#489 – Paul Rosolie: Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon Jungle

The following is a conversation with Paul Rosolie, his third time on the podcast. Paul is a naturalist, explorer, writer, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest and celebrating the beauty of the natural world. He has a new book coming out in a few days titled Jungle Keeper that you should definitely go preorder now. It tells some intense stories about his time in the jungle over the past several years, building up to a few epic recent events, including a new full-on extended encounter with a non-contacted tribe that we discuss in this podcast. Both the book and audiobook are great. I highly recommend it. If you would like to support Paul and his incredible team in their mission to protect the jungle, go to junglekeepers.org. You can help with donations, or by spreading the word or checking out the gala that Paul is hosting in New York on January 22nd, in a few days. They are doing all they can to help raise funds for the mission of safeguarding as much of the rainforest as possible, and I think it's a mission worth fighting for. The Amazon jungle is one of the most special and beautiful places on Earth. As an aside, allow me to look back briefly and mention something that I've been struggling with a bit. For context, I traveled to the Amazon rainforest with Paul a while back. It was an adventure of a lifetime with lots of crazy twists and turns. We did record a podcast out there, literally in the jungle, episode 429, if you want to go check it out. It was awesome. And we also recorded a bunch of disparate footage of the journey just for fun. And I would still love to somehow put all that together into a cohesive video in case it's interesting to someone. But I've learned just how difficult it is to organize and edit a pile of chaotically recorded footage like that. So let's see if I can pull it off. But in any case, this kind of raw vlog-style video is something that I would love to be able to do more of as a way to celebrate amazing human beings like Paul and others, including everyday people who I meet on my travels. So I'll keep trying, tinkering, learning, and I ask for your patience and support along the way. Now back to our regular scheduled programming. And now a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Shopify for selling stuff online, Finn for customer service AI agents, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, and Masterclass, of course, for learning. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. 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A person I've never gotten a chance to interact with, but I am a huge fan of, huge fan of everything he's created in this world is Scorsese, Martin Scorsese. Probably one of, if not the greatest filmmaker of all time. Incredible genius. I can't— as a director, as an editor, as a visionary, as a storyteller, all of it, genius. So anyway, go to masterclass.com/lexpod to get an additional 50% off any annual membership. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/lexpod. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Roselye. We've survived a challenging time out in the jungle about a year and a half ago. And since then, your life has increasingly gotten more intense. So you've achieved the incredible feat of saving now more than 130,000 acres of rainforest. And the goal is that you're working towards is protecting 200,000 acres more. Yeah. And doing so while facing extreme danger from narcos, narcotraffickers, so-called cocaine mafia in an escalating drug war. This is insane. These are new developments, illegal loggers, as we've talked about before, gold miners, and the incredible recent encounter with a non-contacted tribe. And we'll talk about all of this. So your new book, Jungle Keeper, opens with the killing of two loggers by the warriors of a non-contacted tribe, the Mashco Piro, in August 2024. And then you reveal that you had your own dramatic encounter with the tribe two months later in October 2024. So, So if I may, let me read the opening of the book. Far out on the western edge of the Amazon rainforest, deep in the Peruvian jungle, a pair of loggers plunged their chainsaws into the buttressed roots of an ancient ironwood. An ironwood, or shiwawako, of this size is a giant among giants, an emergent sentinel that reaches heights of 160 feet. Towering over the rest of the canopy. I've read that many are over 1,000 years old, by the way, as an aside, and you've found ones that are 1,200 years old.

Yeah, incredibly old.

Anyway, you continue. This particular tree had started its life as a tiny sapling in the great jungle, a story that began before the Spanish reached Peru, long before the United States was even a dream, at a time when Leonardo da Vinci was still honing his talents in a faraway part of the world. Through the Renaissance, the First and Second World Wars, and the birth of our grandparents. This tree was out there slowly charging upward, anonymous, just one pillar among the billions of others. But on this day in August 2024, when the two loggers worked, this witness of the centuries came crashing down through the canopy with such cataclysmic power that it shook the earth. And then you go on to talk about how the shaking of the earth was, was felt and heard by the uncontacted tribe. So, uh, you go on to describe how these particular loggers were murdered by the uncontacted tribe of Mashco-Piro. What do we know about these warriors of the uncontacted tribe?

We know that across the Amazon basin, there's still perhaps thousands of clans of quote unquote uncontacted peoples, people that are living in nomadic isolation in what remains of the intact Amazon basin and want to remain that way. And so what happened with these loggers was that local people told them, don't, don't go out there. Don't, don't go into these territories. And what happens is that people that aren't from this thing with the jungle, people don't believe that it's as wild as, as the legends say. And so when they say there's, there's calatos out there, there's, there's, there's wild people out there, these loggers from another region go, yeah, that's, you know, some, some story. We're, we're, we're fine. We'll go. We have shotguns. They don't realize you're dealing with a civilization of people that is still nomadic, still uses bamboo-tipped arrows, still lives naked in the Amazon rainforest, has knowledge of medicines that we've, we have yet to, to encounter or may never discover. And that they can hit a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 meters. And so while you're using a chainsaw, they can sneak up and you will never know they're there. And so when that arrow passes through your body, you'll only have a moment to realize it before you fall over.

And we're looking at, uh, something you posted on your Instagram.

Yes.

Which are the arrows that they use, which are bigger than you. Yeah. So they're like 6, 7 feet.

6, 7 feet. More like 7 feet. And that's incredibly sharp. They cure it over the fire and they have a way of sharpening it. That edge of bamboo becomes incredibly like knife sharp. You can cut meat with it easily. I've done it. These arrows, look, look at that. I mean, I'm 5'9". That, that, that's easily a 7-foot arrow.

Yeah. So for people who are just listening, this quote unquote arrow is really a spear. Some people would think of it as a spear, but they're shooting this thing with a gigantic bow. That's crazy.

Yeah. And so to be holding that, look at that. They even, they even twist the fletching so that the arrow spins in the air. They have incredible craftsmanship. And then you see all the, all the little string on there is plant fibers that they've woven. And then this is them. Yeah. The warriors of the tribe, the warriors of the tribe. And, and so the fact that we're sitting here talking on microphones and that we have airplanes and cell phones and all the things that we have in the modern world, and there's still, we still live in this age where there's right now at this moment people living out in the jungle who have been there since before history is an incredible thing.

Let me look this up on Perplexity. What are the technologies we modern humans have that the Mashco-Piro do not? It's just interesting to think about the kind of technologies we take for granted. Energy and power, obviously all the electricity generation and grids and batteries and solar panels and electric motors, metals and materials, mass-produced steel, aluminum, advanced alloys, plastics, composites, glass, concrete, all of those things, tools, of course, and machinery, the infrastructure of roads and bridges and buildings, and the weapons of war, everything but the spears and arrows that they have, and the medicine and biology. Of course, they probably have complicated medicines that they've developed for their own, uh, that are available within the jungle.

I mean, that entire list is no, no. I mean, metal, think you have to be able to excavate into the earth and, and forge metal. These people don't even, as one of the local anthropologists said to me, a Peruvian anthropologist, he said, you know, people think of them as Stone Age tribes and he was like, they don't have stones. He's like, they don't, so they don't know that water, they see water that they drink. They don't know that water freezes because they've never seen it. They don't know what the water boils because they don't have, they don't even make clay pots. They just have their bamboo and their string. And so they're living an incredibly simple life. So all of that, I mean, even, you know, a camera is a miracle to them. Like, it's like, yeah, it's, it, you have to bend your mind to even understand how, how far back they are. It's like looking into thousands of years ago, like Stone Age.

When they hear the sounds of the chainsaws, the sounds of machinery in the distance.

Yeah.

I wonder how they can possibly comprehend what that is.

I think they view it as like a demonic destructive force. And I'm, when I show you the encounter that we had, the, we got a few takeaways. We, we, we left with more questions than answers, but one of the things that they were able to communicate across the language barrier was Why are you cutting down the trees? They don't like it.

Yeah, that represents to them the danger that the outside world brings, the destruction that the outside world brings.

They see us as the destroyers of worlds.

So tell me about this encounter in October of, uh, 2024.

So in order to tell you about that encounter, I think we need to orient people into where we're talking about. We're talking about this river that runs through the western edge of the Amazon rainforest that you know, you know well now after spending time there with me. It's a high tributary of the Amazon rainforest where, you know, you have the main river channel and then smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller tributaries. And the smaller you get, the less trafficked they are. And so this river has remained wild through the centuries. And even during the '90s when there was a mahogany boom where people went out for mahogany trees, there's very few people going up this river. And so 20 years ago when I first got to the region and people were telling me that there's uncontacted tribes out there, it was, it was always in the realm of something, um, you know, it's like people say there's, there's, there's Bigfoot or don't go there, it's haunted or something, you know, it's like it was like a tall tale almost. And even the Peruvian government at the time that I went to Peru first, which was 2006, their official position was that the tribes are a myth. There's no such thing as the tribes. That was the official position. And you just, you would hear these stories of people that got shot. You'd meet someone high up a river, 4 days upriver, deep in the Amazon that had an arrow. And you'd look at this thing and it had this, you know, mega gravity. And so, as we've created Jungle Keepers and now we're protecting 130,000 acres of this river, we're protecting the plants and the animals and the ancient trees and trying to preserve the ecosystem and counting the butterflies and conducting ecological surveys. And what we've inadvertently found ourselves the caretakers of is the fact that these people, in order to continue living, have to remain isolated, want to remain isolated. That's their one mandate as a civilization, the tribes of the Mashco Piro. And so in October, we were, you know, as Jungle Keepers now, we're working with the indigenous people. What we do is we take loggers and gold miners and make them into rangers and and give them better jobs and we try to protect the forest. And those people who live up in the remote indigenous community, they called us on a satellite phone and they said, "Directors, you've been working with us and telling us you want to help us. The tribes are coming out.

What do we do?" So even they don't really know when the tribes emerge from the deep jungle what to do.

They were terrified.

What was your thinking when you got the phone call?

When we got the phone call, it was a mix of, you know, we should keep, because we're over here like trying to get land concessions and doing all this important work. And part of me was like, that's, that can't be real. So we're going to keep, keep, keep our heads down. Bigfoot is emerging from the forest. Like, yeah, sure, sure. And then, because we got the call, we hung up and we said, okay, maybe tomorrow if they're like still there or something. And then it was crazy because it was, it was probably about noon and we had an important day of meetings. We had a meeting with the police. We had a meeting with the landowner. We were trying to do all this stuff for the conservation work. And then I got together with the core team of directors, J.J., Mos, and Stefan, and we said, "Wait, if this is real, we have to get there, like, now. Like, now, now." And so we dropped what we were doing, canceled the meetings. We put other people on the meetings. We got a boat. We called Ignacio. We called our most hardcore ranger.

Who has been shot.

Who in 2019 was shot in the head by an arrow. and still bears the scar. And he barely survived. And we said, look, this is going down. He said, I already know, because the whole river already knows. And he said, we said, can you get us there by tomorrow morning? And he said, look, it's a 2-day journey by boat, so no. And we said, is there any way you can get us there? And he went, I'll get you there. And so we got a couple sacks of rice, a couple cans of tuna, our dry bags, our tents. We got on a boat by 6 PM, and we started riding up the river through the night, through the night. And so 2-day boat journey that we're trying to flex in one night. And so I was at the front with the, with the headlamp, with the torch. And so the first few hours it was clear, and that comet, remember that comet that was going? There was that comet in the sky. I remember looking at the comet and going, somehow I was like, this is it. I knew this was it. And the first few hours was clear and the stars was out and it was beautiful. And then It clouded over and the lightning started and then it just apocalypse downpoured. And from midnight until 8 AM, it was just the front of the boat with the light and it was just Star Wars vision of just, you know, raindrops and galaxies and moths flying in my eye. And, and you people don't realize you can get hypothermia in the tropics, but it's like as you're going at night, even if it's 80 degrees outside in the rain, in the wind at night in a lightning storm. You're freezing. And so by, you know, 2 AM, I'm convulsively shivering and we're using the crocodile eyes, the caiman eyes on the side of the river as, because we, it was so dark, we couldn't see where we were going. So those shine back at you. So I'm, I was finding the caiman eyes and then motioning with the light to Ignacio where to go. And he knew how to find the channel. We had to jump the waterfalls. We did the 2-day boat ride in 1 night.

Nice.

And we got there and we arrive at this community where, and it's morning now and the howler monkeys are calling over the jungle and, you know, the little naked children are all by the side and everyone's scared. And we get a hug from this guy Bacho who we know, and they're like, come in, come in, come in. And they're like, the tribe came out yesterday that we saw a few of them on the beach and they're gone now. And so we collapsed, we fell asleep. Rained the whole day. That night we went out and we looked for them and there was this crazy moment where we're standing on this beach and their footprints were there and the local indigenous anthropologist was standing there and we're standing at the edge of this beach looking out into the Amazon beyond and there's just all this wreckage. It looked like something very Cormac McCarthy, just dark sky, iron clouds, and we're standing there Everyone is waiting because at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck and there's people holding shotguns and the anthropologist, this little guy is standing there in the front and he's going, "Nomole." He's going, "Brothers." There's only a few words that intersect between the languages and he's going, "Brothers, we're here. We don't want to hurt you." He's speaking in the Yine language and he's saying, "Come out." And you can tell by their footprints, the trackers explain this to us, that you could see it was just the balls of their feet. So right as we pulled up to the beach, they had run. So they were there listening to us and he's going, no mole, come out. It's okay. Lay down your arms. We'll lay down ours. No mole. Just kept saying no mole. And nothing happened. And we went back to the village. We went to sleep. We wake up the next morning and it's 5 AM. And again, we're trying to save the jungle. We're in a race against time to get these land concessions. And so my team, like Mohsin and Stefan, JJ couldn't come because he was in town actually signing paperwork and interviewing loggers and landowners. And also he didn't think that there was any chance this was going to be real because in his entire 50-something years in the Amazon, he's never seen them. And so we're getting ready to leave in the morning. We had tents on the boat and Ignacio comes up to me and he goes, you're my director, right? You're my boss. And I went, yeah. He goes, I need to talk to you like a friend. I said, yeah, shoot, shoot, go. And he goes, you'd be an idiot to leave right now. He goes, they're coming. And so he convinced us to stay. We pull our tents off the boat. Stefan and Mohsen go off with their cameras. They start shooting, you know, people. These are monkey eaters and fishermen, the community that we're in. And everything's quiet. And I opened my laptop and I was working, just writing, writing my book. And then, then it happened. Then you start hearing people screaming, "Mashko! Mashko!" And people are screaming and women are lifting children and running into the huts and the dogs and chickens are going nuts. And I mean—

So fear. Fear.

Fear.

Because we should say, kind of the obvious thing is, as far as anyone remembers, any encounters, any minimal small encounters with these tribes have been violent.

Extremely violent. These tribes have remained alive because of their violence, almost like the Spartans or the Comanches. They seem to have adopted violence as a first response to contact.

Uh, maybe you can correct me on this, but I read that, uh, in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there was documentation of encounters with these tribes by the private armies of the rubber barons. And those encounters were from the rubber barons' armies perspective violent.

Yeah.

And so maybe the lesson they learned, the uncontacted tribes, is that any interaction with the outside world is going to have to be violent because they have to defend themselves.

Yeah. You had colonial missionaries in the 1600s, 1700s. Then you had the rubber barons, late 1800s into the 1900s, just periods of extraction and domination and cruelty. And these tribes, their grandparents must have told them, when the outside world comes, you shoot first. That's the only thing that's going to keep you alive.

Do you think the memory of that, those violent encounters, is defining to how they think about the world?

Yeah, because even in my lifetime there, in the 20 years I've spent in the Amazon, Ignacio was shot in the head. My friend Victor survived a violent encounter where they murdered somebody on a beach. I mean, they've shot numerous people. They've even shot people who were trying to help them, people who were trying to give them clothing and bananas. They've just where they, they call it porcupining them, where they find a body on the beach with so many arrows that when they fall over, all the arrows are sticking up. And so they think, and they'll do it out of curiosity too, where it's like, hey, you're wearing a suit. That's weird. We've never seen anybody in a black and white suit. And then get a close, you know, the way Teddy Roosevelt would shoot a bird for science. They're like, they'll just want, they just want to look at you. And so they're operating on a different, they don't have a moral system that we have or understand. They're just, They're truly wild.

How does Ignacio think about them? Because they almost killed him.

Yes. It depends on the mood you get him in, because if you ask him, one day I asked him, I said, if you could see the people that shot you in the head, what would you say to them? And he looked at me with that Ignacio look, and he said, I wouldn't say anything. I would kill as many of them as I could. I said, okay. He also had a time where he was in a really remote guard station working for the Ministry of Culture, and they showed up. And he knew that they were going to kill him. And so he climbed up into the, the peak of that, of the little structure there. And just like, you know, like a dog in a car, that greenhouse effect in the top at midday with the sun beating down, he was huddled over a mattress while they were walking on the deck, moving pots and pans and looking at our items and artifacts. And he knew that if he was found, they'd kill him. But if he stayed up there, he was literally frying to death. He said he was soaking the mattress. He was, he could feel himself dying for 2 hours. He had to stay there and he is constantly making this decision of, if I come out, I die. If I stay here, I probably die. He's like, probably die is better than definitely die. So he's terrified. And so as they're screaming, "Mash, go!" And everybody's running and women are lifting children, Ignacio comes and finds me. And you can see in his eyes, you can see when somebody has that PTSD response where he's breathing heavy. He's, he's, he's moving behind trees. He's not, he's keeping me close to him and he's going, "Look there. He has a boat. He has a boat." And we're looking up the beach. And there's just this clan of naked men walking down the beach with these 7-foot bows and they're hunched over and they're pointing at us. They're going, look at that one. They're going, look, there's a gun there. And you can see them communicating to each other and the butterflies are swirling off the beach and, you know, in these moments you go, am I, am I entering a moment that I can't, is this, is this a one-way door? Is this, is this not something that, is this an irreversible situation? Because there's an unfolding situation where they're coming at towards us. Are they going to attack? What do they want? Is there going to be a— I mean, I'm, I'm, I am soaked in chills right now just talking about it because I remember standing there and going, there's no way this is real life. I say it's burned into my memory, them walking down the beach and seeing them with the bows. And of course, you know, Stefan is up there just firing off pictures and, and, and Mohsen is down getting video and the, the community that we're with, people had, you know, you hear shotgun shells loading home and them, and them loading it. But they're also, they're getting ready. And there's this one guy, this anthropologist named Rommel, who has been the only person who has communicated with them peacefully. He did it in 2013 where he stood on the beach and he spoke to them. He knows enough of the local dialect that overlaps with theirs that he can speak to them. And so as they're coming down the beach, the butterflies are flying up and we're all waiting. And again, shotgun, You're talking, you know, how many meters? 30, 40 meters. I don't know, accurate. For an arrow, you loose a 7-foot arrow that weighs nothing, you're talking about 300 meters easy. They can shoot you from across the river. So Ignacio was like pulling me and he was like, down. He's like, you go down. He was like, you stay behind this tree. And he's like, you watch them from there. He's like, watch out, that guy has an arrow. He's like, he was watching everyone. 'Cause you could see, he's like, this is how it happens.

Did you think you might, this might be the last? Day you have on this earth? Were you afraid?

I was, yeah, yeah, of course I was afraid. Um, it's, you're with, you're with, I'm with my two best friends and a bunch of people that I work very closely with, and you're in the middle of nowhere, and there's no help coming, and you're with like, you know, 26 people, and there's 50 of the tribe that you can see, and you know that they're surrounding us. There's all men on the other side of the river, and then we had, we had guns looking back towards the jungle because we knew we were being surrounded. And so, again, this is always the story of someone's uncle, brother, cousin tells a story that happened, and now it's happening. And it's not happening in the shadows. It's not happening in the middle of the night. It's happening in broad daylight. They're walking out onto the beach. You know, it's like the first time they saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. You're going, "Uh-uh.

There's no way." And you are kind of walking on the knife's edge of— And it's funny you say Stefano was taking pictures because there's two ways to think of the situation. "this is fascinating" or "this is extremely dangerous." And it's both. It is a nice edge. So you could approach it one of the two ways. Like, "If I die, I die. I'm gonna take some good pictures." But also, we're there—

that was also our mission, you know? As the directors of Jungle Keepers, we're working with this community to ensure that their lifestyle can continue. And they're saying, "Hey, that's great, but as an indigenous community, we're dealing with these people that come out and raid our stuff, try and steal our women, that kill our hunters. And now they're coming out. We want you to see it." And so, documenting that documenting it is part of our job. We have to show what happened that day. And so those guys were shooting, um, and then yes, very seriously. It's actually— so Mohsin's wife and I, we always joked about like, oh, if the tribe ever comes out, like, you stand in front of him. Like, you take the arrow. He has kids. And it was, you know, that day it was like we were strategically positioning ourselves, being like, you know, you down. You cannot get killed. And it was— you start in those moments to go, okay, Where can, where will I be safe from arrows? Where can I run to the river if they, if they come over? And you start planning, okay, if I jump into the river, I was going, okay, I got my bag, I have a can of tuna, I have a flashlight. I was like, if I jump into the river and float down and I live, I'm still days upriver. And so you, you start going through all these things, but, and of course the, the Machu Picchu people are thinking exactly the same thing.

Probably.

Well, well, the, the interesting thing is that they're initiating the contact, right? They're, they are the ones coming out of the jungle and confronting us.

And fundamentally, that contact is— they're at least giving peace a chance. It's just they're trying the peaceful contact first, correct? Or is there a violent element? Like, what did you sense in the caution of them emerging to the beach?

Fear. Fear. As they came out, you could see fear on them because the way they were hunched over, the way they had their bows ready, they were worried. And so they came and, you know, Rommel is standing there as closer than any of us at the edge of on one side of the river. And it was like, you know, shirts versus skins. It was two tribes looking at each other with a thousand years of civilization between them. And Rommel's going, put down your bows, put down your bows and we can talk. And he's, you know, no mole, no mole. He kept saying no mole. He kept saying brothers, brothers, please put down your.

So no mole means brother. In a language that they might be able to understand.

Nomoli means brother in a language that they do understand. And it's, and it seems like they refer to themselves as the nomolis, the, the brothers.

So potentially that's what they call themselves as a tribe is nomolis.

Exactly. And actually the anthropologists that we've been speaking to post this event have been explaining to us that Mashko Piro, you know, Piro is the, is the, the, the group that they're from, these, these various nomadic tribes. And Mashko basically means like wild Piros. So the one thing we know they call themselves is Nomoles.

So at the end of this, we might converge towards the name of this tribe being Nomole versus Mashco-Piro.

The Nomoles, yeah. Seems like the most current, or at least their self-appointed identity, is the brothers, Nomole.

Anyway, there's these shredded warriors on the beach.

Yeah. With 7-foot arrows. And we're all standing there, and so the— And the first thing, again, you just think of like, you know, the peace pipe and the old stories. And the first thing is let's make them an offering of peace. And so they got a canoe with no motor and we piled it with plantains, like just full of plantains, 16 feet of endless green bananas. And then, I mean, the balls on this guy, the anthropologist, he gets into the river, takes the canoe and it's the dry season. So the river is only about 3, 4 feet deep at the channel. And so he walks this thing out. There's one man walking in the face of all these warriors, and he takes the boat and he pushes it towards them. And they rush out and they start grabbing the bananas. And they're not going, okay, we will unload these bananas and use them later. They're my bananas. And you're grabbing your bananas. And they're fighting and they're yelling and they're all grabbing and they're grabbing them. And then they push the boat back. And he talks to them a little bit. And again, it's not a perfect translation. So he's, you know, he's saying, where have you come from? What do you want? Who's your leader? He's trying to establish these things and they're saying things and they all sort of talk at the same time like a flock of birds. They're not, they don't have, it wasn't like one man speaks and there was no women. The women were, the women were nowhere to be seen. And actually at one point as we were preparing, I think it was while we were preparing the second canoe of bananas, there was a moment of absolute panic and, and it happened when there was a noise behind us and you just hear a bunch of shotguns swing behind us. You know, Mohsin goes down, I go running away from the river now, because again, I want to see it coming if there's an attack coming. And I'm standing, me and this guy, we're sharing a tree as cover, and he's got a shotgun and he's looking back into the forest and peering through. And what was happening was the women of the tribe had come silent foot and they were just pulling the yuca out of the ground and taking the banana plants and ruining the farm completely. But they were raiding the farm behind us. While the men were talking up here. So again, were they peacefully contacting us or were they like, hey, we need some food, so go make a diversion and take the food up back?

I mean, you really were surrounded.

We were completely surrounded.

So they could have murdered all of you probably.

Easily. We were outnumbered 5 to 1 at the least.

Yeah. And it's probably fair to say that part of the reason they did, maybe they wanted peace, but part of the reason is they didn't know how deep this goes. They didn't know if you have backup.

They don't know if we have backup. They also, they had questions. They were asking, some of their questions were incredible. How do we tell the difference between, how do we know who the good guys and the bad guys are? Because to them, all you outsiders are the same. So why, who are the ones cutting down the trees?

And those are the ones they know are the bad guys.

Well, the big trees seem to have incredible significance to them. They're significant to us in a different way, but to them it's It's, it's a, it's offensive on an almost religious level to cut a big tree as if you're, as if you're killing their gods.

So there's a spirituality to the trees.

It seems like that.

And so whoever's cutting them down is a source of destruction on a spiritual, existential level.

Yeah, well, how could, why would you destroy our home? I think they're right. Yeah.

In a deep sense, the uncontacted tribes represent the deep deep jungle. And so if they're threatened, that means the jungle, the deep jungle is threatened.

Yeah, I mean, they are the human voice of the jungle and they're asking questions. They're also demanding, you know, they're clapping at us and they're waving and they're saying, send more, send more bananas. And so they loaded up another boat and they pushed another boat out. And this time they gave them some rope. They all had rope tied around their waists, penises tied up. But they love rope. And some of them were wearing rope that they had made, which is brown or reddish, and then some of them were wearing rope that they had clearly pillaged from logging camps or the communities because it was modern nylon paracord. And they had this wound around their waists like a thick belt. And they took the second boat, and that way they had some, some rope and they had some plantains on there.

So some of these guys might have been the ones that murdered the loggers.

Could be.

From a couple months before that.

Absolutely could be. But what Rommel said as he was talking to them, he turned to us and he said, you know, this group, he said, the other groups call me the grandfather. He said, this group, he said, I don't know any of these. He said, this is first contact. He said, this is the first time this group is talking to us. And you saw people from maybe 12 years old to what looks like 40-something, like a banged up 40. And, and no really old people and no women.

So this is a particular clan, a particular tribe that never contacted.

Yeah.

Is there, just from your memory, interesting aspects about the way they were trying to communicate? Like you said, clapping. I think it's, uh, from an anthropology perspective, from a human perspective, fascinating. How do you talk to people from an uncontacted tribe like this? So clapping, yelling. It's interesting to know that there's not a hierarchy where there's a leader that represents, or is that we know for sure.

Before even coming to talk to you about this, we passed this through anthropologists and ethicists and people. And we, you know, we said, look, is it even, can we talk about this? Because if you talk about this and you tell people there's these uncontacted tribes, people have misconceptions. They go, they're the last free people on earth. They're living the real life. We need to go join them. We want to see them. We want to photograph. There's all this bad stuff that happens. And all these people want us to be left alone. So the last thing we want to do is, is kill the thing we're trying to protect and tell the world, but at the same time, they're speaking out. They're saying, stop cutting our trees, leave us alone. And so if we're not successful in, in the greater Jungle Keepers mission of protecting this river, they cease to exist. And so advocating for these people requires us to have this conversation and requires us to have this footage and to show the world. And then leave them alone. In order for any of this to make sense, I have to show you this footage.

And this has not been shown ever before.

This is a world first. I mean, up until now, that's the other thing, you know, we're sitting there this day and, you know, the only thing you've ever seen are these blurry images of someone's cell phone from 100 meters away of the uncontacted tribes. And we're sitting there with, you know, 800mm with a 2x teleconverter and, you know, R5s. And so this is as we're looking through the farms anticipating the tribe coming. I'll put a little bit of volume so you can hear it. And then you can see this is the moment. This is us running when they're like, "They're out. They're coming down the beach." Yeah.

Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

You see how many I mean, thousands of butterflies. But look at the way they move. Look at the way they point. Look at him with his bow.

Wow. They're trying to figure out what they're looking at.

Uh-huh. And they didn't know what the cameras are there, so this was the guys looking out the back. Back. So he's going, "There's something back here." He could hear the women in the farm. And I'm looking in every direction because I'm going, "Which way is the arrow coming from?" But see, he has his shotgun. This is just like a farm shotgun. Even if he shot it, you have to use a stick to bang out the shell. But see, as they come closer, they start laying down their— see, he's laying down his bow and arrow. They understand. No mole.

So these are warriors, and the way they were At first moving, it really looked like they're ready for violence, and now they're all standing in a relaxed—

yeah, and smiling.

Are they smiling?

Smiles come at some point. I would say that one of these guys seemed like, uh, in a leadership position. He did most of the talking.

What, what's with the different hand gestures? This, the holding your hand up to the face, all of All of this means something.

All of this means something. Some had red smeared on their faces, some had yellow.

Did you have a sense of hierarchy at all, like the boss?

Again, there was just these two dominant guys, and like this guy and one other guy who looked almost like him, like his brother. Yeah.

Wow. This is incredible, Paul.

Yeah, you see the rope? Yeah, some of that rope is—

yeah, I can kind of tell who the, who the bosses are, right?

All right, so a few of the But see, even that, as he's pointing, we're going, what are you, what are you, what are you pointing at?

You guys are nuts. You guys are nuts.

Uh, you see his So they're rushing in, there's this desperation, they're hungry.

Is that in the water, is that Ramo in the water?

In this particular video, it's a guy named Liner. But like, see these guys, they're fighting over it. It's not that we're all gonna share it later, it's I get mine, you get yours. And so what does that mean? Yeah.

But here they're in peaceful mode.

Now after we'd given them After we'd given them several boatloads of bananas, things did calm down. Rommel said to them, "You know, look, we've given you what we can give you. We gave you sugarcane. We gave you boatloads of plantains." And so then there came a time where things were a little more relaxed. They were walking around. We were— at one point, we had a great moment where we'd given them the plantains, we'd given them the bananas, And, and he'd said, look, this is, that's it. He said, we, we've given you what, what you asked for. You asked for bananas. We don't, we don't cut the trees here. All of us here are not tree cutters. We're indigenous people. And, and he, he couldn't explain who the hell we were, but they were like, we don't cut the trees. We're not the loggers. And they're like, okay. So then at some point, you know, Ignacio went out and like, sort of like started, you know, he'd go like this and they'd go like this and, you know, he'd like dance a little bit. They danced a little bit. And then there was this very human moment of just sort of joking.

So even Ignacio warmed up.

Even Ignacio warmed up. Once he realized it didn't seem like anyone was gonna die that day, things did calm down. It was a false sense of security. Here, I'll show you. There's a couple more things that are relevant here, though. Yeah, this is just them interacting with the boats.

This is truly incredible, man.

But then they don't have boats. They don't have stone tools. They don't— Imagine if you showed them ice.

—this is historic.

I mean, it's the—I mean, you hear Percy Fawcett encountering the tribes. We've heard of anecdotal accounts of the tribes. This is the first time that the tribes have been filmed, that we can hear their voices, that there's a documented interaction happening. I mean, this now—look how comfortable he's getting. He's so close. They asked him for gave his shirt. He gave his shirt. They asked him for his pants. He gave his pants. He was in his underwear. Yeah, you see this, the shirt that's over his shoulder? Ignacio took off his Jungle Keeper shirt and threw it to the anthropologist, and then the anthropologist walked it off and threw it to them. So over the shoulder of that uncontacted naked warrior is a Jungle Keeper shirt with the logo showing. So they're like their second shirt.

You just upgraded that guy's status in the tribe. He's gonna be the new boss with that shirt.

He's got a dope-ass polo. Yeah. He didn't even have to order it. But yeah, this is in like the aftermath when things were calm. And then my sort of moment with this that really stuck with me was when Rommel said to me, he said, you know, they, he said, they're asking about you. And I said, what are they asking? I said, you know, me? And he goes, yeah, they're asking about you. And you know, again, I'm not tall, but I'm, I compared to the people in the village, I was a little bit taller and big shoulders, and he said, "They said you look like a warrior." He said, "Could you come forward?" He said, "Show them that you don't mean any harm." He said, "Show them your palms." And so he pulled me up onto the beach, and this was right before they left. But see, I hold up my hands, listen. And they sang back. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] They're singing. They raise their hands, I raise my hands.

Wow.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] And then we were left with watching them walk off the beach. Into the jungle with everything that we'd given them, and they were gone. And so we went downriver the next day, and the community said to us, okay, now you understand this is real. This is terrifying. You felt that fear. You have a duty, if you're going to protect this river, to protect us from them and to help us figure out what future they want. If they want to come to us, if they want to learn farming, if they, whatever it is. you know, that's, that's fine, but they were like, we need protection from you guys. And then in this video in the beginning, I'm sort of narrating to the camera and walking around right as they're coming up the beach. But you see this guy right there in the blue shirt. That's George. And he was very friendly, very confident with this. He said, don't be scared. They're not going to hurt us. And the next day we went back to town, you know, long journey back to town, go to sleep. We wake up in the morning and we find out that the following early morning, our friends in the community had said, okay, the tribe is gone. We gave them all the things they wanted. We gave them sugarcane, bananas. We said, please come back. You're welcome here anytime. And George was driving a boat and there was people on the boat. And as they were going upriver, the tribe, 200 of the tribe ran out surrounded the boat and they started firing arrows and everybody else could hit the deck and get under the benches and hide behind bags of rice. George was driving and he was leaning back as he's driving. He's driving as fast as he can. And one arrow came in just above his scapula and came out by his belly button. And so he had that 7-foot arrow tip through him. And so they pulled him out and I saw the boat afterward and there's just, you know, horrific amounts of blood all over the boat. And he had to be medevacked out and somehow he lived. And we were able to help getting him a helicopter, getting him evaced, all this. But again, you just go, you know, these people came out of the jungle and they asked for bananas. We gave them bananas and we, in every way possible, said, we mean peace. We want friendship with you. And then the next day, Uh, they attacked.

What do you think happened? Why do you think their mind turned? Or maybe this has to do with the role of violence in their society. Maybe they, it's so, uh, integrated into how they interact with the world that they don't even see that as a fundamental shift in the interaction. I don't know.

I don't know what to make of it. And the only thing I can think is that The way they hid the women from us, you don't know for them, maybe we're not allowed to see their women. You know, or, or because the one thing that we got was that as George, George's boat and this other boat were going upriver, the, which is how they live, these, it's not like they were doing anything wrong. These people live in a community days into the Amazon. They were going fishing. And so they came around a bend and I think they spooked the tribe. The tribe might have just acted defensively and said, ah, we don't know who this is. The motors could have set them off. We don't know. Um, they, but they, they shot him. And then the other thing is the, the thing with the necklace. I've asked anthropologists about this and their answer was that at this point they said, you know more than we do. But that, yeah, because two of them had the exact same item around their necks and it seems to be a Brazil nut and then some sort of casing around the side, and it looked like animal teeth positioned in there. And it's like, what are you carrying? Are you carrying medicine? Are you carrying some sort of a totem? Are you— but both of them, and it's not a comfortable thing to wear around your neck, you know, grapefruit-sized, bigger.

Do you have a sense that that's a container, or is it just like a totem?

It seems like a container. They didn't let it get wet. They cared for it. The guy in this picture, so he's got this, this is a piece of tree fiber that he has it on. And then he's gotten his hands on Brazil nut sacks, plastic sacks from one of the farms across the river. And so they just take, they take. And one of them got a machete and he was walking as they were leaving. Again, during that period where it got friendly, he was leaving and he had the machete and he was playing with the machete and like swinging it at butterflies. And one of my friends, this guy Bacho, he goes, "Oi!" He goes, "Deja mi machete!" He was like, you know, drop the machete. And the guy just looked at him and was like, yeah, come and get it. Yeah, you know, it's like, yeah, you cross the river and see what happens.

Do you think he figured out, or they later figured out, how to use a machete? Oh, they know machete.

They understand. Yeah, yeah, they do raids for machetes. Okay. Yeah, they understand the power of a sharpened metal. It's, I mean, it's a, it's an Excalibur sword to them, you know. Um, but yeah, that, that one, that one has stuck with me because I go, what were they carrying in there?

So what are some of the questions? Like if you can know everything you'd want to know about them. So maybe in the space of communication and language, that's really interesting. You mentioned that there's all kinds of calls, animal calls. So they obviously know how to fake animal calls.

Yeah, they speak in, they can use animal calls with enough complexity that they can do basic commands. So they can speak in Capuchin, they use tinimucals. Some of our rangers were upriver a few months ago. This is long after this. This is recently. Just recently, they were upriver and they found a trail, let's say nomole trail, a Mashco Piro trail. And it was Ignacio, of course. And he made the— there's like a secret whistle they do, this mouth. And he whistled out into the jungle and he was listening and they whistled back. And so him and everybody on the team just ran back to the boat and got out of there. But it was like, at least they answered. They didn't just shoot. They— he whistled, they whistled, and they said, out. And he got out. But it's like, we don't know where are the old people. Do they not survive? What is the— what are the marriage rituals? How is reproduction handled? There's one or two children in the Amazon that I know of who have, you know, washed downriver on a log and been rescued by communities and then raised, and they either learn the native dialect or Spanish. And then, of course, at some point somebody will go and say, "Hey, what was it like when you lived with them?" And the answer is always the same. "I forget." They don't talk about it.

So maybe we know that they value secrecy. I mean, when you're afraid of the outside world, you don't— part of that is confidentiality. They all sign NDAs. They have some really good NDAs. It's understood. It's an NDA. There's no lawyers. There's only one way to execute the law.

Yeah, it's either a really strong NDA or, or, or that it's, it is savage that they're living out there in the jungle and that you're eating monkeys and turtles and you're hungry for days on end. And, you know, your wife might get stolen by another tribe. Your baby might get stolen. You know, I mean, imagine the botflies and the, and the things that they must put up with. It's, it's just I mean, what we experienced in, what, 3 days of living out with modern camping gear and headlamps and a sense of direction, and they're doing none of that. You could put us out there naked, a very different story.

So yeah, the brutality of nature. Yeah, Werner Herzog comes to mind. That they have to live in that. But then there must be— there's something about the jungle that serves as a catalyst for spirituality. So they must also have religious component, a spiritual component that probably unifies them. There must be an ideology they operate under.

Oh, there must be. And there, there, there must, there's many things they must have. They must have a belief system. They probably have amazing origin stories. Um, it would be amazing to know what things they have accurately and inaccurately guessed about us, about the outside world. I mean, they've never They've never heard of the country they live in or of World War II or any of it. And so seeing them come across the beach was surreal because it's like this aperture into history.

By the way, I mean, you do have a certain look. So you realize like them singing to you, your face is carved in some wood somewhere and there's a few of them gathering around and like still singing about the great gringo, the, with the beard, with the beard, nose.

They probably drew this like he's got 'He's got hair all over his face and a huge nose,' and they tell their children.

And it could be anything. They— you could be like, to the children, they say, 'This is the monster you should be afraid of,' or you— this could be the, the most beautiful encapsulation of the outside world. It could be every— everything in between. You don't get to control them.

You don't get to control the myths. Um, yeah, God only knows. But I mean, it's so interesting. So now, now in that 130,000 acres that we have, we know, and this is what We're sort of, we sort of have to come out of the closet with this. Like, we are now protecting these people. And the only way to do that is to make sure that they're not contacted, let alone that they don't get machine guns shot at them by the narcos, or that crazy, you know, hippie gringos don't go down there thinking they're gonna, you know, join, join the, the coolest commune on earth.

So how much of the land that they they move about is within the 130,000 acres of rainforest you've been able to save, and how much of it is not? How much of it is in the extra 200,000 acres that you're trying to save?

Most of the rest, most of that 200,000 that we're still trying to protect is territory that is theirs. And in order— and in order— people always ask me, they're like, first, a lot of people ask, how could you buy the Amazon? They're like, that doesn't make sense. And it's like, I have bad news for you. Somebody already owns it and we have to buy it from them so that they don't log it. And so these landowners are going to sell their forest to the logging companies because owning 10,000 acres of the Amazon doesn't help you if you're a third generation jungle man. And now it's just something that's up there and you live in the city. And so they're going to contract either the narcos or the loggers or the miners to go out there and use it. It and they'll get a little money. And those people, when they see these people, will kill them. That's for sure. And shotguns and machine guns in the end will win, not to mention the germs.

So all the money you're trying to raise and all the land that you're trying to save, it's all towards that, protecting the deep jungle. So when you buy up the jungle, you just want to let it be, let the natural ecosystem come back to life in the cases when it was logged or just flourish if it hasn't.

Again, we're talking about the last great jungle. I always called it the last endless forest because this place is so incredibly remote. And then the other question I always get is people say, well, why is this river so, so important? And for my whole career, my whole time, 20 years in the Amazon, it's been that it's massively intact forest, places like the ancient forest where the trees have never been cut. So it's forest that's been growing since the dawn of time and thousands of species can be on a single shiwawako tree and it's, it's avatar on earth. It's, it's, you can see the sweat come off your skin and rain down and then drink it out of the river and you're part of the chemical physical reality there. And so it's the, one of the last places that's untouched. This changed everything because we realized that along with the butterflies and the monkeys and the jaguars and the trees and the ecosystem, there's also a human culture that will, in the next few years, cease to exist, that will be exterminated if we don't protect them. And when you look back at what happened to indigenous cultures all over the world over the past few centuries, that they've been wiped out. We collectively now, because we know this, have a chance to undo all of the injustices that happened in the past by at least doing one right, by saying these people want one thing, to just be left alone. Imagine if we just protected the river. And then it's not that they're this thing that's vanishing from reality, but they get to continue living that way. And then if they want to come out and contact us, great. And if they want to continue living like this for the next 10,000 years, they can. And that's what we're working with now. It's become so much more important than just, you know, we're trying to protect the environment. It's like, no, we're trying to protect, you know, things like Yellowstone and Yosemite and the sequoias occur nowhere else on Earth. You protect the things that are unique and special, the crown jewels. And in both a biological way as well as an anthropocentric way, this has now become a river with global historic significance because this story is going to play out in the next 18 months.

You're, you're further and further, further trying to save more and more rainforest. And the mission is clear because there's just this deep jungle that's full of this incredible life. And now we know with uncontacted tribes, there's a lot of interests that don't care about the jungle they're pushing and want to cut it down, want to destroy it. And the mission is pretty clear.

You just want this whole territory to be preserved. Yeah. And that's what makes it so beautiful is that this is one of those crown jewels. This is one of those special places on earth where it's like a time capsule for nature, for human culture, for biodiversity, for climate services, for everything. And then You know, I think people get overwhelmed with where you say, okay, we, we have to save the environment. We have to save the ocean. This is one watershed. It's 300,000 acres and we're already at 130,000. We've shown we can do it. The loggers are happy to turn into rangers. People all over the world have become Jungle Keeper supporters. We have several thousand people that every month give us between $500 and $1,000 every single month. Month. And that keeps the rangers going, that employs the local people. So it's not just making a, you know, drawing a line and making a park and saying everybody stay out. It's like, no, you have the Nomoles, you have the indigenous people, you have, you have a future for the indigenous people where their, their kids don't have to worry about like eating monkeys. They can, they can be park rangers. And I get blowback from people right away where I say like, and people can even come see it through the treehouse or something. And people go, oh, are you going to bring tourists into the wildest place on earth? And it's like, man, look at that jungle. And it's like that 300,000 acres of that. And you're talking about on a football field, we're talking about two blades of grass that we access so people can see it, which makes a huge difference. And so like the fact that we can share it with people, that people, I mean, the amount of people that listens to, look, like since, since the first time I came here and spoke to you, the amount to which you've made it possible for us to protect this place, the amount of spider monkeys and jaguars and giant anteaters and, and those ancient millennium trees that you've made it possible to protect is monstrous. And so thank you, brother.

It's been an honor of a lifetime to be able to watch you. I tell a lot of people, there's certain people I'm glad exist in this world because you've educated me and, and, uh, millions of people about the beauty of the jungle and then how important the fight to save the jungle is. Uh, so if you're listening to this, you absolutely must go please donate or post about it, share it with friends, uh, junglekeepers.org. You're also doing a gala in New York at the end of January. Mm-hmm. So if you can, please go and donate to help save the jungle.

Yes, please do. And because our first conversation led to the first surge where people realized what Jungle Keepers was, and then because we got this surge of support, then we were able to expand our work, protect more acres. A lot of our major donors, a lot of our small-scale donors came in because of that. And so these are people that went, wait, if Lex thinks it's a good idea, then we'll do it. And that, based on your trust, they came in.

And so I guess also I should say it's not enough to speak and communicate the importance of saving the rainforest. You actually have to have incredible people that are making it happen. And we have talked and we'll talk more about the dangers and the complexities involved of how to navigate everything. And one of the things and the reason I'm really excited about what you're doing is I just got to meet the team and it just brings a smile to my face. Several of the people I know who are extremely competent. Stéphane, somebody we've talked about. Yes, he likes to take pictures of stuff, but primarily the thing he does incredibly well is um, run everything, organize everything, to make sure that stuff happens and happens quickly and efficiently. All the kind of things that are required to make stuff like this happen in the, in the complex environment that the jungle operates in, the sometimes lawless environment that the jungle operates in. So, the team is incredible, which is why when you sort of connect the money, uh, how does the money lead to the solution of the problem? It's the team, and the team makes it happen.

I didn't know that people like Stefan existed.

Yeah, me neither, you know, because when I met him, I, I just like—

I was a beautiful, wonderful human being. I just, I'm, I'm, you know, again, I can, I can use a machete to catch a fish. Yeah, but like his systems knowledge and his ability, I mean, his bandwidth is the size of a country. It has its own area code. It's He's, you know, just like JJ opened the door of the Amazon and gave us that local indigenous perspective. I mean, yeah, okay, I told some stories about it, but like Stefan came in and went, okay, you guys have good ideas, but you're both jungle guys. You're not helping each other. And running those systems and making the website and making it possible to connect the people that care with the indigenous ranger program and make sure the rangers have shirts and cans of tuna and that there's a person running the ranger team. And these are things that I couldn't dream of organizing. I can't even organize my, I can't even I can't even make my bed. You know, I can't even get that far. I mean— Caveman want fish.

Caveman want fish. Watching you fish or hunt for fish with a machete is one of the most awesome things I've ever seen. You're literally able to catch a fish with a machete. Yeah. So that's what you're good at. And then Stéphane is good at everything else. Everything else.

His, you know, remember the most interesting man in the world and they're like, you know, he once had an awkward moment just to see how it felt. Like Stefan's to-do list doesn't exist because it's already done. You know, he just, it's just incredible.

Quick pause. Bath break. Oh, 100%. I'm so happy about that. Yes, sir. And we're back. One thing I forgot to ask you is about the diet of the uncontacted tribes. You mentioned potentially monkeys and turtle eggs. Yeah. So like, what do we know about what they eat? What's the source of protein? Do they eat monkeys? Oh yeah.

Their primary sources of food, I would say, would be monkeys, turtles, turtle eggs, and small game like, like paca, the large rodent that's like the size of a beagle, capybaras, stuff they can shoot. They don't really fish. And we know these things because our indigenous trackers and our rangers find their camps. And so they'll find some of those little little thatched structures they make on the beaches. And we see the bones. There'll be tapir bones. There'll be turtle shells, which seems like is their closest thing to a bowl. The day that we interacted with them, they did find a bowl in the— we saw them walking away with it in one of the farms. And then days later, we found it destroyed. So they didn't seem like they saw much utility in the bowl.

Hmm. It's temporary. It's temporary.

So they, you know, they kill it, they make a fire. They must be amazing at making fire. I don't know how How do they do it out there?

It's very difficult because of everything is wet.

I don't know how they do it. And I'm a really good fire starter.

And it's tough in the jungle.

It is almost impossible most of the year because everything is wet to its core.

So you think they cook the meat?

I mean, they have to be cooking their meat from a parasite standpoint, from everything. We know that they're cooking their meat. We see it, that they've cooked it. You know, there's not a lot of excess berries, things like berries and nuts and fruits, the monkeys and the birds and the bats are getting to those first. As soon as, I mean, that's what fruit does, right? A tomato is green until its seeds are mature and then it turns red to advertise, eat me, so that you eat it and then your gut transports that to somewhere else and it gets free transportation. In the jungle, that happens so quick that you were never getting produce.

In the book, you have a picture of a native girl on the Las Piedras having monkey. Monkey for lunch. Yes. Um, it, it, it looks really strange when you have the monkey kind of looks just a little, it looks a little bit like cannibalism cuz it looks like a small human. Mm-hmm. I don't know what it is about, uh, well, I guess I do about monkeys. There's a human element to them in their eyes, in their in the form factor, but even in the warmth they bring to the interaction.

Yeah, I was babysitting her and she was 6 at the time, Daira, and her parents went out and we were left at camp and they just said, you know, keep an eye on her, make sure nothing eats her. And I said, sure. And she was like, hey, I want lunch. And I said, great, well, what is there? And she pulls out this monkey head and she was like, it's ready. And she starts pulling at the ear and she's like, I can't get the ear. She's like, can you help me? So I pulled off the ear with my teeth and then I gave it to her. And then we just shared this monkey head back and forth. And we're sitting there and I, you know, I took a few pictures of her as she's eating. And I have this video where I go, what's your favorite food? And she was like, monkey. And I said, not cake? And she was like, monkey. And she was like pulling its lips off. And like you said, you see the teeth and the eyes and it's like sort of grilled in static agony. Yeah. And it looks like a tortured human and she was just enjoying it.

Let me look it up on Perplexity. How many Uh, people in the world eat monkey. Does it taste good?

If it was prepared right, it would taste good, but they just throw it over the fire and then eat it. And so, I mean, even if you took a perfectly good chicken and did that, it wouldn't taste great.

There's no reliable global count of how many people eat monkey meat, but available data suggests many millions of people regularly or occasionally consume consume, uh, primate bushmeat, especially in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. I mean, she looks like that is her favorite meal.

Yeah. Is monkey. Yeah. Yeah, we had a great time. Who are we to judge? Who are we to judge? I mean, have a tuna sandwich or a monkey face, whatever.

She's loving it. That's awesome. It's adorable. Yeah. Now that some time has passed, when you look back at that encounter, which I really do think is historic with the uncontacted tribe, what do you think about? What lingers with you?

Honestly, I'm still processing it. I'll still find myself just staring off, sort of remembering it or looking at the footage, but it felt like the voice of the jungle. Was speaking. You know, these, these people are, there's that separation between humans and nature where we go, we have to protect nature. You know, it's like the fish that, you know, explaining what water is to a fish. We're part of it. We depend on it. And these are people that depend on it 100%. And as we sit here surrounded by technology and concrete and civilization, they're still out there right now. And the fact that we've been trying to protect their home without even really knowing that they were in it because they're so elusive, it gives you perspective on where we came from and how far we've come. You know, I look at simple things, you know, you board an airplane or you take a picture and you go, this is a miracle. And I think having that perspective of having interacted with them where you go, go, you know, how much work does it take to make this? If me and you were standing in the jungle and somebody said, you have to make this, how many years before we came up with this? How many rubber trees and where would we get the metal and what would we use as dye and how do we make the spring mechanism and figure out how to make it rotate? I don't know. And it's like they are working with the bare essentials. And so it's an interesting reference point point to start at in terms of how incredibly privileged we are. The other thing is we have written, we have so many different types of text and we have code and we have language and we have music and we can communicate in all these different ways and they have spoken word. They have oral tradition and that's it. And so they're operating the way our great-great-great-great-great time, so the power of what? Operated and persisting in modern times. And so I think for me, I come back to the world and I think it moves very fast when I see it because I'm still stuck on whether or not me and you can drink out of that puddle. Yeah. You know, and thinking about that.

The big questions of life.

The big questions of life.

Yeah, I mean, you're right. You're right from the perspective of the uncontacted tribes. I think going from the technological world to, to the jungle, you realize the majesty, the magic of the biological system that is the jungle, that is nature. But from their perspective, also there is a majesty and magic to the technological world, the, the, the human-created technological world of the pen and the computer. And the light bulb, that too is magical. So sometimes we don't give enough credit to both the, the magic of the technological world, all the incredible things humans have been able to build, and, uh, the magic of the natural world.

I mean, what we've been able to achieve, I think you and I and people that spend large amounts of time in the wilderness, especially somewhere as remote and fundamental as the western Amazon, have a different perspective on it. Because I think that when you're born in it, you don't necessarily have the framework to appreciate how far we've come. Because you go, yeah, I got on the train today. You know, I checked my phone, I FaceTimed my mom, and you're like, this is all normal. And it's like, we found a way to take things out of the ground and mix them together into magic devices that can do anything. And it's mind-blowing. There's a deep optimism to that.

And you actually write in the book, which I really like, I think somewhere in the beginning, quote, given all the death and destruction I've witnessed, it would be easy to slip into the popular anti-human narrative that we are a plague on the planet and there's nothing that can be done. But my career in conservation has given me a glimpse into an alternate narrative. I've met people who are proving more and more that something can be done. I'm talking about real heroes, people who have dedicated their lives to redeeming the evil that is capable of being waged by the human soul. People who are guarding the flame amidst the storm, proving every day what so many have forgotten: there is still hope. And that speaks against sort of the cynicism and maybe apathy and the view that humans are a destructive force in the world. That speaks to the fact that humans, with all the technological elements that we have created, can actually do a lot of good. I wrote in my notes here a quote from the great Jane Goodall, "The greatest danger to our future is apathy." So caring about the world, having an optimism for the world, having a hope for the world, is the way to help have an impact, help save it. But on that, I have to ask you about Jane. She passed away on October 1st. Some humans in this human civilization of ours can open our eyes to the beauty of the world, and she is one of the best of them. And she's had an impact on your life. Maybe can you speak to the impact that she's had?

I mean, when I grew up, you know, my parents— being dyslexic, I couldn't read for a very long time. And so my parents read to us every night, which was amazing considering how hard they were working, but they'd find the time to give us, you know, an hour of reading every night, whether it was Lord of the Rings or Sherlock Holmes or Jane Goodall. And so I grew up with Jane been being this figurehead of conservation and of adventure and sort of a living historical figure, this legendary person. And so then one time, right around the time that I've been going to the jungle for a few years, I got to go see Jane speak. I think it was at NYU. And, you know, sitting in the crowd, watched her completely amazed. And I had, at the time, my cousins had been telling me that I should write down my stories, of stories of taking care of an anteater and stories of catching anacondas. And they're like, I've got to write, you know, these are such good stories. And so I've been writing them down. And I just remember after the talk, you know, she did it, you know, at least an hour on stage, and then thousands of people lined up, at least hundreds of people lined up. And she sat there and each of those people wants a moment with this legend. And so she has to take a picture, shake their hand. They say, you mean so much to me. She says, thank you. And then they move on and they say, we'll send you the picture. Okay, great. And so I got my moment and we waited in line for a long time and I gave her this manila envelope with two chapters in it. And one chapter was Lulu the giant anteater from Mother of God. And the other chapter was me, JJ, and Pico out on the river catching anacondas and just talking about how amazing the jungle was. And I said, I'd love it if you could endorse my book that doesn't exist yet. And I felt like such a loser doing that. And I felt so stupid because I feel like everyone was probably asking something of her. And it's incredibly draining to talk to that many people, even if it is for a good reason. And 48 hours later, she got back and she said, "This is incredible. I would love to write a recommendation for your book as soon as you find a publisher." And what happened with that is that Jane, the way I think of it is she waved her very powerful magical wand in my direction. And she had the incredible compassion and presence to actually— I mean, you know, after talking to that many people and being on the road 300 days a year and being Jane Goodall, this living legend scientist, to actually do something so mundane as look at some kid's writing. And, and, and of course, when I went to publishers, they said, Jane, who, who said that they would endorse your book? Because everyone had said no. Every publisher in New York had already said no. And then after that, HarperCollins took me on. And they said, "Well, if Jane Goodall thinks it's a good idea, then we think it's a good idea." And it became Mother of God. And then because of that, Jungle Keepers, DAX, everything else stemmed from that. So had Jane not been the legend that she is truly in every moment, my whole career would never have happened, which also means that those thousands of heartbeats and thousands of acres in the Amazon wouldn't be protected because we never would've started Jungle Keepers. And she did that not because you're special.

She did that to everybody. Yeah. And that, just imagine the scale of the impact she's had because of that. Yeah. And guess what? That you have a bit of that responsibility now as well. There's young people that walk up to you that way and you have that responsibility of seeing them, of giving them a chance, seeing the, the potential in every single human being. Being that walks up to you. It definitely is.

I would say that Jane's— we could do 4 hours on just Jane, what she did for humanity, what she did for science, what she did for women, what she did for wildlife, the amount of other people that she inspired and gave careers to, everything she did for me. But to me, that presence of mind when you reach that level to not be like worried about your own travel and your own schedule and busy with, you know, getting some rest and that she actually looked at at it has informed how I operate. And indeed, like you say, at this point, as strange as it is, people will stop me on the street and say, hey, I watch your videos every night with my kids. And I, you know, or someone will say, you know, how do I get your job? I love watching you for years and I'd love to help conservation. And so it's, it's made it so that, you know, I follow her example where it's like you stop what you're doing and you, and you, you pay attention because you don't know that might be the next kid that's out there saving a river or the next person that makes an innovation that makes it possible to clean rivers or whatever it is, whatever their dream is. But we're, you know, Jane was in the hope business. She always said it, you know, that not losing hope was key to staying in the fight and that we live at a time when, you know, that apathy is a poison peddled by the darkness. It's, they're trying to make you feel disoriented and apathetic. Pathetic and scared. And fighting back against that and having conviction and passion and fire and hope are the only way that we're going to fight that. And she understood that and she spent her whole life spreading it, guarding the flame against the storm and tipping her candle to others to light them. I mean, she just— that was her whole thing.

What advice would you give to young people how to do that? Those young Pauls sitting I mean, your life story is just incredible in that way. You've taken the leap into adventure, into the unknown. What would you recommend they do?

I think the thing that, that I try to communicate to them, and again, my inboxes are filled with people, you know, I'm from Finland, I'm from Spain, I'm from, you know, Georgia, people saying, how do I get your job? How do I get out there and do it? And it's, it really is just that. It's that you throw yourself headfirst into adventure and it's, you just do it. And, and, and I, I remember I remember hearing people say that thing like, you know, if I can do it, you can do it. And it's like, I remember thinking how hollow that sounds because I'm like, yeah, you're on a talk show or you just wrote a book and you're going, you know, these, these, these titans of, of their industries and, and, and innovators saying like, you know, if I could do it, anybody could do it. But now that we're protecting all this rainforest and that I've, you know, lived with the animals and met the tribes and that it's becoming this global movement. You know, I didn't have a PhD. You know, there's that quote that someone less qualified than you is living your dream life and has your dream job right now. And I am the poster child for that because I went there with, you know, I failed out of high school and started taking unmatriculated college classes and going to the jungle with my friend JJ and just doing it for the sheer love of it for years, almost a decade before anything surfaced. And the other thing is there's not even a path. There was, there was no path ahead of us. There was no, you know, okay, you go to school, you get trained in this and you're going to become a this. I went there and it was like, you're never going to be a conservation biologist because you don't have the grades. You're not, you don't have a PhD. You don't have family money. You're not going to, you're not going to be able to protect rainforest. So I said, all right, well then selfishly, I just want to see it. And then I ended up getting trained by the indigenous people and like what happens so many times and you could use, you know, like a, I think a restaurant example is the best one you could use where it's You might start washing dishes, but at least you're in the restaurant, you know? And then at some point that the manager's gonna need you to help with, you know, restocking and da da da. And then at some point after a few years, you're gonna be helping the new guy. And at some point after a few years, you might end up being the manager. And at some point you might end up being in a position where you're starting your own restaurant. And it's the only way to do that. You can't just search it on a computer. You have to go sweat and bleed and do it.

And that said, especially if you fall in love with the journey that you take on, it's full of difficult periods. I think you said somewhere this just seems to be the nature of it, that there's going to be pain, there's going to be suffering along the way. You have a really nice post that I recommend people watch about just this. When people ask for advice, that the hardship, the suffering— and I've seen how much you care. You— when I've seen you you, just in your face, when you see a tree being cut down or you see the fires, there's real pain there in your heart and you have to carry that. And so the post is, how honest can I be? What do I tell these kids who message me asking how they can do what I do? It's not David versus Goliath. There's no sword or sling that can hold back a dragon this big. You're going against the current of global economic entropy and human apathy. Swimming against the current is tiring. A great way to drown. Every day we don't win, we lose, and when we do, worlds burn. The more you know, the more it bleeds. The heartbeats all stop when the flames come through. Constellations of species turn to ghosts. And we're the only ones saving them. Them, cupped our hands around a candle in the howling darkness. And people want to be inspired. Keep that social media going. Keep it up. You're doing great. They want to know we're winning. And we've done a lot of winning. But not right now. We're getting slaughtered. We're at that part of the story. We're almost at the endgame. We can think positively, as positively as we want. Thoughts and prayers won't stop a chainsaw, and the motor that's carrying us against the current towards the miraculous goal only when there's gasoline in it. As soon as that stops, we drown. We drown. We can take the warm light from all of those who help and not let it bother us that there are people who goodbye planets claim to care. At some point, you realize what's really happening. As a kid, you'd rather be Aragorn. You don't want to actually carry the ring. Not when you learn what it's gonna cost. Even if you make it, how can you? Explain to Sam why you can't get on the boats. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. It's that time of year again. Here come the flames. Whatever it takes. It's coming. And people should watch the video that goes along with this. But that speaks to the pain, the difficulty, the challenge, the suffering involved when you're faced with a possibility of destruction. That's the other side of the sword of caring for something deeply.

Yeah, we've watched a lot of forests burn. We've pulled a lot of animals out of the flames. Yeah, that, I wrote that at a time where we were just getting hammered, man. Funding wasn't coming in. There was miners. It was just months and months out in the jungle alone. And, uh, yeah, that, that, that it's a Thom Yorke track that we've just been listening to again and again. And I was just so, so low. Um, there was then, you know, the, there's a huge new invasion where they just, they just burned the whole side of the river and just, you know, it's, it's, it's never going to come back. And it's part of the forest that I loved and I knew the animals there and it's, um, gone. And so we have to live through that on a weekly basis, at least a day-to-day basis. And when you take on responsibility for something like this, you, you go to sleep thinking, yeah, if we don't do it, then worlds burn. You know, if we don't save it, then every time you said the, the, the sadness that surrounds a happy moment, well, it's like, how am I supposed to go to a party and talk with people about anything? Or how am I supposed to even go to sleep when If we don't succeed at what we're trying to do, if we don't outrace the chainsaws and the roads, then those trees die, those millennium trees, and we're the only ones out there protecting them. And when you see that black scorched earth with nothing left, it's just ashes on the ground and all the cacophony of life is silenced and it's just this horrible, violent silence. It's, it makes you sick. And so yeah, there's a lot of weight that comes with that where we're not, we're not, we're not theoretically doing something. We're, we're, we're black and white practically doing it.

So that's the other side of the advice to young people. Oh yeah. Well, it's not going to be easy.

No, the, I mean, when they say, they say, how do I get your job? It's like, well, Well, you don't want my job and you don't want the botflies and you don't want the dengue and you don't want, you know, don't even inquire what a normal life looks like. Like, you know, I lived out of a backpack for 20 years. You know how many monkey faces I had to eat because there was no other food? Like, seriously. You know, just that shot, just being alone on the boat in the river and how many days the motor didn't work. And you sleep out there and you get rained on because you don't have any protection and you have some leaves over your face and then you go home and everyone everyone's got a job and everyone's got kids and everyone's happy. And they're like, what are you doing down there? Trying to save the rainforest. They're like, sure. And now we're at this point where, you know, I cared a whole lot for a whole long time. We've had rises and then we've had falls and we've had wins and then we've had failures. And the last few years we've had this, this rolling success of, of people finding out about our work and coming in and we start to go, wow, we've protected 130,000 acres. We might actually be able to do this. And so, you know, there's that moment in 300 where they show Leonidas and they say, "Even the king allows himself a moment of hope that this might be okay," right before they get slaughtered. And someone very dear to me recently said, you know, in celebration of where we've gotten to, that if it happened in any harder of a way, it would have actually killed you. And if it had happened in an easier way, it wouldn't have been so divine. And that slapped me in the face because it was like, man, it has been so hard, but look where we are. We might actually do this.

It just has to be that way. Uh, speaking of which, another complexity in all of this, you write about in the afterword of the book, uh, about the narco-traffickers that have moved into the, the river basin. They're not the loggers that we've spoken about anymore. They're growing coco for cocaine and they're building, uh, airstrips. So tell me how this came to be.

Like you said, the loggers, our whole life on this river, when loggers come in, JJ and I would walk up to them and say, hey, what's up? And sit down with them and have a beer or share a, share a meal and talk to them and ask who their father was and if we know them and then hire them and they're friendly.

And they are in a way brothers, the J.J. They're the same.

They come from the same people. They're simple local people. They're not evil. They're just people who usually have a kid and a wife and they're looking for work. And so they work with a chainsaw because that's what they know. And they work for, you know, $30 a day, if that in very challenging, harsh environments. And so when we see clearings, I would always go with the drone and fly it over clearings. We'd get some intel and then we'd go bring that to the police and the police, you know, Jungle Keepers supports the police at this point because the Peruvian government has a hard time with resources trying to manage Amazonia. And there's, you know, when you're 3 days from civilization, getting cops out there is not the easiest thing. So sometimes we'll lend boats or gasoline or logistical support. And, uh, there was a moment in March, several hours upriver from, you know, home base, and I'm with JJ on the boat and I fly the drone and there's this big new clearing and I flew the drone over and we lower the drone and a few times I've had people come out and wave at the drone or say like, get away. And we're out in the middle of the river, just sort of idling, staying in one place. And I lower the drone and I see the, these little huts and we're saying, okay, this is a big clearing. I'm snapping images, snapping images. These people are on boat with us, these visitors who had flown in, and I have my local team. And all of a sudden people come running out of the houses and they run straight to their boats and we're already above where their boat is. So home is in downriver direction. They get in their boats and start chasing us and we start driving and we're going at full speed. We have a 60 horsepower. They, they had a 40 and we're driving up these, we're just doing this chase now. And our guests who are going to be potential funders, you know, at one point the father looked at me and he goes, hey, this whole, you know, running from the Pirates of the Caribbean thing, he's like, it's getting scary. You're scaring, you're scaring us. He was like, can we, can we, like, what are we doing? He goes, when are you going to put the drone down? And I'm flying the drone at full speed to keep up with the boat. And I just crash landed the drone on the side of the river near a big tree. I just said, fuck it, we'll get it later. And I was like, this is fine. This happens all the time. They get mad. They, they chase us. It's no big deal. And I smiled at him and JJ's smiling, he goes, "This is so bad," and he's smiling. And JJ looked at me and the smile fell off him like a mask. And he looked at me and he was like, "This is not good." And we kept going upriver. And luckily there was a camp of police that we've worked with quite a bit. And I went to a friend of mine and I remember we got off the boat. I shook his hand. He said, "What's going on?" I said, "Look downriver and there's this boat tearing upriver towards us." And he did 3 things. He got the rest of the guys, they armed up, they got on the boat with guns, they put ski masks on, they got like ready for combat. They told us to get down. He also said, hey, turn on the satlink, call for support back home. We turned our boat around. And as soon as the narcos, which we didn't even realize that these were narcos chasing us, we thought that we were looking at loggers. When they saw the guns and they saw us face them, they turned their boat around and they went back downriver. River. So we got escorted downriver. And I remember shaking his hand, my friend, and saying, thank you for saving us today. And telling the other guys they did a good job. I said, get back upriver. We'd been brought home safe. This is hours later. I said, good job. Thank you so much. And they went back upriver. And then that night I'm sitting at the station that you know, and I get a phone call from Stefan. And he goes, pick up the phone. And I go, I can't, I'm in the middle of a conversation. He goes, pick up the phone. And my friend who I had just shook his hand a few hours ago, they went back upriver and as they were unloading their boat and washing off in the stream, the narcos did a drive-by and shotgun straight to the chest, shot him in the chest. And so all of that enthusiasm and we're protecting the biodiversity and this is so great, there's people from around the world. It's like that scene in the movie where there's just a montage of success and hope and acres and wind gunshot. And I could still feel his hand in my hand. I just shook his hand. I said, no, you can't. You're not. He's, I said, is he okay? He said, is he okay? He said, he took a shotgun straight to the chest. And they're like, he's dead. Okay. And so I had to go out to dinner and not show the guests anything and just smile and laugh and talk to them about you know, whatever, um, and keep that, and keep that in, which, which felt very, very difficult to do. Um, and so what happened, as you said, the, the threat level escalated and we didn't know it. The narcos had come in and started realizing that there's so much wilderness here that they can operate and there's no police. And then when we flew the drone, they got mad. So we realized this, um, we communicated with with our, with the police and they said, oh yeah, these are, these are narcos. Now we realize this is part of the serious, like, drug mafia. And then I had gone back with the, the incident that you're referring to at the end of the book. I had gone back to New York again to speak to donors to try and get this work to continue. And you know how it works. We're at the station and then you go to that logging town, and then there's a road. And so our, our pickup truck had come in on the road, and JJ was supposed to come down, get in the truck, and drive back to the city. JJ was on the river and went, I forgot I was supposed to get more stuff at the city. He goes, you know, I'll go, I'll go tomorrow. He went back up and he sent the boat driver down and told our driver, Percy, who was waiting with the pickup truck, said, JJ's not coming today, go back and come back tomorrow. Percy starts driving down the road, and he sees a tree across the road. And this is a single-lane road through the jungle. There's nowhere else you can go. And men with guns come and stick the pistols in through the open windows. Gun against his head, they pull him out and they go, "Where's JJ and the mierda gringo voladrón?" They said, "Where's that shithead gringo that flew the drone?" And if either of us had been in the car that day, They would have killed us. And we know that because they took his wallet, they took his phone, our driver Percy. They thank God they didn't hurt him, but they sent a message to us. They said, let them know. They said, we missed you this time, but we'll get you next time. They said, we're going to get you. And so when JJ called me, he called me and he was howling. He just had the, um, you know, that, that adrenaline and that emotion of, of that, it almost happened. And so that was, that, that changed everything. And so since then we've been, you know, it's not counting butterflies and taking ecological surveys. It's, it's that there's a drug war being fought on our river. And now when these roads come in, we can't just go out and meet these people anymore and go talk to them because they are actively looking to shoot us. They know our names. And then on, if, as if all these other things weren't enough indication, the police intercepted a phone from someone they arrested. And on the phone, in the WhatsApp chat, it said, if you see JJ or the gringo, anyone in our network, please kill them. You'll be rewarded. So we both have a hit out on us. And life on the river has changed at the moment. We don't, we can't, you know, I can't just go out walking around and swimming and driving my boat. And it's like, you have to be looking over your shoulder at all times. And you know, you can get as trained as you want with a pistol and sleep with it under your pillow. And, but the way these people work, they'll catch you when you're least expecting it. They'll wait till you're at a cafe in town. They'll wait till your motor doesn't work on the side of the river. It'll just be a quick one and they'll go. And so that, that feeling on top of the weight of, of protecting the ecosystem and the animals and the race to, to tell people about it and do all this, it's like now we're actively being hunted when we're there.

So And this is very directed at you and JJ. Yeah. So they really don't care about the others. This is, they understand. Mm-hmm. Are you afraid? What's it been like living with a real fear of being murdered at any moment? Moment?

I wish I could say I handled it better than I've been handling it. Like, I wonder how people in war zones do it. I wonder how some of my soldier friends that I have immense respect for have, have did it when they were deployed. Because for me, once this happened, it was, you know, every phone call now, I, I think, did something happen to JJ? Yeah. You know, every time I go to sleep, my dreams are that I'm being shot. And it, I just, it just, it just, it, it really threw me. It really, really affected me when JJ called me the, the, the way he was just, he was just shouting. I don't even remember what he was saying. He was just, he's, he was just shouting. They almost got us. They almost got us. He was so, you know, uh, terrified and, and angry. And, and, and so, yeah, it's, it's, I, there was a day not that long ago that I was swimming in the river. River, and I was just in the river, you know, right in front of the stairs at the station, and a boat came around the bend. And I remember thinking, do I run? Do I go underwater? Do I hide? Do I— what the hell do I do? I didn't have a gun near me. I didn't have— the security people were up the stairs. It's like, you go, holy shit. And it's not the danger of, you know, if I jump on an anaconda, it might kill me, or if I climb this, I might fall. These are people who want to kill And on top of it, you have the, you know, the, when you see your, when you see what your friend looks like after 3 days of floating in a river, what a body looks like of a person you used to know, that's very viscerally terrifying because there's the, the tragedy of that, that person lost his life who was younger than I was, you know, he's like, he was a kid, he was in his 20s. And then yeah, it's just, it's very hard. It's very hard to do anything because you're, you're, I mean, like right now my hands are sweating. It just, it affects me. And even in the daylight, if I can go, you know, it's fine. This is part of the thing, you know, so this is the adventure. People deal with this all over the world. You can talk yourself tough. And then, and then in those quiet moments, you know, that, that 4 AM thing, you wake up and you go, fuck, you know, why am I sweating? Why, why did I just have those dreams? Why is my heart racing? It's like you just have it sinks its way into your subconscious and it's just not what we signed up for, you know? It's like we wanted to just protect this beautiful place and this is this whole new threat. We're not trained for this. We're not, we're not a, you know, we're not police or military and it's like we've, we've now seen violence on a scale that we were very unprepared for. And so, I mean, just 2 days ago, I was, you know, on my way to you and my phone rang 9 o'clock at night and it was JJ and it was like, I had a, my heart was jackhammering. I had to pull over because I was going, what, what, what news now? You know, did, did we lose another bunch of acres? Is it a new road? Did somebody die? What? It just, you know, it, it really scatters you.

And in some sense it's a twist that you didn't ask for and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the fight you're fighting, which is protecting the rainforest, but because of it being pristine and quiet and away from civilization, it also becomes a place where, uh, you can have airstrips. It becomes lawless in a certain way because it's so far away from civilization.

Yeah, it's the only place that they can operate with impunity. They— there's no police out there. And so they saw us helping the police and they went, cut the head off the snake. Yeah. And that, you know, Chico Mendez, Dorothy Stang, the list of people that environmental defenders that are assassinated in the Amazon every year is huge. There's endless examples of it. It's staggering. I forget the exact numbers, but it's like every year we lose, there'll be local leaders who are trying to stop an oil company or a drug cartel and they shoot them because they know that that one person that's able to rally that support, who has that voice, if you just shoot them, usually it'll end the thing and then they can go back to doing whatever the hell they want. And so right now we're working very closely with the Peruvian government and people assume that, you know, a Latin American government is automatically corrupt, but what we've found is that these are really good people that want to help their citizens. And the police have been working very hard to stop the narcos, to protect the local indigenous people, because, you know, with the narcos comes human trafficking. With a team of male narcos that are out in the woods making drugs, they want prostitutes. And how do they get prostitutes? They go steal girls from indigenous communities that don't know anybody. Better. And then there's reports that the narcos have made contact with the uncontacted tribes. And of course, they're going to shoot machine guns at them. They're not going to have a little shotgun where it's a fair fight. They're going to mow them down. And the uncontacted tribes are going to have no idea. That's why I posted a video of me in the rain saying this is endgame. Because there was a new road that was coming off the north of our territory above the ancient forest. They had jumped over because we stopped it at the ancient forest. They've gone above the ancient forest and now they're trying to cut down to a new area. And so it looks like this, like that.

So there's the Transamazon.

Stefan made this map, of course. Um, but you see the area that we're trying to protect loosely so that we don't give away anything, the loosely the area that we are protecting. So the light green is the 130,000 acres and then this metastasizing network of roads just reaching out and trying to get in. And so they're trying to come in from the north where that arrow is they're trying to come down. And so the police are fighting them along this, and it's a full-on drug war right now. And so stopping that, securing this northern boundary, and so when I, I mean, again, just the power of what we have. When I posted this, I asked Stefan to make, show people the road and where it's going to go. We posted this video and said we have to protect this 100,000 acres right now, and all up here is uncontacted tribe territory. Story. And just from that one post, we got $150,000 in like 48 hours. And we bought this concession. We stopped that road. But now they're up here and they're trying to come down. So it's like, and this is the thing again, you said, you know, it's great. Yes, you get to be an adventurer and you get to live in the jungle. Sure. But it's like, there's this, this Mission Impossible thing where it's like, you might get lucky enough to pull off your psychotic mission, you know, jump your motorcycle off the train and parachute down and stop the bomb before it goes off. Great. How many of those do you get? And we're having to do it every month. And if we, that's the thing, these amazing people that are supporting the rangers allow us to patrol and protect this because once we have this land protected, the interesting thing is that the, the police can go into any of the light green areas. If anybody's there, just arrest them. They're on Jungle Keeper's land. They're out. And eventually that land will become national park if we're successful. The problem with the land that's not is it's a gray area. It's the middle of the Amazon. Are they allowed to be here? Do they really have cocaine? Because they'll, they'll plant papaya for acres and a little bit of cocaine behind it. You know, they'll, they'll, they'll put the sacks. They're sneaky. And so they have to build a case and it takes time. And then the road comes in and they, you know, and in that time, then they'll knock off a police officer. And it's like, if we were just able to get this tomorrow, tomorrow. The whole problem gets solved. We can, we could, we could give the police 2 more boats, you know, and then they could do all the patrolling they need.

So the mission is clear.

The mission is very clear. And the problem is that right now we've been playing defense and sustaining losses. And either we need to inspire enough people that the donor program goes through the roof. And instead of having several thousand donors, we have, you know, 50,000 donors. And we, again, we'll raise, what is it, we need $20 million to save the rest of the corridor. We'd raise $20 million overnight with enough people. Or we need one of these people that has the resources to come in like Batman and just go, I want the park named after me and I'm just going to come in and give you the $20 million. And then we do it tomorrow. And then we make a documentary about how we saved a river and the tribe and the monkeys and the, but right now We're, right now we're, you know, begging on the side of the road for enough change to buy bullets so that we can stay alive.

So these narcos, they're, uh, there's a kind of distributed network where a bunch of them are pretending to be farmers. So they're holding onto the land and then maybe they start planting cocaine on the land slowly, and then they build airstrips. Are they trying to stay under the canopy? Yeah. With the airstrip? It's brilliant.

First, what they do is they, they, um, they subsidize the poorest people and they say, go up this river, turn left at the tree, and just start there. And they're like, here's a few grand. And these people are like, I never had a few grand before. They're like, buy gasoline, here's a chainsaw, go clear some land. They send these people up there and then when they show up a year later and these people have made an illegal farm out in the jungle. They go, hey, we need a safe house. Remember that time we gave you the gasoline and now you live here? You're going to work for us now. And so they, they're kind of a friend of the people like that. And they have safe houses all over the jungle. And then when the bosses come to collect what they're growing out there, I mean, the police busted a narco operation that was in the middle, in the middle of the jungle. I mean, you know, hiking to the ancient forest, like just days into the jungle, these people are going on foot with sacks and stuff. And the way they do their airstrips is you think the, the canopy of the rainforest is 150 feet tall, 160 feet tall. And if you clear the interior of the landing strip, the trees are still meeting overhead. And so you can't fly over and see down, which is the same reason we didn't know about the road that was going to the ancient forest because overhead the trees are meeting. So you're not going to see it on satellite and you're not going to see it from a plane. And these pilots, these bush pilots fly in and they'll just duck in under the canopy, land their plane, load up, and then they fly out. I mean, expert pilots.

So it's impossible to detect?

It's almost impossible to detect. Uh, we're working with people now, you know, they're— it's, it's this arms race, you know. They were going, okay, there are drone programs. I talked to someone that has a different type of drone, you know, a 16-foot drone that, that like uses the thermals to climb up and has solar panels on the wings and flies for 2 weeks at a time. It's like a glider that recharges itself itself, and it'll keep constant imagery. So we'll get up to the, almost up to the moment data on disturbances in the canopy. And it's like, well, that'll be a firsthand alert system. But then we got to get the police out there, which, as you know, a 2-day expedition by boat, and it's the only way. And so the local police force there may be dedicated, but putting people on a multi-day expedition to go get shot at in the jungle is nobody's idea of a good time.

You understand, have you researched into this whole other world of, uh, drug trafficking, cocaine trafficking? How big is the operation here? Looking at Perplexity, multi-thousand-ton, multi-billion-dollar global industry.

I mean, globally, it's, it's a monster.

Colombia, Peru, Bolivia. Yeah. And they move north and east through the Americas, the Caribbean, the Atlantic to reach major consumer markets. Yeah, this is a machine fueled by a lot of money and a lot of brutality. Number of cocaine users worldwide is about 25 million people. Users. Users. So there's a market. Oh yeah. And when there's a market, you're going to find the way. Quick pause. Bathroom break. All right, and we're back. And me as somebody who is afraid of heights, and I've got a chance to interact with you a bunch, uh, you're in some sense fearless, uh, and I've watched you climb a lot of trees. You've helped me climb a tree. And there's this wonderful part of the book where you talk about finding the tallest tree in the forest you knew at the time. Climb, and that was something that you passed and thought was impossible to climb. And you talk about climbing it, you take us through the experience of that, and that leads you to seeing the mist river in the rainforest as the sun rises. I was wondering if you could talk to the story of that, both for, at least for me, but even for you at that time, the terrifying process of climbing a tree like that for the first time with JJ at the bottom cheering you go on and what it felt like to see the Mist River.

That tree, you've met that tree. She's a, she's a good one. Her base is at least as big as this room and, um, she's probably about 160-something feet tall. And so when you're looking at these giant buttress roots going up, which I'd been doing for 18 years at that point, and I'd always said, man, if I could just climb it, and I never had the rope skills, you know, and I developed as a rock climber, I was working on strength and I trained for it. You know, it wasn't, it's like most things, it's not, you can't just do it. You know, I'd gone and climbed up, you know, 30 feet and gone, no way. You know, the, the, the trunk of the tree goes vertical for about 70 feet before branches even come out. And so there's just this one big vine and JJ and I did it at, I want to say like 4 in the morning, like really early. The howler monkeys had just started. And you start climbing with the rope up this one vine, and you have to— it's not a technical climb, it's a strength climb. You have to gorilla up this vine, and it's all back strength. And, and so I did it, no shirt, no shoes, straight up. And JJ had the belay device. And so every like 30 feet, I would put in a piece of webbing and a carabiner. So then you go up another 30 feet, and you put a piece of webbing and a carabiner, and you don't know what you're going to find. And you're going up in the dark.

And so when you say it's a lot of strength is involved, so there's very few places to rest. You're essentially just lifting the whole time. So it's extremely exhausting.

Extremely exhausting. Like I really trained for a long time and there is no rest. You have to, the only rest you get hurts. You have to, you'll have to cling to the tree and your feet are smeared against the bark and you're holding on with your toes if anything. And if you fall, you know, if I put a, if you're climbing up a tree, up, I mean, it's basically trad climbing. If you're climbing up and you put a safety, which is, you know, a piece of, piece of rope with a carabiner, and you put my rope through that, again, as you're doing that, it's dangerous because if you fall, you fall. Then I do that and then you climb up right before you put the next one, you're going to fall double. So if you climb 30 feet, you fall 60 feet. And so your, your head's going to smack against the side of the tree as you're climbing. You don't know if you're going to reach into a wasp nest or if there's going to be a venomous snake. And there's, by the way, in those trees, a lot of those, a lot of those. And it took me over an hour just to get to the branches the first time. And it's just, again, full exertion, everything I had. And then you get to the branches are above you and each of the branches is the size of a mature oak tree. They're just, you know, these huge branches, big, big, big branches, the size, thick as a minivan. And you're, you're climbing up this straight tree that's like the World Trade Center, just huge. And then I had to traverse around the tree on vines. And then finally I get up into the crown of this tree. Tree. And then from there, I called down to JJ, and I just see this little speck of light, you know, 85 feet below me. And then I climbed up to about 120 feet, which is up here, and I sat there.

And you're doing all this still in darkness? We're doing all this in the pre-dawn light.

And so when I got up there, now the howler monkeys are going, "Ooh," and the jungle's starting to vibrate, and you can hear the first macaws starting to chirp, and everything's starting to turn on. And in the the sun is coming over the jungle. And so the sun, the first rays get line of sight to the canopy of the jungle. It starts lifting the mist off the canopy. All of that moisture starts coming up. And I'm sitting on this branch at 100-something feet above the ground with dark jungle below me. And all of a sudden I see the, the river. I see the Mist River I'd always heard about. They say that there's a, a river above the Amazon, an invisible river. Mist river that has more moisture in it. More water is flowing above the Amazon than is flowing in the Amazon. And I'd heard this my whole life. And you think, okay, the fact that there's a molten core of the earth or that black holes theoretically exist, it's just like one of those things. You're never going to see it. And in this moment on this tree, as sweating and just ripped apart and bleeding, I was sitting up there and I saw the mist river and it was flowing over the canopy in the golden rays of the morning and the macaws start taking flight and there was monkeys below me that were looking up. And you could tell they were confused. They're looking at me going, what is that? And I just had this absolutely incredible moment. I wanted to, you know, it felt like, it felt like you're seeing God. I wanted to, I wanted to share it with everyone. You know, I felt, I felt, I felt guilty afterwards for having had a moment like that. But it felt like I had done this insane risk and, and, um, you know, risked falling out of the tree or, or getting strung up on the ropes. And of course it's just me and JJ. So if something goes wrong, no one, no one's going to help help you. And being out there on that branch felt suicidal because even then, if you fall, it's a giant swing back to the tree. But the beauty that I saw up there was so intense that it sucked the air right out of my lungs. I had tears in my eyes and I'm just watching this incredible process flow over the earth, this legendary thing that I'd heard about that scientists described, and now I'm seeing it with my own eyes. It was, um, it felt like the gift of the tree.

And you write, now in the branches of the greatest tree in the jungle, I watched as the Mist River caught the morning rays, illuminating golden currents swirling as it rushed over the canopy like a stream from heaven. In the troughs and basins and lower areas, the river was deep blue, but then as it flowed up and over the taller trees, slow rapids washing over the canopy, the Mist River became ignited, electrified in the gold magnificence of the sunlight. Scores of birds flew up, in and out of the churning currents. The life and breath of the Amazon was flowing from north to south along the basins of the Las Piedras of the jungle. My God, my God. I thought of everyone I loved, of every creature contained in the leafy distance. The jungle itself was like a great being, a monstrous leviathan of warm green might. I wanted to call down to JJ and tell him to find a way up. I wanted my mother to see it. I wanted the world to see it. The light filled my eyes and I found myself wiping away tears. You know, I should take the small tangent of saying the obvious, but the thing that needs to be said is you're a fucking great writer. Greater.

Thank you. I mean, come on, that's— I'm just describing what happened, but all right.

You mentioned macaws as part of the process of the jungle waking up. I read that, you know, when you first start in the jungle, that's kind of your job is to studying those. And me as a fan of monogamy and birds, so macaws are beautiful, but they're also monogamous creatures. They scream at each other quite loud. Worldly. What are some interesting things about them? Among which, by the way, you write how important the ironwoods are to their wellbeing, to their life.

Yeah, I mean, when I went down there, that's, like I said, you know, for young people, if you want to get out there, go do it. I agreed to stay at the station and do like 6 hours of Makah research every morning. So you'd wake up before dawn and go sit and just stare at the side of the river. And the macaws would show up and like you said, they all scream and bicker at each other. That's just how they talk. It's very, it's very, very loud and very, very harsh, but they do love each other. Um, they are always, you can actually hear when you walk through the forest. I know what the sound of macaws giving affection is. They make a certain kind of sound when they're just preening each other's feathers and, and, and taking care of each other and, and just nuzzling. And then there's a different call altogether when they're yelling yelling at other macaws or saying, "Let's go." And you start to learn macaw language.

What have you learned about relationship and successful marriage from listening to macaws scream at each other in nuanced different ways that you're talking about? Well, I guess— Never mind, you can skip that question.

It's interesting to see two animals sticking by each other's side, and they're both raising a chick. And at the bottom of the stairs at the station, there is a macaw macaw nest in an ironwood. And the relationship that you mentioned is that in the jungle, there's a limited amount of macaw real estate. And those are all ancient ironwood trees, at least 500 years or more. So they have to be, you know, thick, thus again, car thickness or bigger. And when a branch falls off, it creates a hollow and the macaws use that to reproduce. And because there's only so many nest sites in the forest, only about 17% to 20% of the macaw population reproduces in a given year. So they have a slow replacement rate. And macaws are one of the things that people come to the jungle to see. And so along with gold mining and logging and all these extractive things, in our region, ecotourism has been great. It's given the local people jobs as guides and cooks and chefs and, and, and carpenters. And so macaws are a huge part of that because because it's one of the last places where you can see these flying rainbows over the canopy, you know, or when you're on a branch from one of these trees and the macaws fly under you. And again, that, that they'll fly by, you just hear the, you hear the wind in their, in their feathers. And they just, they'll look at you over their shoulder. What? And just keep going. Just loud. And they'll just keep going. And then they'll join up with other macaws and they fly across the horizon. It, it gives you this sense like you're seeing something from, from the dinosaur times. It's just, it just looks like wild jungle and there's nothing human in sight and there's just this savage canopy to the, to the horizon and just these beautiful birds flying over. It's just, it's just, they're just, they're just magical.

You have this, uh, Instagram post with an anaconda around your neck. So, I mean, there's a million questions. Maybe you can talk about that experience, but also how did you not die?

So as you know, we've been studying the habits of Eunectes murinus for quite a while. Um, the lowland green anaconda is the largest, heaviest snake on earth. And I've been practicing a lot for a long time. And this is the biggest one we've ever physically caught. This was just under 20 feet. It was 19 feet something. And you can see she's in the middle of shedding. And the other interesting thing with her is that she had blue eyes because she was in the middle of shedding and their, the scale over their eyes turns blue right before it comes off of their head. And so I've never caught a blue-eyed anaconda before, but if you look at the size of my head and the size of my hands, you start to imagine that thing's head is bigger than a Great Dane's. It's huge. And so the power on that, when we tried to lift her to measure her, we wanted to bring her up out of the stream and get her over to the side so we can straighten her out and measure her. And again, we're just trying to take some simple data points and then release her. And she, at one point, she just decided to flex her body and you just see 10 people fly this way. And then she flexed in the other way and 10 people fly this way. And every time that mouth would open, she would just open the mouth and try to— she'd just reach back and she'd just be like, just let me do it. And you know that if she gets purchase purchase. Once they get purchased, they just, they wrap you so quick and they'll just, they'll crush the life out of you like you're a bag of chips. And if you ever seen a mouse in a mousetrap, when the mousetrap goes down and the eyes come out, and when snakes, anybody that's owned snakes and fed them mice knows this, sometimes if they catch it right, they'll, the guts will either come out the back end or the front end. So I'd imagine that the same thing will happen with a snake, you know, it's that big, that's bigger than, bigger than I am around.

So they have a process when they say purchase it. Would they want to buy it just to hold and then they—

yeah, so, but again, she, she, all she wants is to be let go. In her, to her defense, this massive snake, uh, her name, we named her Millie for, for the, for the data entry. Um, she just wanted to go on her way down the, down the, down the stream. The, the, the comments on this are hysterical. People are, you know, this is, this is the worst example of white people shit I've ever seen. I mean, Snoop Dogg shared it. Some— one guy, one guy goes, he goes, he goes, congratulations, you've touched enough grass, go back inside.

Yeah, somebody said, uh, interesting use of free will. Yeah, and I, I saw Kill Popper 007 commented, uh, and maybe you can tell me if this is correct, anacondas are ambush predators. If you approach them, they will usually try to flee. It will not register you as food. There's other reasons too. This is in response of why— how did Paul possibly not die from this? Uh, there's other reasons too, but this is the main reason. They're pretty much apex at that size, so their fear isn't as prominent. He was calm, so the snake was calm. It's insane to do and still risky, but he might actually be the most qualified anaconda handler on planet Earth. Paul is one interesting cat. Hugging emoji.

Is that accurate? Yes. At that size, they're apex, so they're really not thinking about defense. They're just like, get off me. Yeah. If I was to hurt her, like, just like if I was to like touch you in the arm with a needle, you'd react. If I was to do anything that hurt her, which I'm not doing, she would turn around and bite me to say go away. But they also, they don't want to bite because their recurved teeth make it very difficult to detach. And also they're putting their head then at the source of the danger. It's not a good calculation. Circulation. And so these, the giants, and I've had the privilege of interacting with 4 or 5 anacondas in the 20 to 26 foot range, and all of them have been very Leviathan-like, and they just, they don't want to move. They don't want you to, they just want to keep going. And he's a, he's 100% right on all of that stuff. Um, I don't know. I've caught 90, 90-something anacondas at this point. Many of them have been massive. Then there's the one that me and JJ didn't get at the Floating Forest because it was bigger than, bigger —bigger than my hands. I couldn't touch fingers. But every single one of them has chosen flight over fight. Only the little babies and the smaller males get snappy. They'll come back at you like a normal snake, and just if you grab their tail, they'll try and just bite you and then go. But these big females, you know, they're like dragons. They're like these big legendary things that live in swamps, and the only reason they've gotten that big is because they have a reliable prey source. Source in a secluded place away from humans, and they've been there for decades just pulling things down to hell and eating them. And, you know, oh, and the other thing, I mean, look, I have a team with me, you know, so there's people holding the— yeah, I mean, let's be real here. I would never do this if I was out in the jungle by myself at night. Doing this would be suicide, 100%, because for every second like there that I'm going, I'm in this, the water, and she's over neck. Yeah, okay. And if JJ wasn't there to jump in and unwrap her, yeah, then I die.

100%. She's continuously wrapping.

She's continuously on her back saying, come, come in here and let me, let me armbar you. Let me squeeze the guts out of you. She's just gone, let it happen. And moving slowly, moving really slow with that assurance of, of power where she doesn't need to try and tap you quick. She's going to get you eventually.

Eventually. Although to push back on something you just said, having known you long enough, let's be honest. You're saying I wouldn't be insane enough to do it. I think you would be. I mean, there's a line of insanity and you, my friend, walk that line masterfully so far. So I think there's, when you're able to sense the animal, whether it's crocodiles, caiman, or anacondas and maybe radiate a sense of calm. I've seen you be able to go into some dangerous, from my perspective, situations and make it seem like it's not dangerous at all. And maybe when you become one with the ecosystem, maybe that, maybe you're not a threat to it and maybe that's why you can survive. I haven't been able to make sense of it really.

Look, I would say this, in the case of elephants, elephants, if we ever end up in Africa together, I can get incredibly close to elephants because I've spent enough time with them where so far every time I've been able, you know, it's always been a mock charge. And you can be one with the elephant and learn their language enough that you respect their boundaries and you also show them that they're not, like, this better be serious because you're either going to have to kill me or you're going to have to just turn around and go back to eating. And you can have that exchange. Change with them. And, and with smaller snakes, I'll be careful and whatever else. I can tell you with this, that when you have both your hands around an anaconda's neck, I truly, I mean, I've been known to surprise myself with the decisions I make, but this alone would lead to death. 100%. It's like, it's like laying down in front of an 18-wheeler with it in neutral. It's like, it's going to roll over you. This is going to turn into anaconda handcuffs with this thickness. And then that is going to wrap you with this thickness. And then 6 more of those are going to go around your body and you will get squeezed and you will turn into goop. And she will not, and like, just like that guy said, she probably is in defense mode and not food mode. So she'll probably just neutralize the threat and then go back to sleep.

I have to ask you about the floating forest. And you write about Santiago, once again, beautifully in the book, of the time when he told you the stories and when your mind and eyes were still fresh and maybe skeptical and more leaning towards the Western world point of view versus the jungle point of view. Santiago's eyes were glowing in the darkness. He watched the orange embers spark upward to join the celestial river of stars that arched across the night sky. Sky, as if the memories were written there. He squinted, his face as wrinkled and weathered as an old map of the world. Vast experience whispered in the firelight, as ephemeral as the breath that spoke the words, but powerful enough to latch on and sink down into some deep part of me. This is Pico saying, Papa, tell me about the anaconda on the Blackwater Stream. And he tells the story of that. He talks about it big and having horns. And you write, once again, masterfully about you at that time having doubts. It sounds like bullshit, but now more and more of the things you've seen of the jungle and the things you sense you have not seen yet, all of those stories seem to be true. The one he was referring to may be 36 feet long, this big, he shows it. He says that the Floating Forest is the place you need to go, gringo, if you want to be liberated of your doubts and skepticism. So tell me about the anacondas you've encountered in the Floating Forest.

Well, the thing he's describing there is that he's saying they found an anaconda that had horns. And in that moment, we were all hanging out by the side of the river, and I said, "That's enough." I stood up. I was like, "Come on." I was like, "There's no anaconda that has horns." And if I've learned anything in 20 years of living with the indigenous people in the Amazon, it's that they're not wrong. You know, if they say there's a tribe of naked people with arrows out there, they're right. They're right. And they know what an anaconda looks like. So if he says he saw an anaconda with horns, horns. He saw something that ain't a normal anaconda. And a smaller version of this played out recently where one of my, one of the people that works at the, at the treehouse, he came and he said, I found a snake and it was in the, in the water tank. And he goes, and it had green spikes on it. I said, there's no snake that has green spikes. I said, congratulations, you're an idiot. You know, and I made fun of him. And I said, I know all the snake species that are here. I said, I said, none of them have spikes. There's no snake that has spikes coming off of it. And he said, no, it had long spikes. He said, the snake is this big and it had spikes this long on it. I said, there's no snake with spikes. Until finally he came and he got me in the night and he goes, the snake with spikes is there. And I said, well, I'll get out of bed for that. Let's go. And I said, and I guarantee it's not going to be there when we get there. And we got to the water tank and I shined my flashlight down and sure as shit, there's a snake there and it's got thousands of green spikes coming off of it. And I could see the snake head and then all, and the spikes are coming completely perpendicular out from its body. And for a second, I really was having this out-of-body experience. And then the snake saw us, got scared and swam and all of the, all of the spikes collapsed onto its body and became smooth. And then I realized snake had been living in the stagnant water for a while and developed algae that was growing off of it. So when it was sitting still, all the algae would settle out. And so if you look straight down on it, it's a, it's a water snake that has algae growing on it. And so it does look like a snake with spikes. He's not wrong. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was a water snake. It was some sort of helicops. Yeah. Um, but there's always an answer like that, amazing, where it's, it's, it's, they're not wrong. So when they tell you something like there's an anaconda with horns and multiple people seen it, you, you make an expedition there. You know, like if somebody said there's giant ground sloths in this one valley, I wouldn't be like, they're extinct. I'd be like, where? You know, you start to listen. Um, I mean, after, after the, after the tribe walked out of the forest, there's, you could tell me, I mean, that day, if a Tyrannosaurus rex walked out behind them, I would have been like, makes sense.

Let's go to the floating forest. Do you ever think about what creatures are in there? I just had a conversation, uh, with Michael Levin at Tufts University. He's this biologist. Dave Erickson, who creates biological life forms in the lab, but also studies all kinds of weird, what he calls unconventional intelligences on Earth. And he speaks about that from a perspective of just understanding the incredible intricacies and weirdnesses of biological systems. So, you know, the soup of organisms that's there in the floating forest is probably probably incredible. You ever, you ever think about like what kind of weirdness is there?

I mean, along with giant snakes is animals that are existing in an ecosystem that's isolated, right? And so the tapuis, you know, like in the movie Up, those Venezuelan cliff jungles where it's like those straight, like, like Angel Falls. And up there you have this allopatric speciation occurring where these isolated communities are departing from whatever's down there. And so on the Floating Forest, you have this very unique ecosystem where there's animals living on grassy islands, there's animals living in the tops of palm trees. And so in that nightmare soup that exists beneath the rafts, there's probably insects. And I mean, I've seen lizards there that we have been unable to identify. There's things there in the— I mean, I can't imagine the the, the— I don't think the decay is gonna happen. There's not probably not a lot of oxygen in that water. And so, I mean, I brought a few scientists there and they've all just been like, this is, this is, you know, yeah, how do you even— how did this form? We've brought hydrologists there and they're like, how the hell did this thing form? And then, you know, trying to study what, what creatures live under that is, is amazing.

But the, the big anacondas, it's interesting because they truly are the apex, so they're unbothered bothered. They're not really using their power for anything.

No. And I'm sure if I bit her, she'd turn around, kill me.

Yeah, but in a bored kind of way. Like, it wouldn't even— yeah, it would just slowly kill you.

But I wonder if once she killed you though, if she'd be like, you know, just like, take a bite. I mean, if she— I mean, bite, they swallow, right? So like, once she collapsed your, your shoulders, it's like, you know, if you killed a perfectly good hamburger and it was like in your hands dead, you'd be like, you know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll try it.

I mean, they need the calories.

Yeah. And then take a 6-month nap. Yeah. Yeah.

It's truly incredible majestic creatures though. Yeah.

This is, look, I love this picture. Just like, again, not just to look at, just the size. Just the, I want, I want you one day to feel the, cause they're, and again, the wild ones are not like the captive, the captive ones are soft from sitting in a cage their whole lives. Guy's been flexing every day. Yeah. So that it's like, it's like you're hitting steel cables. Yeah.

And even if it's just being chill, you can probably get a hint of the power it's capable of, right?

The one good thing about those really big ones is that when they do strike, it's like a— it's like being in a fight with like a, a big fat guy. It's like, it's like that, that haymaker comes from way back here and you're like, oh good. You're like, I'm gonna duck. And you get down because like they're like, they open their mouth and they're like, they start, they start accelerating. Yeah. And it's pretty easy to either get out of the way or like, you know, get it right before it hits you in the face. Uh-huh. Usually. Again, the, if you ever mess that up, just like the haymaker from the big guy, it's over.

Your level of knowledge and comfort with snakes is incredible. I think they sense that. I mean, I've just seen you with snakes. They, they must, cuz it, they must sense in you the camaraderie predatory? I don't know. You have a way of speaking to animals and about animals like there's zero danger. When from my outsider perspective, it seems like a lot of them are full of danger if you're not communicating to them correctly.

With snakes, I think it's, it's more of a, the highway is dangerous. You can drive safely. I know what I'm doing. So I'm working with a snake that can't envenomate me and is small. And so I can allow it to freak out. And then if I can get it into my hands and warm it up and it goes, oh, it's nice in here. And of course, like you said, I'm not scared. And so the snake is going, they are very sensitive to that. And so he's going, okay, this isn't so bad. You can chill them out. But I don't think snakes have any camaraderie. I think the, I think that whales, monkeys, elephants, I think that they can sense, they can say, okay, this person's trying to help me get out of this net. I'm gonna relax and not kill them. I think that then very much so you have that dynamic.

Speaking of somebody that does have camaraderie, there's this incredible video on your Instagram that people should go watch where the spider monkey was drowning and you jumped in to rescue. Sure. So we're coming downriver.

It's 7 o'clock in the morning, so I'm cold. I'm always cold. I'm sitting on the boat and I'm wearing my warm— you know, I'm wear— wearing whatever. I'm sitting on the boat and JJ's like, look, spider monkey. And I go, great, spider monkey in the river. Like, that's normal. And JJ's like, no, she's having trouble. And I was like, I was like, why is she having trouble? They swim all the time. And he goes, no, she's having— he goes, you should help. And so the boat, the boat comes around. Then sure enough, what you can't see in the video is that the river was so full that there's these little whirlpools and currents and she was trying to get to the side. And again, all the animal righteous people are very quick to be like, let nature take its course. You know, let the monkey drown or she doesn't need help. You're interfering. Sure, sure, sure. If you were actually there, you would know something. And that is that she did need help and she was drowning. Her head kept going under. And so I saw that JJ was right. And so we pull around. I took off whatever I could in the moment, jumped in with the pad, with the paddle, because now here again, I trust monkeys, but I don't want her to bite me. She is going to be scared. So I thought instead of, there's two ways I can do this. I can grab her by the neck, right? And like animal control her, grab her by the neck and the tail and take her out of the river, which is going to be scary for her. For her? And instead I thought, I know spider monkeys so well. I've raised so many of them. And when you raise them, they curl up to your neck and they'll like— if you have an orphaned spider monkey whose mother got shot by poachers and you're taking care of her before we bring them to the animal rehabilitation experts, they'll curl up on your neck and they go ooo-ooo-ooo. They'll just talk to you in your ear. And so I feel like I know a little bit of spider monkey, broken spider monkey. So I I pull up next to her and I give her the paddle and we're in this rushing river and we're moving at 10 miles an hour downstream. And I tried to give her the paddle and she, she smacks it away. She was like, no, get away from me. I don't know what you are. And then she keeps swimming. She goes under again. I give her the paddle. No. And then I, she puts a hand around the paddle and that moment that you had paused on, she looked back at me and she looked at me like, yeah, right there. She looked back and she registered like, oh, this This is, this is another animal with a face.

For people just listening, or you need to go watch the video, you guys are just looking at each other and she's looking at you. Yeah.

It's so cool. She looked right at me, but then she went, she went, no. She was like, whatever you are, no. And she went to go back in the— she was like, I'd rather die in the river. She was like, I'm so scared and I'm drowning. And she looked at me and she got scared and she jumped back in. And then I lifted her up and I went, and I started talking in spider monkey and she She just does it. Then like the next moment you see it, she just goes, "Sure." And she just, she wraps her tail. You see her tail is around the edge of the paddle. And she puts her hand around it. And then I lifted her and then, 'cause I'm taller than she is, I lifted her out of the river. And so now instead of manhandling her like, you know, like a raccoon you're catching by the neck, she's holding on in her spider monkey way to the paddle. And she looks back over her shoulder. She looks at me and I'm sitting there, I'm over there talking to her in spider monkey. And she looks at me and you hear her. She goes, I can't do the sound she makes, but she does this, this, whoa, she makes this spider monkey sound like, and she goes, fine. And then she, she, she's looking off the front end of the paddle as she's looking at the jungle. And she looks back at me and she's like, you could just tell. She's like, I have no idea what's happening. But she accepted the help. And the difference is, is that it's because I spoke her language in this case. And I know that that would sound, that would be one of those stories that people would nail me on every time if it wasn't on camera. You can see the moment that she makes direct eye contact with me and goes, okay. And then as soon as we get to shore, she jumps off and runs off into the forest.

It's so, I mean, to me, it's just watching the video. It's so amazing because she's looking at you like real. Yeah. You can, you can see that there's an actual connection. Oh yeah. That there's like communication, like a social, you know, the way humans, when you, when you're maybe saving a human being that's drowning or something like this, there's that, that That connection is beautiful to see, man. And then I read a little bit that spider monkeys have a, they're very intelligent, but they're especially socially intelligent. So they have social connections with each other. So they understand what that means. They understand what another entity means. So you speaking it, it's like in a broken language, probably is really important and a powerful way to indicate that, Wow, you're in network, like a foreigner, but like— Yeah.

It's like you're in a foreign country and someone goes, "Helping, helping, helping." And you go, "Okay, sure. You're not robbing me, you're helping, right?" Yeah. But no, they're incredibly— I'm telling you, I've had orphan spider monkeys so many times and they wrap their tail around your neck and they hug you and you realize that that connection that they have with their mothers when they hold onto them in the canopy, canopy. You shoot the— the loggers shoot the mother, and then I'm taking care of this baby. They hold on to you, and it's— they need that love and that connection more than they need food. They— if you put food or you put warmth of a body, they'll, they'll choose the connection over the sustenance.

Yeah, they really value the, the touching, the— that connection. Very tactile. They're very loving.

They wrap their long spider, spider monkey arms around each other. They, they're very much like us. They hold their babies. When it rains, all the spider monkeys will get together and they'll kind of huddle up and they'll pull leaves down and they'll all huddle up together. They're, when it's cold out, they get close. It's very cute.

Yeah, that's true for a lot of, I mean, they're distant relatives, but that's true for a lot of our relatives, the apes, chimps, all of them. They have this intricate, they're different, sometimes more violent, sometimes more loving, but social interactions, it's cool. It's cool that way.

Yeah, I mean, them, you expect it from them. They're practically us, you know, it's, it's to me, it's when other animals show, you know, the times that I've been on a trail and a jaguar has walked by and just been like, what's up? Keep walking. And it's like, it's kind of cool of you not to eat me. Like, I appreciate it.

Has that happened to you? Yeah.

I thought somebody was walking on the trail behind me and I was doing a camera trap and I put my finger up and I was going to go, could you walk any louder? And I had my finger up and I'm crouched because I was doing a camera trap. Jag walked by and he literally was just like, just kicking leaves, just like having fun, mouth open with, uh, uh. And he just walked by and he looked at me, just went, sup. Never broke stride, but like deadass eye contact with the, the bottom teeth out and that jaguar look of just like, hey. I was like, okay, now I'm going to have a like full meltdown. Your system, you start sweating, you're like, whoa. Because they're also so beautiful when you actually see a jaguar and it's like bright yellow and the teeth and and the, all the muscles and it's, you know.

What do you think you communicated to the jaguar that it didn't kill you?

No, nothing. The jaguar was making the decisions. I didn't do anything that, that like saved my life. He was just going somewhere. Mm-hmm. And because he's the king there, he just went, eh.

Yeah, probably also not threatened.

Not threatened at all.

I don't know, but I, I think there's something to you. See, you, you're just taking for granted the things that you're putting out into the world. Mm-hmm. You're probably radiating calm. Or not, not calm, but non-threat.

No, certainly non-threat. I also smell like an animal when I'm in the jungle, right? I'm not— I shower in the river. I don't use deodorant or shampoo or any of that stuff. So I don't smell, you know, you can just imagine to animals that have a smell that's like 4 times as good as ours, that, you know, just your deodorant, just your conditioner, just whatever other products, the, the, the, the detergent on your clothes smell that we, we smell like Times Square. We smell like a fire alarm to them. You know, they're like, what is this thing? It smells very foreign and scary. Everything's scary. Speaking of scary, the, the jaguar was kind of friendly. He was like, sup. It's almost like he'd seen me before on the trails. So he was like, oh, it's just you. The one time I stood on, on, on the forest floor in India with a wild tiger and nobody else was there, the thing that the tiger did that was so unnerving, and again, a tiger's back is you know, they're so much bigger than you think. It's like 4 jaguars. They're so big. Um, she wouldn't look at me. And it was terrifying because now I'm going to do this to you. She would look over there, then she would look like this, she'd look like that, and never eye contact. But it was like, you're as important to me as a stick. And you know, when you see two fighters square up and it's all about the eye contact and everything, trust me, you look through a person. You pretend they're not even there. That tiger insulted me on such a profound and disarming level that I never forgot it. It was just like, you matter as much as a sparrow. You're just not one of the things that I care about. She just was looking around and carried on doing what she was like, I'm going to walk this way. And I was just like, holy shit, I'm going to run. You know, it was just profound insignificance from this this god of an animal with paws the size of dinner plates. And it was like, man, if she does, I don't want her to look at me because if she looks at me, I'm gonna probably—

that's the end. That's the end. Uh, yeah, it just shows how much more powerful she is. That's probably the, the most, uh, terrifying animal on Earth.

Yeah. Yeah. And the rock-paper-scissors of land predators. I don't— I think like polar bear and tiger got to be the most scary. Yeah. Yeah, polar bear.

Polar bear is pretty scary. Fuck with a polar bear.

I don't think they're as fast as tigers, but I don't think you're gonna go fast on the and— Yeah. But I mean, like a tiger, it's like you can't outrun it. If you climb a tree, they climb better than you. If you get in a car, they could smash through the door. It's like, no matter— If a tiger decides it wants you, pretty much nothing— Even if you had a gun, even if you had like a 9mm, ain't gonna stop a tiger that wants you.

In the jungle, have you ever felt in danger? So, putting the humans aside, was there animals— You've talked about that humans are really— We've talked about how the humans are the source of danger. Danger. Yeah. Is there— you often speak about animals as, you know, a source of beauty and wonder and elegance and grace and all these things, which they are, uh, but I'm sure you've felt danger.

Yeah, I mean, I'm very aware that a hornet's nest can kill you. They'll kill you. Oh, so the little guys— the little guys suck, you know. You, you— I always think, like, when we were going through the jungle, one machete whack, and again, people don't realize how dense it is. You try to run, you get hung up on vines, you trip, you, you fall onto one of those trees with the black spikes, and then while you're laying there dealing with all that, they're just stinging you, and your body goes into anaphylactic shock and you die instantly. It's like you just— that can very quickly just take you out.

You're right. I mean, the biggest, you know, you're speaking of spikes, the biggest danger is not even the spikes. I mean, the spikes just because it creates open wounds, and then that can lead slowly to infection.

So it's really that is the biggest danger. Yeah. And the Amazon, I mean, again, I've never heard of a a human-directed violent jaguar in our region. They just don't attack people. I'd say mosquitoes are the thing that come after you. The snakes just want to be left alone. Even the venomous snakes, they, again, the Bushmaster, I grabbed a Bushmaster, I grabbed an 11-foot Bushmaster by the tail and he turned around, he lifted up to about this high off the ground. And like, if you could translate what he said, it was just, don't make me do it. It just said, you know, make my day. See, but that's the thing.

You speak snake language. And then I put the tail down. I was like, okay.

I was like, I'm scared, sufficiently scared. So the problem happens when you don't know what you're doing. So I'll give you an example. You want a dangerous animal story? I'll give you one. I was walking one time and I was trying to be responsible. It always happens when I'm trying to be responsible, I get into trouble. Trying to be safe and you fall down. I'm trying to be safe and I'm on the side of the stream and there's elephants on the other side. I'm in India. There's a deep, like a 12-foot foot thing and then a stream and then on the other side there's elephants and I'm walking and I'm like, I'm going to sit in a tree and I'm going to enjoy these elephants. I'm going to make notes in my book like Jane Goodall. Then I came up against a cement wall and it was the back of a male elephant. And in India, it's a male elephant that's been harassed and had fire thrown at it and God knows what else. And he, I don't know if I translate what he said, he turned around and he just went, what the fuck? The fuck? Like, he just looked at me like, how dare you? Mm-hmm. And then just went, boom! Just smacks apart the tree, turns around, and then that elephant was trying to kill me. That was not a mock charge. I threw off my backpack, zigzagged through the woods. He broke apart trees. If I had a GoPro on my back to show you what I saw of just the shrapnel and devastation of this thing just bashing through trees. And again, every bush that I encounter is a possible trip. Every vine is a possible hangup. And then if they get to you, he'll step on you and crush you. And so I like threw myself off the edge of this cliff, rolled down into the stream, and the elephant got to the edge of the cliff and almost fell on me. Got to the edge of the cliff and did one of these and then came back down on his hind feet, picked up a stick, threw it at me, and the stick just smacked down next to me in the stream. And I remember I gave him the finger because I was like, I'm alive. Yep. Just stormed off into the jungle.

There's nothing like an elephant. There's nothing like an elephant anywhere.

There's a, I loved, I loved the guy. I loved listening. I was so excited when I put on your podcast with the dinosaur guy. 'Cause he was like, when a baby is born, he was like, it learns, you know, elephant, giraffe, T-Rex. Mm-hmm. And I was like, holy shit. You know, along with like banana, water. Yeah. Sky is blue. And somehow you're like, in these initial things in your first few months on Earth. These are the characters you're introduced to. Like, how the hell did T-Rex get there? They don't even exist anymore. And it's like, yeah, it's— it was so— it was just such a fun— and I could hear your— I could hear you smiling through the mic as I'm listening to it, and I was like, oh, this is gonna be a good one.

Yeah, I mean, the dinosaur world is, is incredible, but like, the fact that you have such a predator evolve with such a gigantic jaw. Yeah, so much destructive power. It's weird.

And then, and then he broke my heart because he was talking about how the T-Rex and Stegosaurus. He's like, all the books has them together, and he's like, they're nowhere near each other. They did not exist anywhere.

And I was like, I want them to battle with each other. Yes. Uh, speaking of elephants, I feel like we'll be up to an adventure at some point after all this chaos is over. You think back in the jungle, Africa, India?

I think I would love to show a herd of truly wild elephants in the African jungle. I think that us going on, I think going on a boat trip through the Amazon, not a hiking one, where we're going through some really, there's areas where you can get permits to go through areas where no one's allowed to go. They're completely protected areas. And you can just go for a week through areas where the animals have no idea what a human is. And so you can move through it. And so it would be a little bit more of a an enjoyable experience, not a survival situation. Like, go with JJ in a boat and just travel through the Amazon. Hey, maybe we protect this river, and then the river's knocked from, from north to south, and we just, you know, you raft down with boat support.

Like, you know, it's really incredible to see how it's all connected. I mean, the river, it's the thread that connects the whole story. And so it's nice to see how it all is connected. And that's why us starting in the mountains is also really nice to see and where it began. Ends, but it keeps going. The story keeps going. It keeps going.

We, we did start in the mountains, an epic first day together.

And, uh, hopefully people get a chance to see, uh, that video. So I gotta ask you about the writing. I, I mentioned you're an incredible writer. What's your writing process like for this book, Jungle Keeper, for The Mother God? For future books you're writing? What are you like, a Stephen King? Do you have a drinking thing that you go to some dark places in the basement? Do you, uh, write every single day? Do you wake up, do you take little notes here and there? Like your notebook, there's a bunch of doodles, a bunch of writing. Like what's your process like?

I try to journal every day for a, for a number of reasons. It's accountability. It helps me keep track track of. It's fun to see your hopes and dreams. It's fun to record the mundane moments that we all forget about. And that might be like cooking in the kitchen with your mother. That might be a fun walk you had with your dog, like little things that you just, you think you're going to remember everything. You just don't. And so I have piles of notebooks. I have just piles of piles and piles of notebooks in my, in my room. And, uh, when something happens, I write it down. And I, if a cool story happens, I will write down, or if I find a leaf from an extinct tree, I will make an etching of it. But I just, as anything that happens that I find remarkable in any way, either for my own personal memory or for writing, I'll write it down. And then, and then when I go back to it later, A, I have a very good memory, and then B, the facts are there. And so when something happens, like you rescue a spider monkey, or, or you, you know, something, something happens that's remarkable in life, you, you get to spend time with someone that you haven't in a long time, and you get that feeling of like, oh, that's why I'm such good friends with them. Like, you know, you write these things down, and then it's always there. And so I feel like whenever I don't journal that I'm missing out on keeping my life and my memory memories. So yeah, I don't, I don't do that. That Stephen King quote about like, you know, amateurs wait for inspiration and the professionals, we go to work every day. And he's like 10 pages a day, whatever it is. I don't do that. I write when I feel like it. And I like to, you know, I'll start thinking of like, oh, this is a perfect way to, you know, start this scene because, because like the moment this happened, I felt so intensely. And if we bring people in and I'll just be in a car or a boat or something, and I'll I'll start thinking about it and I'll go, this is just, the thing is you gotta carpe diem. And I'll go, okay. And then I'll go, okay, where, where did that happen again? I go, okay, I'll go to that page and I'll go, okay, so what exactly did that happen? Then you get the laptop and you, mm-hmm. So it's brain to paper to laptop, always paper in between.

But how do you go desperate notes to the, the final thing? 'Cause you have, I mean, it's, it's, it's difficult to convey through words the experience and you do that Wow. So is this like, do you edit a lot?

Do you iterate? That's where Stephen King was right. Because I look at writing like sculpting. You have to have something to sculpt. And so when you're thinking of a story, again, a lot of, I mean, I love listening to great storytellers and I actually love listening to bad stories, just like I like watching bad movies to see what they did wrong. When you listen to someone that starts a story and they have you hooked from the second that start. And then you were like, wait, but how did that happen? If, why was that happening? What happened next? And they keep you going and they drop the information perfectly. And so every now and then you figure that out in that moment of inspiration. So then I have my facts written down here and then I'll, you know, I'll, I'll do an outline on a page or something, but then I have to get it all out of me with a pen. Then I can move to, and I'll almost close my eyes. I'll almost just close my eyes and write the story out. I just need to, you're making the, you're, you're literally making your clay. And so it's It's like you make the shape of the thing before you— and then editing is the giving it details.

So you do take passes like— Oh my God.

Yes. I mean, dozens and dozens. That's the— that's where writing sucks. When you're finishing a book and that— I'll never do that again. So what I'm doing now is this last book, there's so much that it covered and I was in the jungle and it'd be like hiking for 10 hours a day, you know, dealing with narco traffickers, all this stuff. I would have to edit at night and it was like, this is no way to live. So now what I'm doing is I'm writing chapters as I feel like writing chapters. When something amazing happens or something remarkable, I go, this is going to be its own chapter. I write it, edit it, and then I send it to my sister who's an expert editor and, and, and has lived more in literature than most people live in real life. And she'll let me know if it's good or bad or needs to be tweaked or moved along, whatever it else. I get it when I get it back from Hertz. Marked up. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put those aside. And then the next time I want to write a book, it's not starting from scratch on 300,000 words. It's just, it's just here. It's ready. Much easier.

What kind of books do you think you might write in the future?

Well, there's Mother of God and now there's Jungle Keeper and then I'm already working on Endgame. Mm-hmm. Because this, I mean, there's so much that has happened. I mean, I think I told you when you were there, but like there's a whole chap— right before you came. Me and JJ went to the back end behind our river to this horrible part of the Amazon that's 10 times more lawless than where we are. And instead of having no people, there are people. And you want to talk about Amazonian No Country for Old Men, it's the oil companies and the missionaries and the newly contacted tribe. There's something called the, there's a people called the Nahua people and they, they're recently contacted and they've been ripped out of the forest and they're standing there with their little bows and arrows. They're tiny people. They're standing there at the, the, the, the Nomoles are tall. The Nahua are small. And we just, we saw brutality in this horrific, horrible, it's like, it's like sicario. It's like just absolute lawlessness. I remember the moment JJ looked at me and he said, you know, and we're both, we both think of ourselves as tough, I think, until we get in these certain situations. And he looked at me and he went, we're not safe. And we looked at the people around us and you were at this like side of the river port, 8 days up this river. And you could tell that everyone that was looking at us was making a calculation about how inconvenient it would be to kill us at this moment and how much money. They're like, camera, watch, clothing, backpack. And they're like, that's a nice backpack. And like, but you could tell they were just shopping. And, and JJ and me were like, we're gonna, you know, where are we putting the tent tonight? I was like, we're not staying here. And then I was like, well, maybe we should stay here. I was like, I don't know what to do. And then, and then one of the little, one of the little Nahua people came over to JJ and was asking for food. And he made the mistake of explaining money to them. They'd never had money before. And so he gave them a piece of money and was like, or, you know, a couple of coins. And he was like, oh, if you just go over there, there's like a man that'll sell you something and then you can eat it. And the guy was like, bow and arrow? And JJ was like, no, no, no, no, no. Give him this and he'll give you food. And it worked. And then JJ got sworn by like 60 of these little tribals came in and they all had bows and arrows, hands out, and JJ was running with all these like half-naked people behind. And just that, that whole saga right there is like, I was, that chapter is going to be called River of the Dolphin Fuckers. Because everyone we met on the river kept telling us, I'd say, I'd have my, I'd have my camera with me and I'd go, are there dolphins here? And they'd go, yeah, there's Dolphins, and if you fuck one, be careful because they'll pull you under. I went, okay, weirdo, to the first guy. Yeah. And then we got to like, you know, 8 hours further upriver, met the next guy, and I had my camera out and I'm like, hey, are there any dolphins here? And he goes, yeah. He goes, if you fuck any, be careful. He's like, because they'll grab on and pull you under. And I was like, what? And then like 4 more people told me the same things. I was like, okay.

Yeah, the lesson we learned in the jungle, you know, horned anacondas, believe them. Believe them.

So apparently on that river, they, they were all trying to be good Samaritans and warn me about the clear and present dangers involved with amorous dolphin encounters.

So stylistically, I mean, that is a bit Cormac McCarthy. Oh, he would have loved it. There are people you draw, like writers you draw inspiration from like that. I mean, you're very close to him in terms of like, you like plug in every once in a while, you jump around stylistically.

Actually, I do, I do. It depends because, because sometimes I want to sink in and flex a little bit, which I don't think people really enjoy, but I enjoy it, you know, like talk about the, you know, just use all those flowery words and make these beautiful metaphors. Um, but what I'm finding more and more is that, uh, it's modern readers aren't really looking for that. They want easy read. And that for my style of storytelling, people really enjoy and tend to thank me for more of an Anthony Bourdain style where you're like, so we found ourselves on the side of this river and we knew we were we were in danger. The reason we were in danger, and you just start telling the story. And you know what? Forget the— forget that maybe once every 2 pages you can throw in one of those beautiful little zingers. But it's like, no one wants to watch you flex.

But also, sometimes you go even more than— I don't think Anthony Bourdain did like Hemingway, like minimal, like, no, like word, period, word. Like, that, that's another way to flex that I really like that you do sometimes, is just like, yeah, less and just power and the spacing, the silences, the unsaid is what does the driving.

I mean, that's what's so arresting about— you read like For Whom the Bell Tolls and, you know, the air was crisp and the water was sweet and the wine was good and the afternoon was warm and you're like, I know what that's like. And these are not complicated sentences, but when he puts them together into a paragraph, you go, oh yeah, I want to drink wine out of of leather, you know, and lay by the side of that stream. It sounds so beautiful. And so sometimes, you know, I mean, just look at that, look at that fire cracking on the horizon there. And it's like, sometimes the only way is just these simple statements, you know. Writing's beautiful. I love writing. I love reading it. Have you interacted with LLMs much?

Doesn't, you know, AI systems, ChatGPT, there's a bit of a scary and a sad aspect to the fact that they can generate language extremely well, but something is missing and it's very hard to put your finger on it.

My question to you is, I can pick out with stunning accuracy when someone sends me a message and they've passed it through ChatGPT. I know. Somehow I could tell, and I don't know how I could tell, but I could tell. I don't I don't know if that'll— that's one of those things like the images, like we're at the point where we can't tell anymore almost. I don't know if that's going to go away or if like you said, there's something— one of the things that F. Scott Fitzgerald does so much is he describes the moment of— he describes these incredibly human moments with such crystalline accuracy that you go, "It must have taken you a month. You must have studied life so much to be able to put those, string those words together. I think in a book he writes about someone screaming with such abandonment that at the highest register her voice like wobbled and cracked. And you're like, oh my God, I know what that sounds like. And I wonder if, because you can say like, you know, write me The Jungle Book, but make it sound like Cormac McCarthy wrote it. And it's like, it'll be like the jungle was dark and stern and the boy was, you know, it's like, it'll They still do it and it's amazing. My question to you is, at least right now, what are we picking up on something as simple as a text message?

Is very difficult to define, but it's important to keep thinking about because it's like what makes us human?

You reassured me recently because I called you and I said, I said, I come out of the jungle and all anybody wants to talk about is AI. And I was like, everyone's like, it's like people are walking themselves into the matrix and asking to be hooked. Everyone's just obsessed with this topic. I'm, you know, and you were like, man, you know, human art and human literature is going to actually become so valuable as this other thing happens. And like, I expected the opposite answer. I thought you were going to be like, yeah, man, this really is where we're taking off and everything's going to change.

And you were like, man, like real artists are going to become more appreciated as more and more compelling and effective bots appear on the internet, we're going to value that less and less, I think, and we're going to value inhuman interaction more and more. And so, you know, artists showing art at galleries versus on the internet, meeting in person, and actually it's going to force people to be more authentic and real and raw with each other. That's going to be the valuable resource.

I mean, I think already, AI aside, I think that in today's world, I think that everyone's so, I mean, like movies have become so polished. Like there's no like weird quirky stuff. There's no risky stuff anymore. It's all very, very curated. I've almost stopped watching movies. I used to love movies, but it's like, it's fun when they take risks, when they're messy, when they're real.

Yeah. I think Hollywood, Hollywood stars, Hollywood movie making process has become less and less and less popular. Popular because of that. So I can't wait for movies to be reinvented, independent film, just raw, edgy, dangerous, all that kind of—

and like, all the actors we like are in TV shows on various streaming platforms. It's like they've all just gone home. Like, they're not there. Like, I was like— I literally was like, man, I was like, I miss movies. What happened to movie? I'm rewatching all the old movies that I like, and I was, um, and I was like, where, where is everybody? Yeah, what are they doing? It's like they all have a TV series on Blu Blu or something, you know, and it's like, fuck.

Yeah, I think we'll call them the raw, the dangerous, the edgy.

What we just described is almost perfect for— there's a scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams makes them open their books, and the first page of the poetry book is like, how do you identify a good poem? He's like, a good poem can be— and he makes a graph, and he's like, by the subject of the poem, and then the accuracy with which it's described, and you can tell whether or not it's a good poem. And he reads this, and the whole class is sitting there bored, And he's like, "Now rip that page out of your book." And they rip the page out of the book, and then he's like, "Now stand up," and he's like, "Now describe something," and he makes them bleed it and, like, scream it. And it's almost exactly what we're describing right now. It's like, yeah, you can turn it into a graph if you need to, but it's something way messier than that.

Yeah, and Robin Williams, the person— God. —is a perfect example of the complicated, beautiful human I miss him often whenever I, whenever I see clips of him come up. It's just, yeah, I can't, I, I, I still to this day can't make sense that a person like that can take their own life. Somebody who's brought so much joy to the world. It scares me, man. It scares me. I'm scared of my own mind in that way, you know? That he could be at the top of the world.

But he had an illness.

Yeah, that's what I understand. Yeah. Dude, life is a roller coaster. I'm telling you. And you're living through it.

As scary as that Robin, like, you can go down the Robin Williams hole, I'll give you this. My very close friend, my friend Gleb, he has a story. He was in New York City as a kid and he saw Robin Williams walking down on the street, and he went up to Robin Williams and he went, "Oh my God, it's Robin Williams!" And Robin Williams was like, "Yeah." And he goes, "Can I have an autograph?" And he goes, "Do you have any paper?" And my friend was like, "No." He's like, "I'm 11." And Robin Williams was like, "Go get some paper." And Robin Williams's manager or somebody was with him, and he was like, "Robin, we don't got time. We gotta get up there." And he was like, "Hold on." He's like, "I told the kid I'd give him a thing. He'll be back." And my friend like heard this as he's like, "Please stay, please stay." Like, you know, his whole life depended on this. Thing that he ran into like a diner, grabbed a napkin, ran back out onto the street. It took him a few minutes. He said Robin Williams was sitting there and he said his irate manager was there just being like, come on, let's go. Let's— Robin Williams waited there and signed the napkin for him. And like actually, actually did it with a smile and a wink and, you know.

Yeah, man, this, you could bring a lot of joy to the world. Never forget that. All those little interactions. Actions. I love it. I love it.

That was one another one of the Jane Zimmer amazing quotes that I don't, I couldn't reproduce, but it's, you know, just that you, you don't realize the degree to which the things you do each day matter, even if it's just to the people around you. And it's like, you are to the people around you their entire life experience, if they're your kids, your parents, your partner. So yeah, the things you do. And if you can manage to put that extra energy where it's to the point where you do put a little magic on it, where it is fun, you show up home with something that you got, you know, play with the kids in a way that surprises them. I had a friend, a good friend of mine, this guy Vinny, he told me, I called him and said, what are you doing? He said, um, he said, oh, I have, I have a whole plan set up. He goes, it's supposed to be really good stars tonight. He goes, I'm putting my kids to bed. He goes, I'm putting my girl, my daughter to bed. He goes, I'm going to wake her up in the middle of the night. He goes, and I'm going to have a candle. He goes, she's never seen those. And I'm going to take her up to the roof to go stargazing. He's like, but I want her to sleep. And he's like, you know, remember when you were a kid and you like wake up and it's like, he was curating a magical experience for her to see the stars and like, you know, like making, making warm tea and like all that. It's like, man, you can just, you can make it so great.

Jane Goodall is the reason you met this guy. That's right. You've continuously spoken really highly of him and he gave me this book that he has recently written, Echoes from Eden, signed it.

Yeah. Dax, A, saved my life and B, is the example of what everybody wishes, you know, Dax made an amazing company, amassed an amazing fortune, and then said, I'm going to use it for good.

He's given a lot, a lot of resources, a lot of love, a lot of effort to helping the Amazon rainforest and the environment in general. And, um, he's one of the only guys I know who has a sexier beard than you.

He's got me beat big time.

Uh, he wrote, thank you, brother, for your love of the wild. This book is about the heroes fighting on the front line for nature. Together we can protect Earth's last wild places. Speak soon, Dax.

He supported all these initiatives, and he, I mean, he was, he was working. He went to the Amazon with Jane. He supported Jungle Keepers. He's supported the Sea Shepherd. And so he really went out and said, okay, what are the environmental projects that are doing the most good? And where do I want to put my resources? And it's like, everyone always whines about that. Like, you know, like, how come the, these guys don't? And it's like, he did. And he got a lot done. And that's, and then he went and visited all those projects, sea turtles and, and, and, and Indonesian orangutans and, and working with Jane. And so then that book is, is like sort of a state of the union on where conservation's at. And there's a lot of knowledge about what what different, how all the different strategies. It's so different protecting sea turtle eggs versus trying to save a river in the Amazon versus Jane's sort of global message of hope. And then he has a guy in there who's trying to save a specific part of, I think, Sumatra. And it's like just amazing stuff. The Congo. The Congo. And then he actually took the time to go to these places and see the operations on the ground.

And, uh, you still working with him?

Yeah. Well, that's sort of the, you know, it, the way it happened in my life was the one time I quit conservation was right around the time COVID hit and I was going through a divorce and I'm like 30-something or 32 years old and I had no job, no nothing. JJ was, JJ's mom had COVID. Don Ignacio, the shaman, had COVID. Pico's leg was coming off. It was like nothing was working. Nobody could go anywhere. And I called Mohsin and I was like, I was like, I quit. I was like, we're never going to go back to the jungle. The loggers just went out and were tearing down everything. I just, I just said, there's nothing. I got nothing. And I, in like this, in absolute black depression, I called him and I said, I quit. I'm going to go get a job. I said, I guess I'm just, you know, I guess I've been like jungle Peter Pan and I, it's time to grow up. And I was, like, really embarrassed at the time that I did that. And then I spent, like, 4 days just laying in bed, just with no idea what to do. The only thing I can do is this. And I had talked to Dax months earlier, told him my plan for protecting the river, for making a Ranger team, and he'd been looking over the budgets and spreadsheets and everything and saying— seeing if this was real. He was still forming Age of Union, and then 4 days after I quit I'm gonna quit. The phone rings and it's Dax and he goes, hey, I looked over the budget, by the way. He goes, I'd like to make a 10-year commitment to Jungle Keepers. He goes, let's go. And of course he was, he had no idea what I was going through and he was just like, let's go. And it's like going from that depressed to that inspired and that single conversation, like you could get the bends from that. Yeah.

And it's not, it's not just the money is that somebody believes in you.

No, it's that he believes it's that we can Money's, you know, that money means tuna cans and gasoline and, and being able to like buy shoes, you know, it's like we, you know, we never had those things before. We're just living in the jungle watching our bodies decay. And he was like, no, I know how to run a company. And so I can tell what you guys need to run an organization. And he did that and then, and then has stuck by us. And he, he came weeks ago. He came not that long ago to the Amazon and we, and he, we took him around and he just, he looked around and he went, I've never seen seeing people, because when he started, he said, you guys remind me of a startup. He said, you're a mess. And that was really right before Stefan had come in. And so now he's seeing ranger teams and boats going up and down, and we have complex systems and a donor program, and all these things are working well, and we're actually making progress, and we have annual reports and all this data. And he's like, yo, you can, you know, he says, he says people have donor fatigue where they donate money and they don't know where it's going. And he goes, here. He's like, they can see what's happening. And so having someone like Dax in your corner is a good— it's a miracle, really. In the book, it's going to sound— it's gonna— again, it's gonna— a lot of the things that happen to me in my life sound like bad writing. You know in the movie when they're like, they got the gun against their head and they're on the ground and you go, they're not getting out of this one, and then like someone bursts through the door and saves them? And it's like, that just happened too many times to me. And it sounds like bad writing, but it's, it's, it's really good life.

Since, uh, you mentioned Stefan one more time, one of the things I forgot to mention, one, one of my happiest moments, uh, in life— I had many of them in the jungle, uh, with you— is, uh, just talking late at night after ayahuasca, funny enough, uh, chatting with Stefan and Dan and you and giggling and just talking about life and everything. And Dan is a guy I have to give a shout out out to. You should go follow him on Instagram, Life with Dan. He's an incredible wildlife photographer. I've seen him— he's worked quite a lot with you. He has a love of nature, a love of the wilderness, a love of, uh, beauty, and is extremely good at taking pictures, but just goes to the edges with you. He's the only guy I've seen with the, with the two giant cameras to be able to follow you into the darkness.

Well, Dan, first of all, that picture I showed you where I'm in the tree, because I told you the story about with JJ where I climbed the giant tree. Well, this, this is years later. I climbed it with Dan. Dan was there. And so he flew the drone up and so got me in the tree. But what Dan's a really good example of is like you're saying, what would you say to the kids? It's like Dan listened to our talk. Our first podcast was living in Singapore, and he's like a young filmmaker, signed himself— again, just get out there. He signed himself up to come on a Tamandua Expeditions with my company, and he showed up on the thing, and sure enough, their boat broke down, and I was off doing Jungle Keeper stuff, and someone was like, yo, their boat broke down. So we show up, and I haul their boat, and he comes up to me, and he goes, I'm such a big fan. He goes, I just wanted to say hi. I said, oh, I said, well, great. I said, hello. I said, well, let's get you back on the river. And then, um, you know, someone came up to me and they said, you know, he's a really good photographer. Yeah, I said, everybody's a good photographer today. I said, that's great. Amazing. We have Stefan and Mohsen. I said, what else do we need? And then someone I trust was like, hey, listen, look at his stuff. It's not normal. And then I watched a few of his videos and I went, holy shit. And I went, would you ever think of coming down for a few weeks to film? And at the time he was like, No way. He was like, no way. And like, he was like so amazed. And then like, now we're bros. Now we film together all the time. But he put himself in the position where he has the skill, the insane skill. I mean, some of his things where he's tracking shots of a white-winged sparrow over the water where he's in the boat with an 800mm lens, getting these insane shots. I mean, he's just abs— I've never seen a talent like him with a, with video.

But wildlife photography and documentary filmmaking in general, it's not just about the competence of being able to pull off a difficult shot. It's like the patience required and like the discipline to just sit there and wait. I mean, when we went out into the jungle, he waited.

Yeah, no, I mean, like, even I'm looking on this page, that shot of the, of the emerald tree boa there, he got up before dawn to wait for the sideways light because he wanted to light— he had a vision of lighting the snake from the side. And then the macaws coming off the clay lick, how many days at the clay lick till he got the explosion of macaws? And I mean, I'm up in the tree and he's on the walkie-talkie. And then it's also, your lenses are going to fog. You have to be able to hike and do everything the— everybody else is doing and your job. I mean, the dude. It is.

You attract a lot of incredible people because you're, uh, because the mission is clear and there's just like, there's a vibrancy and energy to the whole thing. It's exciting. That's why, that's why it's the best people come to work with you, come to hang out with you.

It's become an amazing team. I, I look around at the people and I go, how did this, how did this happen?

But it is getting more intense and dangerous and so on. I have to ask you the, the thing we've talked about, uh, what do you think you'll do when you're getting older? This is pretty intense. This is pretty insane. Where do you see yourself years from now?

I want to protect this river. We have to protect this river in the next year and a half or else we'll lose the chance. And so either I'm going to have first book, I got to the Amazon and it was wild. Second book, we went, we built this amazing organization and we got so close. It'll be like those movies, like, like Blow, where it's like, for a time it was amazing. And then at the end, it's not so great. Great movie. But yeah, great movie, but, you know, and that's what, so, you know, and I'm writing this story as it happens and, you know, Endgame might be written by somebody else. Or we just got really close and then it all fell apart. But, but we're 130,000 acres of the way. If we make it to 300,000, I think, I'm calling it now, I think what's going to happen is enough people are going to learn about this. It's going to tidal wave. We're going to make an amazing documentary about how we protected the wildest place on Earth. And then I would love to have a few kids, get a PhD, teach, teach other conservationists around the world how to do this, to save really wild places, keep inspiring people, keep writing books, keep going on expeditions. I don't have any problems with that. I can tell you, I, I can't, I can't do this much longer because the pressure of wondering if it's going to be Okay, I've used all of it that I can. My Lord of the Rings analogy of like carrying the ring, it's like you can only do that for so long. And so I'm actually very excited to, I need to know that it's safe. I want to know that, I mean, those, I mean, that monkey that I rescued out of the river now, you know, the toucan Lucas that comes back to visit us. Lulu's grand, we just saw a giant anteater not that long ago with Dax in the jungle. And like, like I know these animals and I'm responsible for protecting their home. And it would be so amazing to bring people to the treehouse and show them this amazing place and put out documentaries. So I have no problem imagining a transition period. I would like to not be, I'd like to transition out of Blood Diamond and go to more of the, you know, the, the sort of the professor role after this. Um, you mean like Indiana Jones type of professor? Running from the, running from the tribes. As long as it doesn't go supernatural at the end, I'll be very happy. That always kind of let me down.

Well, thank you for giving basically everything you got towards this mission that you're doing. And thank you for being who you are. It's been an honor of a lifetime to be able to call you a friend and to have this conversation, brother. This is the third time we've spoken. I think we'll talk at least 10 more times. And I think I speak for everybody in saying thank you and please don't die in, uh, trying to save the rainforest.

I have to say thank you to you because our first conversation changed everything. It really did. In this, in this story, it, it brought so many more people onto the mission and I think also lifted me up. 'Cause as, as, as we often acknowledge this, this can weigh you down. And I often do get weighed down and I lose hope myself. And then I get lifted up by moments like that where someone I'm a huge fan of and who I respect so much reaches out and goes, do you want to come to Austin and do this podcast I do? And I respond to Lex fucking Friedman podcast. But you know, you've, you've really, really changed the narrative and allowed this to be a reality.

So, and everybody go preorder Jungle Keeper, the book available everywhere. And if you can donate on, uh, junglekeepers.org now, this is an important mission, an ultra competent team, and this is such a beautiful part of the world that, uh, I really, really, really hope we, uh, protect. So thank you for talking today, and now let's Let's go eat. Thank you, brother. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosely. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And once more, let me say thank you for everything. Thank you for your support. Thank you for the love. And thank you for listening. And I hope to see you next time.