very cute. Yes, you need to...

1:00:51Jungle Keeper, what it takes to change the world. And so this is the whole story. This is from the frustrated kid to... And it's crazy because I wish I had a time machine now to go back because 18 years old, getting on the plane for the first time, leaving for the Amazon, never in a million years would I imagine that we would have, you know, caught the biggest anaconda and met the uncontacted tribes. And now that we're actually protecting 130 ,000 acres of rainforest and on the cusp of making history by saving a whole river. And you've got one of the heroes that inspired you writing a blurb on behalf of the forests that I love.

1:01:27Thank you, Paul, for writing this book, Jane Goddard. Dude, that's so amazing. I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of you. Jane, Jane, Jane, also Jane taught me something very incredible which is the grace of attention someone who's as luminary and famous and busy as she was i came up to her to talk when i was in my early 20s with with chapters about the anteater that i was taking care of i lived in the in the rainforest with my anteater and i took care of her and we did this and we did that and i i waited in line with hundreds of people after a jane goodall talk in New York city. And I handed her a manila envelope.

1:02:08You know, you have two seconds with her. Hello. You're so inspiring. She goes, yes, everyone, you know, everybody says the same thing. And she takes a picture with you and then you move on. And I just said, I've been living in the Amazon rainforest and I have a story I think you'd love. And I had included a message in there. And I said, my dream is to become an author. And it would be, it would mean the world to me because you're one of my heroes. If you would endorse my book. And she incredibly actually read the material i gave her this random kid out of hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people she would travel 300 days a year she actually read it and had her team get back to me and said as soon as you find a publisher tell them you have jane godall's words let's fucking go dude dude she she she waved her magical very powerful wand in my direction and gave me a career and by giving me a career handed me the excalibur sword to go and actually start jungle keepers and protect an entire river.

1:03:02And so what she did was she empowered others. She wanted to save nature. She empowered other people to do it. It's interesting that of all of the things that you've done, of all of the terrifying situations that you've been in, not fulfilling your dream. By far. Is the thing that gave you the most terror? Absolutely. I mean, that's a state. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. and that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them and it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books.

1:03:48That's chriswillx.com slash books. of agony that's a state of you know that that young protracted as well right it's like drawn out over time it's the bar being in your foot for decades yeah it's the state you live in and it's the it's the existential question of am i going to have these ambitions and never see them to fruition which what which you know there's that there's that line many are called few are chosen that's the other thing am i going to invest 20 years in this and then fail and there was there's a part in the book and there's a part in my life where, you know, after the discovery thing and after I'd gone, I'd been going on expeditions with my local friends in the Amazon for years.

1:04:30And so I already was the guy in the Amazon, but I had tried. I'd written the first book. I'd done the Discovery Channel thing and failed. I'd gone and lived with the elephants. I'd even started Jungle Keepers, but it wasn't working yet. There was something missing and it was like, kept trying and kept trying and kept trying year after year after year and there was a point where my dad we pulled over somewhere in the car and my dad went hey before you get out he said i just want you to know we love you no matter what and i went what and he went you know you just keep doing this jungle thing did he think that you were doing it to try and prove your worth to your parents no what he meant was even if none of this works out it's okay he was like you know what you're doing you're not making any money doing this you just keep going to the jungle and getting new injuries and and and and you know we see you trying real hard and he was like it's okay it's okay he sounds like a good man he's a he's the best man my parents are angels on earth they were they were the best parents and they're just very good people but the horror of that moment was him saying you know it's okay if you just if this is all there is and i went no and so you know the the because i went it's it's happening you know i go you're 32 years old and i go i've been doing this since i was 18 and and and you know the the you so you slowly you learn that relentlessness is the greatest skill you can learn because there's so many opportunities to give up i uh i have a slightly contrarian opinion on consistency and relentlessness um for a very long time i always said that my my superpower is like consistency uh i've slightly changed my opinion on that recently um i think it's stubbornness i think that stubbornness is functionally the same yeah um but much more accessible to a lot of people consistency sounds super sexy there's a really famous visualization by my friend Jack Butcher from Visualize Value.

1:06:32And it's a graph that explains my life and your life and a lot of other people's lives as well. Yes, that's my life. How'd you know that, man? For the people that are listening, it's a bar chart and it's very, very long and it's completely flat. Yes. And there's a little arrow pointing to a point where it's completely flat saying, this is pointless. And then the bar chart starts to lift off in an exponential curve. That is the first 17 years of my adult life and the last three. That's exactly what happened.

1:07:12You felt like you had that as well. I think for at least a good bit of what I was trying to do, what I've been trying to do with the show, and it comes in waves. It's interesting with the way that momentum occurs on the internet. for a very long time. I think it took 500, 500 episodes for us to get to 100 ,000 subscribers. Yeah. Wow. It's like, you know, four or five hours of... I was booking every guest, researching every guest, sitting down with every guest, doing the edits for every single audio episode, doing the ad reads for pennies because I wanted to keep on going and I wanted to do this thing.

1:07:51And I didn't care because I just, I kind of liked it. So it was less mission-driven. my outcome was not to get to a stage where it was it was simply sort of the doing of the thing but if you were to look at the trend on a graph there is a this is pointless yeah exactly and as you start to zoom out a little bit everything looks puny in comparison you realize that for every conversation that you have now the impact can be greater and the opportunities and so on and so forth. And, uh, yeah, the, the stubbornness to stick something out when it seems like it isn't working, but the thing that you've got, the confluence of what you were interested in, what you were inspired by, what environment gave you the opportunity to do the people that were around you, chance meetings with heroes and opportunity, all the rest of the stuff that JJ, even just the fact that you found a guy that has stuck with you for so long.

1:08:43Yeah. That is sort of the genesis of obsession. I've been thinking a lot. I wrote this week a really, I think is an interesting article about the relationship between discipline, motivation, and obsession. So the relationship is to do with friction. Discipline is friction accepted. You accept that there is an amount of friction that's going to be bestowed on you and you're going to use effort and habits and willpower and patterns in order to move through it. Motivation is friction removed and there is no longer the friction. You want to do the thing. So discipline, I will make myself do the thing.

1:09:22Motivation, I want to do the thing. Obsession, I can't not do the thing. So obsession is friction inverted. And it pulls you into it and it causes you to stay awake at nighttime and it ruins your relationships and it destroys your sleep and it causes you to forget your health. And it does all of these things. But the problem is discipline is relatively easy to engineer. Motivation is tough, but can be engineered. And obsession is impossible to engineer. You cannot engineer obsession. And this is why the whole thesis of the argument is if you have an obsession that's worth something, allow it to climb inside of you and stare out through your eyes.

1:10:04Because most people for most of their lives don't have an obsession that's worth anything at all. And it's destructive or pointless or just simply is not going to move them in the direction that they want to. What they're obsessed with is politics or the toxic ex or porn or gambling or some sort of, you know what I mean? Like the obsession is just not moving them in direction that they want to go to. And if you're one of the people that's being gifted with this and the coolest thing, and it is a gift. Yeah. The coolest thing is that when you look at most people as they age through life, people who are serial obsessives, they have this period of obsession that's maybe a few years or half a decade or multiple decades.

1:10:48And then what you see after that cools and hardens is something that looks more like identity. So you look at someone that Dorian Yates, bodybuilder guy who now continues to go to the gym, the gym is no longer his obsession, but his, what looks like discipline from the outside is just the echo of an old obsession. So it's what cool, what happens, discipline is often what happens when it cools into identity. And, uh, he's the guy that goes to the gym. He's just the guy that goes to the gym. So I'm the guy that records the podcast and the guy that wants to sit down, always looking for people. It wouldn't be cool to talk to.

1:11:22Wouldn't that be a good idea? It's like, it's just what I do. And that's, if you deny yourself what you did, the, yes, you're still obsessed, which is great, but much of what you're doing now is you're just the guy that goes to the Amazon. I'm just the jungle guy now. You're just the jungle guy. Except, yes, and now, it's so funny how many of those things are just the hero's journey. So like you've been through it, I've been through it, the ruining of the health, the constant obsession, the graph going nowhere until it goes somewhere. I mean, you have to have the experience and in a way have those stories and have that knowledge and have those failures so that you're able to play the game at an expert level.

1:11:58You have to put in your 10 ,000 hours to the point that you know what you're doing. And so, yeah, it's now, the thing though here is that even if I wanted to get off the train, now I can't. Because now we're responsible for protecting millions and millions of heartbeats. Now those anteaters and those monkeys and all those ancient trees would be blackened to earth if we stopped. And coming and talking to yourself and writing a book like this, And now we're spreading this message to so many millions of people. And we've created a way for them to, because so many people care about the Amazon rainforest.

1:12:35People, this, I get messages from fans. I get messages, this classically, I tell this story, a mother messaged me and she said, you know, I work two jobs. She's like, I can't donate a lot. She goes, we give$5 a month to jungle keepers. But I tell my kids they're part of saving the Amazon rainforest. And that, that means so much to me. So whether it's a billionaire giving a few hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars, or it's a mother giving five dollars a month, the fact that people have the opportunity to change the narrative of destruction and actually make the world a better place, that is, to me, that's such a crucial thing that in these fallen times where everyone seems so disassociated, the modern nothingness wave that everyone seems to be feeling, the antithesis of that or the antidote to that is radical action.

1:13:20is that there are people out there who are making things better, helping people, finding water for people that don't have it, fixing ecosystems and improving technology and the way the world works. And it's like we've never lived at a more exciting time. What drinking water, what is the state of drinking water in the Amazon? Can you drink the Amazon water? I wouldn't drink from the main channels. There's a lot of sediment. And also most, again, even in the Amazon rainforest that a lot of us imagine to be very, very wild. There's boats and some gasoline and like rivers, anywhere humans go gets polluted.

1:13:55But the river that we are on, the river that I work on is so remote and so pristine that we drink straight out of the river. You can bend down to a waterfall and drink. And that's a rare thing on earth these days. You know, I don't know in the US how many waterways they would recommend that you drink. I've been in national parks and I've had the rangers tell me, you know, whatever you do, don't drink out of the streams. And I'm like, we're in the Rockies, you know, like what's, what's polluting. I would have imagined that there would be maybe some dangerous parasites. Well, there are, there's Giardia.

1:14:33Okay. I think a lot of, a lot of, a lot of it is, you know, you, at some point you just start, you go, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to fully embody, I'm going to play this game on, on full, you know, We're going to walk barefoot. We're going to go on that adventure. When you get to the scary part and there's a waterfall, you go, let's just go over the waterfall. Sometime along the way, they say, play the game like you can't lose. And it's like, I think I apply that to just about everything in life. You just go, it's going to work. And if it doesn't work, you die. But that's okay. I mean, do you think of a Comanche warrior going out on horseback with their bow and arrow?

1:15:13they might die or they might win how did we get so soft that everyone's worried about their little 401k and what their you know their feelings and their journey go try i think they would have been scared too i think the comanches would have been scared before they left home they've got wife they've got kids when the mission calls yeah they they go and they do the thing when it's time to when it's time to go you go but the problem is that there is much more time to consider going and much less time that's spent going now. Yes. And I think that the edge of anticipation and action is interesting.

1:15:48Action is the antidote to anxiety. It always is. And unfortunately, there is way less action. There's less opportunity and there's more time to consider. And that means that you vacillate and ruminate and talk yourself out of doing what it was that you were going to do. Yeah. And I mean, that goes, you know, there's the warrior analogy of that. And then there's also the execution of whether it's starting that business or it's pursuing that relationship or it's moving to that country or whatever it is, it's, yeah, it might not work out, but that's okay. I've been playing with ChatGPT backgrounds for my phone and currently the one.

1:16:28Yes. Do it anyway. Do it anyway. Do it anyway. Do it scared. Do it as high as. Do it scared, yeah. Do it scared. Do it tired. Do it uncertain. Right? Do it uncertain. and that's a big one for a lot of people. Do it anyway. Okay, so that was the existential fear. What about the kinetic fear? Sure. I would say the two times I've been the most scared, I'll give you two. One, because of this existential fear of not having adventures, not having a meaningful life, I said I want to go out like the great explorers did, but better. I want no porters, no guides, no nothing. I learned for a few years. I trained in the Amazon.

1:17:08and then I went out on solo expeditions. And so I took a boat three days deep into the jungle with some poachers, and then they left me on a beach, and then I walked another few days into the jungle along the river. Totally on your own. Totally on my own. Camping at night under the stars, backpack. I had a raft with paddles, so if things got bad, I could get to the main river channel, fishing and eating. And that was the first time. I was told that this tributary was so remote that there was nobody on it. I wouldn't see a human. It was just wild nature. And sure enough, the animals, it was like the Galapagos.

1:17:42The animals were so unfamiliar with humans that jaguars would walk out on the beach and there'd be, you know, the animals just don't care. They don't know what you are. They don't care. Jaguar doesn't care. Tapers and capybara and caiman and just incredible amounts of life. And I was, these are the experiences that I wanted to absorb because I wanted to see what raw nature looked like before humans touched it. So this was an incredibly important thing for me. And I was out there enjoying this. And then I went up this one tributary. I pushed a little bit too far. And it just happened to be where the uncontacted tribes, nomadic tribes, a small band, they had a campfire on the side of the beach.

1:18:23And these are naked people who are pre-stone age. They don't have stones. They've been living out there for thousands of years. They've missed the Sistine Chapel and the World Wars and everything else that's ever happened. And they don't even know the name of the country they live in. They've never seen a spoon. And now they're looking at me. You're on the what? I'm on the side of the river and they're on the other side of the river. And I see them see me and they're holding bows and arrows and they're naked and they have face paint. And they're staring at me and I'm staring at them. And I know that any help is about three weeks away by foot.

1:19:00And I just ran for my life. And I ran for my life through the jungle for about as long as I could. And then I opened up my pack raft. I inflated this raft. It's a pretty durable raft. And I started paddling. And for the next few days, I didn't stop. Because even if I stopped, I would go to sleep or put up my tent, fall asleep. And the first dream you have is that you hear the voices that they're coming. Because these people are pretty famous for, they have seven foot arrows. And they don't have modern, much like the Comanches, they're a warrior clan so they don't it's okay if they kill you they don't care you know so they think your shirt is cool they'll they'll shoot you in the leg because they don't want to ruin the shirt you know and so to them it's it's a whole different and also they've been they've been as a society traumatized by the things that happened in the past like the rubber boom where outsiders came to the amazon and the industrial revolution and made slaves and basically had this massive genocide making people go out and tap the rubber trees that only existed in the amazon on.

1:20:04And so these tribes have learned the outside world is trying to kill us. So they're very happy to shoot first. So that was fear on a level that was like the, the, the fear equivalent of the stingray thing, the idea of being hunted in the deep wilderness. It wasn't a, a paradise expedition through the rainforest anymore. All of a sudden I was like, wait, I have a mother. Like I have people that are going to be broken hearted at when I disappear or that I just into the wilded myself like there's this is stupid and then i was you know days of of of running scared and uh pack rafting all night although i'll tell you this when you're pack rafting at night with a flashlight in the amazon and you're you're sort of going down river with the crocodiles and the anacondas it's incredible it's an incredible ride um what's the difference in the amazon between day and night apart from the fact that it's light apart from the fact that it's light and dark how does it feel oh feel different it's different reality it's a totally different world it's the the daytime in the amazon again dawn every moment is different dawn is this it's every dawn is like the world is being created again when you're in the mountains or the desert or the jungle when you somehow living outdoors you you end up seeing the sunrise and I think that that's something that we lose with modern society where you end up experiencing the sunrise and seeing when the light is coming directly into your eyes and the dawn chorus and then dusk you hear it switch over to the night chorus nighttime in the Amazon is wild I mean the Amazon has been called the greatest natural battlefield on earth because everything is eating everything else everything in that vast ocean of forest and branches and jaguars and everything will be digested at some point.

1:21:55So in this churning energy transfer, life is a momentary stasis in the entropic march of recycling. It's just an eating machine. And it's just marching and marching for thousands of years. And so when you're there, you start to feel it. You go, you know, you get one mosquito bite, two mosquito bites. Some wasps land on you, they start eating your skin. it's like they the the jungle wants to eat you it's like give me your give me your carbon give me your energy um you're decomposing while you're still alive they want you to you or they want to start you um the wasps will land they'll start pulling pieces off you they they can eat like if you leave a piece of meat out they'll tear it apart and then flying piranhas they're like flying piranhas and the worst thing is that the bullet ants sometimes grow wings as i saw a bullet ant with wings the other day um but no so running from the tribes was the most scary thing The other most terrifying thing happened actually not in the Amazon in India.

1:22:58I set out to see a wild tiger. Now you can go, in the turn of the century, in 1900, there was 100 ,000 tigers on earth. When I was growing up, there were 3 ,000 tigers on earth. So tigers are almost completely extinct. We almost lost the greatest predator that we have on our planet. And then the tiger king came along. Well, there's more tigers in captivity than the wild. And what people don't realize is people go, well, at least there's tigers in captivity. What they don't realize, though, it's a one-way door. Unless a tiger has its mother to teach it how to hunt, you can never take a tiger that's born in a zoo or in captivity and release it.

1:23:40It's never been done. Never. You can do it with a rhino. You can do it with a deer because they'll go eat grass. a tiger has to learn how to stalk how to hunt what things to hunt how to functionally useless it's functionally useless so so the fact that we there's 6 000 tigers in captivity across the world useless i think that might just be just in the u.s they're good to stay in captivity and breed for captivity but they're good to to entertain people you know educate kids at zoos and in the best possible interesting it's like a uh a genetic dead end for that for that type of animal yeah this irreversible okay so you want you to go and see one actually wild I wanted I had a dream of seeing a tiger said there's only 3 ,000 tigers left on earth this is the greatest predator that we have this giant striped thing that you know I mean their shoulders so much bigger than you think you think of them as like kind of like a Great Dane it's like no it's like a horse they're gigantic I mean their paws are dinner plates and it was just you know when I finally years and years of walking through forests and hoping and hoping and hoping.

1:24:48And when that moment came, that I was standing on my own two feet in the forest alone. Again, just as I had always imagined it. You work towards these things and then all of a sudden it happens and there's a tiger standing there and this giant thing just looking. And the tiger did the thing that scared me the most, which was that I was not acknowledged. If you take a step, a raven will react. You know, a deer will stomp a hoof. Tiger didn't care that I was there. Tiger looked straight through me. Tiger didn't once. But he got a contact that was irrelevant to Her Majesty. And just kept walking.

1:25:30Would that not have been less scary than going? No, it was so... That almost would make sense, right? Because she would look at you and go, oh, I'm scared too. Or I'm taking notice of you. This was... You're a sandwich I don't want to eat today. Yeah. you're irrelevant, you're a blade of grass. And it was like the power in that statement was wild, that sort of disdain. And now I've used that in the human world too. If you really want to mess with somebody, somebody you really are trying to insult, you shake their hand and look right through them. It's just - Move straight on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:26:07We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, focus, and performance, but most people have no idea what theirs are or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan.

1:26:37Seeing your testosterone levels and dozens of other biomarkers charted across the course of a year with actionable insights to genuinely improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands and be a nightmare, but with Function, it's just 499 bucks and now you can get an additional $100 off, bringing it down to$399. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save 100 bucks by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's at functionhealth.com slash modernist.

1:27:10What's the most unpredictable or dangerous animal in the Amazon? Unpredictable or dangerous animal in the Amazon. The thing is the animals in the Amazon is they're all sweethearts. I mean, my jaguars.

1:27:27They sound like tree tigers. Jaguars sound like tree tigers. They are. the jags okay so the jags are they they call them the pit bulls of the big cats they have the strongest bite of the big cats they're 250 pounds they're thick they're muscles leopards are very lean and live slinky they're yeah they're way more about jumping up into the trees get away from the lions a jaguar is heavy they think nothing of jumping onto a caiman and biting its skull they have this crushing bite force and so you look at you know that thick foot that thick face of a jaguar they can just crush everything but whenever you see whenever i've seen a jaguar on the amazon it's always it's peaceful it's always this this kind of you can't be that peaceful if it was that hungry you look like a nice meal yeah but they're never their mothers again the with the big cats their mothers teach them see that deer you can eat that deer don't go after porcupines the the the baby caimans are safe the mother would have taught the baby what to eat and again they're thinking about jumping on the back and biting the neck, or they're thinking about coming underneath and closing the windpipe.

1:28:29They've been taught to go after horizontal prey. Now, suddenly this vertical thing that smells like deodorant and conditioner and all this weird stuff that they've never smelled before, this quite large vertical animals walking around, they're usually curious. They come and they do the bob. They look at you from side to side, and then they're gone. And even that, most of the time you won't see them. Most of the time, a big 250 pound yellow Jaguar, I have literally been in one's presence and not been able to see it because the pattern disruption of their spots somehow blends them into the forest, the dappled light in the forest.

1:29:06And you, you know, you're just looking around and you go, you have this moment of realization. Or one time I was checking a camera trap and I was down on my knees, you know, just arranging this camera trap. And I I heard whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, loud footprints, footsteps. And I turned around with my finger up to tell whoever it was. I thought maybe it was one of my friends to be like, walk quieter in the jungle. I'm out here being quiet. You could be, there's a jag. Just walked by, looked at me, kept walking. Never even broke stride. It was just like, hey, tongue out, big teeth out. And I was like, as close to him as I am to you.

1:29:44He walked right by me. Didn't care. Didn't care at all. Wow. So is it rare that humans get attacked by Jags? In our region of the Amazon, no one's ever been attacked by a Jaguar. There was one old, old, this was 20 years ago, one old Jag, you know, their teeth go. With big cats, usually the first thing is their teeth. And one old Jag attacked like an old farmer. He attacked an old man and his wife defended him with a shovel and they ended up shooting the Jaguar. But it was such a feeble old jaguar that it said, the only thing I can go after is a human. And there's that classic story of, I think that Jim Corbett was the guy that eventually got it.

1:30:24But there was a tiger that was in North India and was killing hundreds of people. This one tiger, she's preying on hundreds of people. And, you know, a tiger has to eat, you know, about a deer a week to live. And so this tiger started eating about a person a week. And so she went to her first hundred people and they brought in hunters to try and get this tiger. And she was smart. so she moved over into a different village and then she another few years went by like the Osama Bin Laden of tigers I mean she just she was just hungry but for some reason she figured out people I could just run into it they said one woman was working in the field and this tiger came grabbed her by the waist right and just ran off with her like a stick like a dog running off with a squirrel that's how big and powerful they are and so another hundred people got eaten over here and then finally they burned the forest down They just surrounded the forest and burned it down.

1:31:15And she managed to escape again. So they hired expert hunters. They got hundreds of elephants. They surrounded the forest with elephant-backed hunters. And they had this hunter, Jim Corbett. And they burned and they had drummers on the elephants. Fenced it in. They flushed her into a ravine. And they finally got to see this tiger. And he shot her. And they realized the reason this tiger had been eating people was because when she was just a sub-adult, barely above being a cub, she had been shot and had taken out her canine teeth. And so she hadn't been able to hunt deer and wild boar, and so she had to eat people.

1:31:53Poor tiger had been shot, and so she was just trying to survive. But that made her the most legendary and prolific man-eating tiger, I think, in history. The full circle of this situation from Genesis back around. Wow.

1:32:11I remember watching some David Attenborough documentary, one of the newer ones. And the final episode was how wildlife are starting to interact with human civilizations, metropolises. And is it maybe India where some big cats have learned to hunt orphans that the kids who are orphans on the street yeah have learned to become nocturnal yeah because if they sleep in the day and stay awake at night they're less likely but there was a bunch of cats that were going down into the city no because there's you know these little meals on short stubby wheels they can't really run that fast and uh the orphans can never run that fast poor orphans uh um so i've i've spent significant time in india while i was tiger hunting in mumbai there's beautiful photos of the leopards that have begun living in the city of mumbai and what's really cool is people's security cameras on their house they go i haven't heard about the orphans but i've heard about the dogs they love dogs there's literally videos of the dog curled up asleep on the porch outside someone's front door and the leopard coming up completely quiet and just biting this dog on the neck and they can you know again they have that bite for us that's it you're mine now you're you're shut off they just break the spine and for them domesticated animals are easy the difference between a wild animal and a domesticated animal is unbelievable like so it for example handling an anaconda that somebody has in a terrarium that has been raised in a terrarium anaconda has never done anything athletic in its life it's never hunted in its life they're soft they feel soft if you if you you know you go to those guys that have like the boa constrictors and you hold them they're soft you find the same snake in the wild it's like holding a giant steel cable it's a different thing it's a totally different thing and uh yeah it's very fascinating even the same thing goes for the chickens.

1:34:23We've noticed that if we bring a chicken from, you know, they say you are what you eat, well, you are what you do. And it's on a very physical level. The chickens that we bring from the town, same chickens, yeah? The chickens that come from an enclosed area. When you process a chicken and get it ready for dinner, the meat is soft and there's fat on the bones. And it's easy to, when you get the farm chicken that's been running around its whole life and hunting bugs and running away from jungle cats, they're lean and they're cord-like and their meat is not as good to eat because it's more gamey and tight.

1:35:01And it's like you literally, it's the same animal. They could have been born in the same clutch, but they - You are what you do. You are what you do. What's your sense of spirituality in the jungle? Something more transcendent than mission, which is still on the physical, but a connection to something even greater? Well, I think that humans have been given this planet where all of these miracles are happening. And first of all, if you think a single one of us knows the answers, no one does, no one's ever come back. I think the jungle to me is where I feel God the most, where you feel this incredible proliferation of life and life is the antithesis to all the the to the majority of the universe which is black nothingness and we're on this glowing example of of beautiful life where there's this this concert of biological organisms that create a living biosphere that allows us to be doing this and so to me the jungle is church to me the mountains the ocean but specifically the jungle because it's the apex of life.

1:36:15There's been nowhere, it's the greatest proliferation of terrestrial biodiversity on Earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record. Really? Yes. There's never been more life on Earth in one place than the Western Amazon. And then we have to remember that no matter how much we want to think about aliens and Mars and everything else, this little blue planet is the only place where we know for a fact that life exists. And I feel like we've gotten into an age where people are very quick to go, you know, oh, but soon we're going to go to Mars. Okay, sure. You know, and the aliens, okay. Santa Claus is going to come at Christmas as well.

1:36:54But what I'm saying, if you want to talk about whether or not we're able to breathe, whether or not we're able to eat, whether or not our children have an impoverished world, there's a great Jane Goodall quote where she said, you know, she said, we're stealing, stealing, stealing from our children. And it's shocking. And it's the idea that we borrow the earth from the children of the future, that we're the stewards, we're the ones passing this on, and we can pass on a destroyed reality or one that's healthy. And so in this particular case of do we want a world that doesn't have elephants in it?

1:37:33Do we want a world where there are still healthy ocean fisheries that are filled with millions and millions of fish where life and biodiversity is thriving. We do. Nobody should want the, I mean, we're in a period of extinction. They're calling it the sixth extinction. And so this is a human, this is an anthropogenic extinction because we're taking up too much land. We're destroying ecosystems too rapidly for wildlife to adapt and keep up for things to regenerate. And so becoming aware of that is crucial. So that's why what Jungle Keepers is doing by saving this river, what I hope is that it can become a blueprint on how other people, so we can save rivers in Africa and we can save rivers in New Guinea and India and other places, because everyone's fighting the same fight right now.

1:38:16They're going, okay, human civilization is moving up. Population is moving up. These poor people in these rural areas are realizing that in order to get the gasoline to provide for their families with the boat, even if they just want to do some basic farming, they need money. And if they need money, they need to go get timber or gold or wildlife products. So how do we get them out of poverty so that they can start becoming stewards of protecting the natural environments that they're a part of? You've got to align the incentives. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think, you know, one of the saddest things is going to be if there isn't sufficient intervention to protect tipping points being reached with stuff like this, what you end up with is a world in future where there's significantly fewer people.

1:39:01I think population's going to peak at about 2090, 2100, something like that. We might just kiss the bottom of 10 billion people-ish, just about. And then it is going to be a very precipitous drop. It's going to be lower. I would guess that in 200 years, it'll be significantly lower than it is now. South Korea, 96 % fewer people in 100 years' time. For every 100 Koreans, there's four great-grandchildren. Because demography is destiny. You know how many one-year-olds there are, and you can't make any more. And you know how many two-year-olds there are, and you can't make any more. And population is increasing while birth rates are going down because people are living longer.

1:39:39And the saddest thing would be if this brief swell, this brief fat bit in population caused damage that this thin bit and whatever continues the rest of time then inherits. William McCaskill, who was the youngest tenured philosophy professor in history, I think. He's a Scottish guy. Youngest, maybe, that was alive right now. He wrote a book called What We Owe the Future. He's got this philosophy around long-termism. I think you'd really like it. It's a pretty accessible read. And it is what it sounds like, that we kind of have a duty to unborn humans. And it is this ethical inheritance. ethical inheritance yeah yeah my words not his no those are those are that's a good term yeah um because there's something called generational amnesia with with nature where you know growing up in the forests of new york i would i would go these are you know these are beautiful forests but i grew up there was no bald eagles there's no wolves and it's the trees that i was growing up in they were small.

1:40:50I didn't know that, you know, within the last 50 years, that forest had been cut. And those are oaks and maples that have been growing for a certain amount of time, but it wasn't an original forest. There's no old growth. There's no old growth left on the East Coast. And so old growth forest was something I said, wait a second. So what I'm seeing is already an impoverished version of reality where somebody else already shaved these mountains and this is just what grew back. And so it's beautiful. The woods are beautiful, but they're not the original woods. And with nature, there's this authenticity that you can't replace a thousand year old tree.

1:41:26Well, not to bring it back to fucking demographics, but it's a really wonderful, much more long, much more highly invested illustration of exactly what you're seeing when it comes to birth rates. And that's not to say that you need to have as many people as possible. But what it means is that you can't create any more ones that have already, you can't make any more hundred-year-old trees. You can only make zero-year-old trees and give them a hundred years. And yeah, this view of long-termism, trying to zoom out and give yourself a little bit more perspective and think, if you knew what was coming, is this how you would behave?

1:42:11If you were living longer. I would have assumed maybe given that people are extending their lifespans that we would have more long-termism, but it doesn't necessarily seem to be that way. Again, I think it depends on, I think it's getting better. I think it is getting better. I think people are understanding that if we can, again, I'm coming at this from the environment and from the wildlife conservation, I feel like I am the voice for animals, for the trees. and what we want to do is make it through this period of adolescence as a global society. That's a good way to put it. Where our technology is stabilizing, our population is stabilizing.

1:42:50So we want to make it through those periods without losing polar bears, right? Without costing the lives of the other things that we share our world with. Irreparable damage. Irreparable damage. Because, you know, if elephant populations dip and then come back, because, you know, for a while there was a lot of habitat used and then they come back, well okay great but we don't want to wipe out elephants that'd be tragic um and the same goes for tigers thank god tigers have gone from a hundred thousand down to three thousand and i think now we're back up to about five or six thousand countries like india and a bunch of other countries nepal bhutan are working to get their tiger numbers up it matters to people that we learn to that we find a way to live in symbiosis with them have you seen what ben lam's doing at colossal uh i heard about the colossal guys yeah yes um so one of the things that might be interesting for you to look at he's trying to bring back the dodo bird the first one that he's trying to do is to bring back the woolly mammoth uh-huh i can see there's a face being made here let me give you the for the people just listening i'm making a face you're making a face yeah um here's the reason that i think what he's doing with the dodo bird aligns with your uh world view The reason that he wants to do the dodo bird is that the dodo bird was killed almost exclusively due to human expansion.

1:44:15Yeah. And what he wants to say is to basically use this entire project of the dodo bird. Yeah. Look at how much work and technology had to go into undoing the encroachment of human civilization on natural animal habitats. Yeah. This is what we had to do just to get one thing back. And what is it, 50 % of biodiversity in the last however long has been lost? Since 1970, we've lost 50 % of the wildlife on our planet. Not in terms of species, but in terms of abundance. Overall number. Right, okay, so maybe not biodiversity. But I understand that people assuming that there's just a command Z, like undo button on extinction probably isn't great.

1:45:03But I think the way I spoke to Ben a long time ago and have kept in touch with him, I don't think that that's what he's trying to do. and the prospect of him saying, look at how fucking arduous and all the technology and all the rest of this stuff to bring back this thing that we destroyed. Let's stop doing the fucking ecology thing that breaks down these habitats. I think could be an interesting marketing campaign. Yeah, I mean, the idea that they're trying to theoretically help extinct animals, I suppose, aligns with a conservation viewpoint. But till I see old woolly mammoth i don't care we're trying to save the animals that are here and i find it highly suspicious the idea that because every scientist that i've spoken to and this is going to get me in trouble because everybody loves this idea no everybody everybody loves this idea and when this came out um i did an instagram post about it and i said you know even if you can clone grandma it's not the same person and the meatballs won't taste the same and she's not going to remember you.

1:46:09And, you know, the fact that you can genetically engineer a gray wolf to be white or whatever they did, and, you know, that - Or a woolly mammoth from an Asian elephant, which is what it's going to be. Yeah, make a genetic freak of an Asian elephant that has some hairy traits or whatever. What you're doing is fundamentally misunderstanding what an animal is. You're fundamentally disrespecting what a species is. And you're fooling people into believing that you can resurrect dead species and you can't you're not gonna get a dodo bird you're gonna make something that you think is a dodo looks like it now side i don't disagree and i think that he would also say or most of the guys at colossal would also say this woolly mammoth is the closest approximation from us filling in some bits of gene code with asian elephant and all the rest of it that being said i'll i'll sort of stand the ground for at least the first time he told me about his idea of explaining to people this thesis, we're going to have to jump through all of these hoops technologically to make something that's the closest approximation we can to something which was driven to extinction by the expansion and the dismissal of the fragility of ecosystems.

1:47:23Stop doing it. Think about what you're doing now that is causing that to happen. Yes, that's where we align. I think that that's the intersection between your two things. You mentioned uncontacted tribes. You recently just found another one? we were we're so as of right now we have employed numerous local indigenous people as conservation rangers people that were maybe living in the amazon they grew up eating monkeys and turtles and and and then as they grew up they said well i need to provide for a family and so they got a chainsaw and they might go out and become loggers we've said hey instead of becoming loggers work for us so we're working with these communities to figure out how they want their future to be because they live five days from civilization deep out in the jungle and they're now working with jungle keepers and so the donations that we get from people around the world go to their salary and towards protecting land and so we were at one of these remote communities with our friends planning for the future making ranger patrols doing all this and we got news that one of the uncontacted tribes was approaching now for all of you know the time that i saw the uncontacted tribes when i was on the solo nobody believed me because i wasn't taking pictures i ran for my life all the pictures that you look at on the internet traditionally historically the it looks like pictures of bigfoot somehow they're always blurry they're always far away and it's there's a reason for that because the people that are seeing these these these naked warriors coming at them aren't sticking around to take pictures and chances are they're long just wait there a second yeah yeah no eyes eyes just eyes over here for me don't shoot yet yeah i want to just get this picture you're out of focus yeah um and they're probably loggers you know because the only it's not like you're getting uh photographers and phd students out six days into the middle of nowhere they're they're at the they're at the usual research station eco lodge um but we were off at the end world's end and uh these people came out across the beach and we had this incredible moment where you know you see them with their bows and arrows and you see them stalking across the beach looking at us and there's maybe 30 something of us and there's over a hundred of them and they're moving through the forest and there's at different times there's different amounts of them that we can see but they came to the side of the river and we were at the other side of the river and so it's sort of sort of shirts versus skins and it was they were all naked penises tied up rope around their waist and we're all standing there waiting what are they going to say they put up their hands and they said nomole nomole's brother nomole they said we are the brothers nomoles we are the nomoles traditionally they're called the mashko piro which really means the wild piro people and so the nomole seems to be the what they call themselves but the what's crazy is you're in this moment and you know we all say oh i wish i wish i could see you know go back in time and see the world in the 1800s i wish i could go see the comanches riding across the plains 200 years ago but this is people from a thousand years ago at least walking out of the jungle because they've been in this natural time capsule human beings from another age stand across the river from us and we're we're sitting here i mean we have iphones and airplanes And we had professional photographers with me, my friend Mohsen and Stefan, who were also Jungle Keepers directors.

1:51:06And so we're watching as this, you know, so need to be very clear on this. They came out and contacted the local, the indigenous community we happened to be at. We didn't make contact. They came out and they started asking for things. So they came out of the jungle a thousand years late to the show. and they said, we want bananas. And they asked for plantains. Someone's able to communicate in a language that's close enough. There's enough of an overlap between the Yine language and whatever the Mashko-Piro speak that they can communicate at a percentage. So there's a good degree of miscommunication as well.

1:51:46But one thing they were able to make very clear is that they wanted gifts. They wanted food. And so the anthropologists put bananas in a boat and pushed it across and they fell on the boat. And as this happened, we were shooting the world first ever clear footage of the uncontacted tribes. And since then we've released that footage and it's become controversial because people go, should you be releasing this footage? What if they want to be left alone? Leave them alone. And it's like, listen, we are the only people on earth, jungle keepers the local people and the international experts on our team are the only people that are actually tactically fighting to save these people's forests and if you look at what's happened to indigenous cultures through the centuries and how much has been wiped out this is one chance again to get it right these people are living in isolation and it seems like the one thing they want to continue to do is live in isolation that's that was their second message We want bananas and stop cutting down our trees.

1:52:53They didn't want to come close to us. They didn't want to join us. They didn't want anything. They stole a machete. They're like, this will be useful. My friend was like, oh, how many machetes? He was like, put down the machete. He's yelling across the river. Go back and get it. Yeah, yeah. You should go get it. That's exactly what they said. He smiled. He went, yeah, you come. And then right as they were leaving, one guy walked out, looked at us real proud, put one seven foot arrow on his bow shot not at anybody just just shot now be like that's that he walked off into the jungle but like proud and so the prevailing um anthropological strategy on these guys is leave them alone they want to be left alone we leave them alone but now with jungle keepers in that 130 000 acres that we're protecting and the 300 000 that we're ultimately trying to protect well they exist in that territory a lot of that territory is land that even our rangers we can patrol the border of it but the interior of that these people live somewhere in there and i don't think that generally people understand how large of an area we're talking about but it's so vast you couldn't explore it you know if you see if i said walk from one side of our reserve to the other side of the reserve through the jungle where you can't see 10 feet in front of you it would take you years um and by yourself you'd never make it and so the fact that these people live in this tiny little you know the nomadic life under that ocean of canopy and the fact that they came out once i mean even the anthropologist who the local anthropologist he said it had been 10 years since they had come out and he'd never seen this clan before it was first contact and so he was you know he was trying to tell them you know we are also nomole we are also your brothers brothers he kept saying nomole he's the foreigner yeah they did they asked about that they said you and they like they like pointed they go we want to see that guy and i think i'm a little bit taller than most of the peruvians that were there and i'm the only person that's a little bit built and and he's got a beard and then they called me forward he goes show them that you don't mean harm and i put up my hands i put up my hands and they sang no more lay back and i just had this moment of sort of the most basic form of communication with these people what did they feel like um it was beautiful actually because because they were i think when they came out it was very well terrifying seeing these people come out like stone age warriors with their and there's no way to communicate or reason with them and you have people around you with shotguns in case we get in case this is an ambush slaughter you know it's a moment where you go is an arrow going to come through the air and go through my neck you know so that we're we were very on edge the whole time and so right before they left when i was able to raise my hands and go and then they they sang back and it was sort of easy.

1:55:39And I said, oh, wow. And also just there's something about the uniqueness of a moment that it's 2024 at that point. And how many, we're old men, is this still going to be the case that there are still uncontacted tribes or that will be a thing of the past? And it felt like an aperture into history. It felt like something historically significant to communicate. It's almost like you were communicating through a time machine. You're just waving, and they waved back. And then they took the bananas and they took the machetes that they had gotten on their backs, and they hiked off and just vanished into the jungle.

1:56:22And then it's the moment that they were no longer visible. We were all rubbing our eyes. Did that really happen? Check the tape. Yeah, you check the tape, and you're like, it really, really did happen. And of course, there's an arrow sticking out of the sand on our side of the river. So it happened. Are the locals scared of them? Terrified. Okay. Terrified because they will murder you without thinking about it. Do you think the uncontacted tribes are aggressive or scared? They're scared and defensive. And so, but that manifests itself in like a lot of people, like my friend was fishing with his father when he was a child and they surprised a group of uncontacted and the Mashko shot the father in the stock just impulsively seven foot arrow it's guts fella I mean it's like a knife it's a big knife it's like a machete what's it made of bamboo single piece of bamboo single piece of huge bamboo but it's it's this big at the base and then it comes down like this it got flights how does it fly oh because it's hated well no no it's a big piece of bamboo that's the that's the arrowhead right oh okay then there's a seven foot shaft uh-huh then then they have they use um vulture feathers for the feathers and they even twist them so that the arrow spins.

1:57:39And so when it hits you, it's a huge knife wound. And so as a gut shot, it spilled his guts. So my friend had to watch his father's guts fall into the stream and they were surrounded by the tribe and the tribe was arguing. And again, they understand, my friend understood enough of what they were saying that some of the tribes people were like, kill the kid, kill the kid. And the other ones are going, why did you kill him in the first place? You shouldn't have shot him. Now they're gonna come shoot us. and they were having a discussion, but it wasn't the biggest deal in the world. It was like, man, why did you drop the shopping bag?

1:58:10You shouldn't have done that. And he got away from that situation and went back to town. And then, of course, there was a response from the community where they came out with guns and chased the uncontacted tribe and were shooting at them. And so there's this violent exchange as well. And so then when they come for these semi-peaceful exchanges, no one knows what's really going to happen. It could end in violence at any moment. And sure enough, the next day after we had gone back, my friend George, who was one of the ones putting the bananas on the boat for them, he was driving the boat. And 200 of the tribe came out onto the river and started firing rain of arrows.

1:58:53So everybody got down onto the benches in the boat. And because he was driving, he couldn't take cover. and the arrow went in just above his scapula and poked out just by his belly button and went straight through his body. So he got shot with a seven-foot arrow and went straight through him. And somehow he lived, but, you know, if you could ask the tribe, like, what were you doing? We just helped you yesterday. What do you think they'd say? They'd probably say the motor spooked us or... It's very hard. There's also another story where this one man was very peacefully, very calmly contacting them by himself.

1:59:32This was over near Manu National Park. He was a local guy, jungle man, and he knew he would see the footprints. And so he would start leaving some bananas in the forest and the tribe would come and take the bananas unseen. Then he would go and leave some rope and some sugar cane and the tribe would come and take that and he would never see them. And then after some time he would wait and the tribe would come and he would see them, acknowledge them. They would acknowledge him, take his gifts, and they would leave. And then over time, he began to talk to them. This very, very, very slowly, very slowly.

2:00:05And then over time, over years passed, and it became that he was kind of friends with them. He could mingle with them. They would show up. He would have some gifts. They would give him some stuff. They'd give him some meat. He'd have some clothes for them. And so he developed a relationship of hand gestures and a few exchanged words. And then one day they found him face down with so many arrows in his back that they said he looked like a porcupine. Zero explanation.

2:00:33what's strange about it is that although it's the same species the environment has sort of crafted and time and inability to communicate and so on. Yeah. It's crafted such a, like we're trying to, it's like saying, why did that horse bolt? Yeah. It's what is it, what is it that caused that to happen? Why, if you were to ask them, why would they say that they had shot in that way? And what's particularly sort of strange is that you're saying this about an animal that is you, that functionally, all of the, So if that person who fired that arrow and hit your friend had been born in Brooklyn, they would have had the exact same language that you do and ability to write and all the rest of this stuff and would have been domesticated in the manner to which you have - Trained the way we have in the skills and the communication.

2:01:32All of the things. I mean, even if you're in the middle of the most foreign country you can imagine and somebody points a gun at you and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't mean any harm. Unarmed. All good. Unless they're just trying to murder people. They're going to go, oh, okay. Well, get on the ground then. You don't need to speak the same language. It's the most wild that humans can be. Yeah. These are the wildest people on earth. And again, we don't know if that's necessarily good for them. Some people are like, they're free. You have to leave them that way. But if you talk to the anthropologist, they'll tell you the rates of infant mortality, the fact that they're all clearly starving.

2:02:09the intertribal warfare. God only knows what things they don't know. I mean, I remember hearing that during the gold rush, people were using lead to stop up. They would open cans of beans or something, and then they would use lead to plug the hole. And how many thousands of people died of lead poisoning because they didn't know. And I've read anthropological studies from, I think it was in New Guinea where they found a tribe. And the tribe had misconceptions that almost every time anyone got sick or injured, it was because of a spell that was cast by somebody else. And so these people were like in the trees, living scared to like their whole culture was based around fear on stuff that was made up.

2:02:47And so, you know, there is a certain amount that education helps to humans to live well. Yeah. I suppose the problem that you have there, the, the, the storytelling animal that we are, uh, as Will Storr says, if those stories don't get corrected by facts, and you're just, they're allowed to, what it is is basically like the most extreme echo chamber that's never penetrated and allowed to persist for many, many, many generations. And then you end up with, yeah, people who live in trees or this is where superstitions would have come from or rain dances, you know, these. Well, it's like, no, but I mean, at least a rain dance, you're trying to call in the rain.

2:03:34It's a positive ceremony. It's a cultural ceremony. this is like the salem witch trials forever yeah yeah she's a witch burn her yeah and then the whole society becomes based on no one steps in to correct it it's like yes she was a witch and we should have burned her and actually we should burn more and actually the reason and you're a witch and you're a witch i mean my god and then and there's no corrective i mean it's like the word it's like the joke they were making in monty python but turned up to to a thousand yeah um and So a lot of anthropologists will say, you know, what we want is for them to, their right is to remain isolated.

2:04:08But in order to do that, we have to protect their forest. Then once their forest is protected, which is what I'm working on with jungle keepers, if they want to start interfacing with their nearest neighbors, which are the indigenous people of the Amazon, if they want to, they can. But that's their right. Well, hang on. It also is a responsibility of the indigenous people who keep on getting fucking shot. Yeah, that's the thing. Right, it's not a costless interaction. No. What you're asking of the indigenous people in order to educate the uncontacted tribes is to put themselves on the line. Well, that's what they would say is incredibly accurate.

2:04:42They would say, you know, we... Fuck you, dude. I don't want to do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're telling me not only is it my obligation to live in the jungle and to help you protect it, but also to potentially be kebabed by the fucking local tribe? Well, to be fair, these communities have not been there as long as the tribe has. So if they've been there for 30 years, the tribe's been there for 300, you know, for 3 ,000. Feel free to fuck off. And this tribe is very happy to do full-on warfare, whereas these are more domesticated people that have been taught it's bad to kill. So they're like, well, we're not going to just shoot them.

2:05:16On sight. Yeah. The same may not be true in the reverse. It's not true in the reverse. And so now they're living here and they're friends of ours and they are part of the jungle keepers thing and they're going, okay, well, cool. Now that we live here, I mean, they've said, you know, can we have like a safe house? Because they live in thatched huts. There's no real protection. They can't lock a door. Yeah. Give us a steel box. Yeah, exactly. It's a big steel. They're like, bring us a container. It was a big steel box. With a lock. You know what the solution might be? More T-shirts. More jungle keeper T-shirts.

2:05:46More T-shirts could be. So a question I have is, of the work that you're doing, you're trying to get to 300 ,000 acres protected. and if that happens, the Peruvian government will denote it as a national park, which would make it, give it even more protection, I have to imagine. In order to do what you think needs to be done for the entirety of the Amazon, how many Paul Rosales do they need? Or how many Jungle Keeper operations do they need to be? Well, okay, so this is the thing. It's like the Peruvian government, we do this as the blueprint. We lead by example. And so if we're successful and we create the, we're at 130 ,000 acres protected right now.

2:06:30In the next 18 months, we have to raise$20 million more. It's only$20 million to protect the next, the rest of the national park. We get the national park. If we had$20 million tomorrow, national park tomorrow. We have lawyers waiting. The landowner's ready to sell. We have the Peruvian government willing to do it, but they're like, we don't have the resources. if we can establish this that's part of an already there's already a huge legacy of conservation there's alto pudos national park there's manu national park there's a tembo potter reserve what what what does the national park thing what how does that help calling it a national park what does that because then it's officially protected because there's a lot of land in the amazon that's sort of just land in the amazon it's someone's land and so what happens is you inherited 20 000 acres from your father who was a real jungle man but now you kind of live in the city and there's 20 ,000 acres on there and you got to pay taxes on it once a year and you never go there and you don't want to, and it's dirty and dangerous and there's bullet ants and jaguars.

2:07:28And, and then your friend comes to you and goes, yo, I'm, I'm getting into the logging business. I was thinking, could I go on that land you got and take down some of the ironwood trees and, and, and clear some stuff for farming? He goes, yeah, I don't care. I don't care at all. And they're like, cool, I'll throw you a few bucks. And so then they go out there and they do that. So if we go talk to you and we say, actually, can we buy that land? How much was he going to give you? We'll give you double that. Give us the land. And so we've just been doing that. We go into land acquisition. And again, as an organization, what we do is there's something called a 990 that you have to file with the IRS when you're a 501c3.

2:07:59So when people donate, you can see where the money goes. Unlike every other organization on earth, when people donate, we protect the Amazon rainforest. When people donate, we hire more rangers. And so it's like bang, bang, bang, bang. And so all these people are coming out of the woodwork as heroes it's large and small it's it's it's the masses as well as some huge donors who have helped us along the way with large chunks of land and so if we protect this though it shows a model where those indigenous communities can work as rangers and then you don't have the problem of narco traffic they don't become narco traffickers and so then the proving government's happy the proving government's well they're they have their their our citizens are taken care of in that region.

2:08:47Well, this is great. And we have clean water flowing out of that region that feeds this city and this city and this city, and that's good. And so it's a win, win, win, win, win all around. So then you go, why don't we do that over here, too? How many times do you need to say, why don't we do that over here? How many of it, is it 3 ,000? Is it 200? It's thousands. But so much of the Amazon already exists protected in indigenous territories. I mean, the easiest and best way to protect these natural areas is just hand it over to the people that have it. So the area that's protected by the Yanomami Indians, the areas that are protected by the Machiganga, there's different tribes all over the Amazon.

2:09:24If you look at a map, there's, yes, there's national parks, but they're not as big as the tribal areas. And so what we have to do though is unfortunately work with world leaders on a large scale level to make slowing deforestation a priority so that we get past this huge population boom and this adolescence as a global society. But you can't protect the whole thing from the start, but you have to start somewhere to protect the whole thing. And so a lot of people have said that to me, like, oh, great, you're going to protect 300 ,000 acres in the Amazon. You'd have to replicate that a million times in order to be, yes, okay, well, great.

2:10:07It's better to do something than to do nothing. And we've risked our lives and spent 20 years in the mud and the blood and the mosquitoes trying to do this. And now we're getting this groundswell of people that want this to happen. Are you going to be sad to have to move on to a new area that needs to be protected after spending so long becoming intimately familiar with this one? No, because I don't think it's ever going to end. I think that we're going to protect this and turn it into a national park. And then comes the fun stuff. You know, if we weren't fighting to protect, I don't want to do this job.

2:10:43I would have so much more fun being like, man, why don't we go up that stream and find out? We'll do a biological inventory of that stream. You know, and so as directors of the national park, we can have education. We can, you know, so what they did with Sequoia National Park, which was very similar to this, where John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a three-day camping trip. I think that was for Yosemite. And he was like, look, we have to protect this because it's so beautiful. And then they did. And so today we still have the Yosemite Valley. We still have sequoia trees. I mean, imagine missing out on the biggest trees on earth.

2:11:12They could have been cut forever and we'd never get them back. And so this is the same thing. But, you know, once we save it. Oh, so what we were saying with sequoia was, because then again, people worry. They say, well, if it's the wildest place on earth, how could you be bringing people there? I say, imagine a football field. I'm talking about, it's so big that we're talking about maybe 10 pieces of grass are the area that we access to show people and the rest of it's inaccessible wilderness. And so we built the world's tallest tree house that I keep inviting you to. And we, we, we do some, some little tourism using local guides, which helps employ the local people and keeps the rest of that giant football field, the rest of the 300 ,000 acres wild.

2:11:58But I think that once we cross the finish line, if we make it and we're not assassinated by the narco traffickers, and if all these - Or the animals, or the insects, or the pathogens, or the anteaters, or the MRSA, or the elements. Yeah. If we make it, then no, I don't think there's an end. I think that we study it and we celebrate it. And then I can consult on other areas and help other people to realize their dreams. I mean, just like Goodall did for me, she, you know, she, she tipped her candle to mine and passed on that light. And I think that that's, that's a, that, that was the lesson, you know, you just got to keep that going and then we can, we can make all the change we need to.

2:12:35Dude, you fucking rule. You absolutely rule. Well, I'm very, very glad that the world has you. I can't wait till you come to the Amazon, man. I'm ready, dude. I'm ready. Give me a few months, maybe later on this year, I reckon coming around. I've been looking forward to speaking to you and it's epic dude i'm really really excited to see what you do next please keep yourself alive yeah please keep uh please keep having these amazing conversations i love listening to them on the wild yeah even if i'm not there with you i'll be there in your ears yeah be there in my ears chris thank you man thank you