Paul Rosolie: Amazon Jungle, Uncontacted Tribes, Anacondas, and Ayahuasca | Lex Fridman Podcast #369

It was just like one of those moments where we saw it at the same time. And we're standing by the tail and the snake was so big that, I mean, this must have been a 25 foot anaconda, dead asleep with a, with a, probably a 16 foot anaconda, like sprawled across her. And they're laying in the starlight and we're floating on top of a lake, standing there in the middle of the Amazon. And JJ just, I just, I could feel the blood drain out of his face. And as like a. However old I was, you know, maybe 20 years old, I just said, if I, if we could somehow show people this, we'll be on the front cover of National Geographic and we can protect all the jungle that we want. And so I tried to catch it. Yeah. So I jumped on the snake and the only measurement I have of this animal is that when I wrapped my arms around it, I couldn't touch my fingers.

Yeah.

And so I was, you know, my, my feet were dragging. And to her credit, this anaconda did not turn around and eat me because her head was, you know, this big. And, and she went, and she reached the edge of the, the grass island and she starts plunging into the dark. And so I'm watching the stars vibrate as this anaconda is going. And I had to make the choice of either going headfirst down into the black, which, no, thank you, or stopping and just keeping my hand on this thing as it raced by me. And I just felt the scales and the muscle and the power go by and then eventually taper down to the tail until it slipped away into the darkness. And I was laying there just panting.

The following is a conversation with Paul Roslie, a conservationist, explorer, author, filmmaker and real life Tarzan. Since for much of the past 17 years, Paul has lived deep in the Amazon rainforest, protecting endangered species and trees from poachers, loggers and foreign nations funding them. He is the founder of Jungle Keepers, which today protects over 50,000 acres of threatened habitat. And Paul is one of the most incredible human beings I've ever met. I hope to travel with him in the Amazon jungle one day, because in his eyes, I saw a truth that can only be discovered directly by spending time among the immensity and power of nature at its purest. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Roslie. In 2006, at 18 years old, you fled New York and traveled to the Amazon. This started a journey That I think lasts to this day. Tell me about this first leap. What in your heart pulled you towards the Amazon jungle?

From the time I was, you know, three years old, I'd say, you know, it was dinosaurs, wildlife, documentaries, Steve Irwin, you name it. And like, when my parents said, you know, nature versus nurture, they. They nurtured my nature. I was always just drawn to streams, forests. I wanted to go explore where the little, little creek led. I wanted to see the turtles and the snakes. And so I was a kid that hated school, did not get along with school. I was dyslexic and didn't know it undiagnosed. I didn't read until I was like 10 years old behind. And so for me, the forest was safety. Like, I remember one time in first grade, they had you doing those, you know, those multiplication sheets. That was pure hell for me. And so I actually got so upset that I couldn't do it that I ran out the classroom, ran out the door and went to the nearest woods and I stayed there because that was safe. And so for me, like, once I got to the point where I was like, high school isn't working out. I had incredibly supportive parents that were like, look, just get out. Take your GED, get out of high school. After 10th grade, you gotta go to college, but, like, start doing something you love. And so I saved up and bought a ticket to the Amazon and met some indigenous guys. And the second I walked in that forest, it was like. It's like the first scene in Jurassic park when they see the dinosaurs and they go, oh, this is it. Yeah, I walked in there and just. I looked at those giant trees. I saw leaf cutter ants in real life. And I just went, oh. It was like the movie just started, you know, that was when. That was when, like, I came online.

Can you put into words what is it about that place that felt like home? What was it that drew you? What aspect of nature? The streams, the water, the. The forest, the jungle, the animals, what, what drew you?

It's just, it's always been in my blood. I mean, for any forest. I mean, whether it's, you know, upstate New York or, or India or Borneo, but the Amazon, it's all of that turned up to this level where everything is superlatively diverse. You have more plants and animals than anywhere else on Earth. Not just now, but in the entire fossil record. It's the Andes, Amazon interface, terrestrially. That's where it is. That's the greatest library of life that has ever existed. And so you're so stimulated. You're so overwhelmed with color and diversity and beauty and this overwhelming sense of natural majesty of these, you know, thousand year old trees. And half the life is up in the canopy of those trees. We don't even have access to it. There's stuff without names walking around on those branches and it's like it just takes you somewhere. And so going there it was like, you know, the guys I met just opened the door and they were like, you know, how far do you want to go down the rabbit hole? How, how, how much of this do you want to see?

You mentioned Steve Irvin. You list a bunch of heroes that you have. He's one of them. And you said that when you're unsure about a decision, you ask yourself, wwsd, what would Steve do? Why is that such a good heuristic for life? What would Steve do?

He's a human being. That like everything we saw from Steve Irwin was positive. Everything was with a smile on his face. If he was getting bitten by a reticulated python, he was smiling. If he was getting destroyed in the news for feeding a crocodile with his son too close, he was trying to explain to people why it's okay and why we have to love these animals. And everything was about love. Everything was about, you know, wildlife and protecting. And to me, a person like that, that where you only see positive things, that's, that's a role model.

And it's just like an endless curiosity and hunger to explore this, this world of nature.

Yeah. And an insatiable madness for, for, for wildlife. I mean the guy was just so much fun.

I gotta, if it's okay, read to you a few of your own words. You open the book. Mother of God. With a passage that I think beautifully paints a scene. Before he died, Santiago Duran told me a secret. It was late at night in a palm thatched hut on a bank of the Tampa Pota river, deep in the southwestern corner of the Amazon basin. Besides a mud oven, two wild boar heads sizzled in a cradle of embers, their protruding tusks curling in static agony as they cooked. The smell of burning cecropia wood and singed flesh filled the air. Woven basket containing monkey skulls hung from the rafters where stars speak through the gaps in the thatching. A pair of chickens huddled in the corner, conversing softly. We sat facing each other on sturdy benches across a table hewn from a single cross section of some massive tree now nearly consumed by termites. The song of a million insects and frogs filled the night. Santiago's Cigarette trembled in the aged fingers as he leaned close over the candlelight to describe a place hidden in the jungle that line the songs of a million insects and frogs filled the night for some reason. Hit me. What's it like sitting there conversing among so many living creatures all around you?

Every night in the jungle, you live in constant awareness of that out there in the darkness are literally millions of heartbeats around you. And so, like, we exist in this. In this, you know, domesticated, paved world most of the time. But when you go out there past the roads and the. And the telephone poles and the hospitals and you make it out into earth, just wild earth, and there's no, there's not. It's not like this is a national park. There's no rescue helicopter waiting to come get you. You are out there and you're surrounded at night by. I mean, there are snakes and jaguars and frogs and insects and all this stuff just crawling through the swamps and through the trees and through the branches, and we put on headlamps and go out into the night and just absolutely fall to our knees with wonder of the things that we see. It's absolutely incredible.

And most of it doesn't make sounds.

Like the insects do, the insects do, the frogs do. You have some of the night birds making sounds. But a lot of it, everything has evolved to be silent, invisible. I mean, everything there is in the. On the list, like, like I. There's another line in Mother of God where I said, like, you know, like life is just like a temporary moment of stasis and like the churning, recycling death march that is the Amazon. Like, it's. It's been called the greatest natural battlefield on Earth. I mean, if any, in any square acre, there's more stuff eating other things than anywhere else. And you go through a swamp in the Amazon and there's like, there's tarantulas floating on the water, there's frogs in the trees, there's tadpoles hanging from leaves waiting to drop into the water. There's fish waiting to eat them. There's birds in the trees. You literally are surrounded by so many things that your brain can't process it. It's just overwhelming life.

Churning death march. Some of the creatures are waiting and some of them are being a bit more proactive about it. What do you make of that churning death march? That the amount of murder that's happening all around you at all scales, what is that? You know, we dramatize wars and the millions of people that were lost in World War II. Some of them tortured, some of them dying with a gun in hand, some of them civilians, but it's just millions of people. What about the billions and billions and billions of organisms that are just being murdered all around you? Does that, do you. Does that change your view of nature, of life here?

I've always kind of wondered like that, like when you see like a, you know, wildebeest taken down by lions and eaten from behind while it's alive, and it makes you question God, you know, you go, how could, how could, how could they let this happen in the Amazon? I find personally that these natural processes make up almost a religion. That it reminds you how temporary we are, that, you know, the bot flies that are trying to get into your skin and the mosquitoes that are trying to suck your blood and the. You know that when you sweat, you see, you see the. You literally can like, hold out your arm and watch the condensation come off of your skin and rise up into the canopy and join the clouds and rain back down in the after afternoon. And then you drink the river and start it all over again. And it's like it's flowing through you. So the Amazon reminds me that there's a lot that we don't understand. And so when it comes to that overwhelming and collective murder, as Werner Herzog put it, it's just part of the show. It's part of the freak show of the Amazonian night.

You, at certain moments, able to feel one with a mosquito that's trying to kill you slowly.

One with the mosquito is a stretch.

Is it always the enemy? What I mean is like, you're part of the machine there, right?

Yeah. And it's like fair play. It's like fair play. So like, we have bullet ants and like, you know, you get, you get nailed by a bullet ant and you.

Just go, yeah, well, well done.

Well done. Today's, Today's over. I'm going back to bed and I'm taking a pile of Tylenol.

And you know, do you think in that sense, when you're out there, are you a part of nature or are you separate from nature? Is man a part of nature or separate?

I think that's what's so refreshing about it, is that out there you truly are. And so whether we're bringing researchers or film crews, or whether we're just out there ourselves on an expedition, you truly are part of nature. And so one of the things that my team and I started doing when I became friends with these guys, this is a family of indigenous people from the community of Inferno. And they took me in and as we got close, they started saying, you know, you can come with us on our, like, annual hunting trip. And I went, okay. And it's four guys in a boat and you don't want to get your clothes wet, so we're all in, like our boxers in a canoe with a motor going out past the places that have names, and you're out in the middle of the jungle. And the thing is, like, when you're, when your motor breaks, you are so quickly reminded of the inerrant truths, like the things that nobody can argue with. And we live in such a human world where everything is debatable. Religion and politics and perspectives on everything. And then you get down to this point where it's like, if we don't figure something out, the river is going to rise and take the boat. That's the truth. And ain't nobody going to, like, argue with that. And it's like, to me, there's a beauty in that truth because then all of us are united there, that truth against like the natural facts around us. And so to me, I, that's, that's, that's a state where I, I feel very, very at home.

And the Amazon is more efficient than most places on Earth at swallowing you up.

Oh, God, yeah. Okay.

So just to linger on that, because you've, you've spoken about Francisco de Arelana, who's this explorer in the. In 1541 and 42 that sailed the length of the Amazon. Yeah, probably one of the first. And there's just a few things I should probably read. I should probably find a good book on him because the guy seems like a gangster.

Yes, some great books on him.

So he sailed, he led the expedition that sailed all the way from one end to the other. There's like a rebuilding of a ship, which is insanity. Yeah, yeah. So because it speaks to the thing, it's like nobody's gonna come and rescue you. No, you have to. If your boat dies, you gotta have to rebuild it.

Yeah. So they came down the Andes, entered in the headwaters of the Amazon, constructed some sort of raft, boat, craft, something, and made it down the entire Amazon basin. Of course, his stories are the ones that led to the Amazon being called the Amazon because he reported tribes of women. He reported these large cities, places where the tribes lived on farms of river turtles that they corralled and they lived off of that protein. And then when they came out to the mouth of the Amazon, if I remember it correctly, that just through navigation and the Stars. They were able to calculate where the way was back to Spain and make a boat seaworthy enough to bring them home. Incredible. Absolutely.

Do people like that inspire you, your own journey? Like, what gives you kind of strength that in these harshest of times and harshest of conditions, you can persevere?

Yeah, I mean, you look at the stories of people that are so, you know, these stories of people that have overcome incredible suffering like that, or like, you know, what Shackleton did or something like that. And so like, when you're, you know, I've been, you know, your tent gets washed away, you go to sleep and the river rises 20ft and washes away your tent and you crawl out and all you have is a machete and a headlamp. Literally no bag, no food, no nothing. And you go, wow. The next six days before I reach back to a town is going to be just pure hell. I'm going to be sleeping on the ground, covered in ants, destroyed by mosquitoes. And then it becomes, you know, am I in any capacity, any percentage as tough and resilient as the people that I've read about that have made it through things far worse than this? And then that's the game you play.

What goes through your head. All you got is the headlamp and the machete. So are you thinking at all? Like, I've gotten a chance to interact quite a lot with Elon Musk and he constantly puts out fires, having to run several companies. There's never a kind of whiny deliberation about issues. You're just always one, one step forward, how to solve. Right. This is the situation, how do you solve it? Or do you also have a kind of self motivating, almost egotistical, like, I'm a bad, I can handle anything. Almost like trying to fake it till you make it kind of thing.

There was a little bit of your machete. I got a sword. There maybe may have been a little bit of that when I was like, you know, like 14, 15 years old. I'd like, you know, have like a hunting knife and my dog and I'd go out into the woods or like the Catskills and survive for a weekend. Which my rule was one match. You know, you get one match and you got to make shelter. And then, you know, I'd bring like a steak and like make a fire and stuff. And like, at that point there maybe was some ego, but in the Amazon, you get stripped down so completely that you, it's like that thing like, you know, watch the atheism leave everyone's body when they think they're about to die. It's like when you find yourself staring up at the Amazon at night and you go, there is no hope of getting out of here. I mean, I was once lost in a swamp where it took me days to get out of there. And there was moments where I just said, this is clearly it. There's no ego there. There's just hope. You start realizing what you believe in and praying that you'll be okay and then trying to summon whatever you know about how to survive. And. And that's it. And so it's. It's actually, again, it's kind of. It's kind of a blissful state. If you can walk that line between, like, adventure and tragedy and sort of keep yourself right at that very, very fine line without going over.

Ever fear of death? Fear, Ever fear terror?

No, I don't want to die. I want to. I want to. You know, I love the people in my life and there's a lot of things I want to do, but every time I've been. Every time I've been certain that I'm going to die, it's been. I've been very, very calm. Very calm. And just sort of like, okay, well, if this is how the movie goes, then this is how it goes.

Almost accepting.

Yeah. Which is reassuring.

You mentioned Herzog. Just to venture down this road of death and fear and so on. There's been a few madmen like you in this world. He's documented a couple of them. What lessons do you draw from grizzly man or into the wild? Those kinds of stories. Were you ever afraid that you'd be one of those stories?

Oh, yeah. I actually think that it's in Mother of God, where I said, I almost into the wilded myself. Like, I went out there and really, I got so lost and so destroyed that I said, this is going to be the next one. You know, this is going to be the next story of some idiot kid from New York who went to the Amazon thinking he was Percy Fawcett and then vanished. Because if you do vanish out there, your body's going to be consumed in a matter of days. Like. Like two, you know, if we see. If we see an animal dead on the trail, it's. You got dung beetles and fly larvae and vultures and there's a whole pecking order. You know, you get the black vultures, the yellow vultures, the king vulture. They all come in, that thing is picked clean in a couple of days.

What would be the creature that eats most of you in that situation.

Probably the vultures. Probably the vultures and the maggots. It's. It's really quick. It's really, really quick. Like. Like. Like you. Even as far as. Like, you can't leave food out. You know, like, if you have, like, a piece of chicken, you say, oh, I'll eat it in the morning. You leave it out. You can't do that. It's not. It's not good by morning.

Grizzly Matt, for example, like what? Because that's a beautiful story. It's both comical and genius. And especially the way Herzog tells it. Well, first, I do like the way he told the story. Do you like Herzog?

I do. I love Herzog. And I love his. His documentary the Burden of Dreams. Which is. Which is in the Amazon, not very far from where I work. And the sheer madness that you see this man undergoing. Of just trying to recreate hauling a boat over a mountain is wild. And the extras that he hired to play the natives are the. I think they're Machigenga tribesmen. And they're just. They just look like all the guys that I hang out with. And it's like, you know, they're doing all this stuff in the jungle. That months and months and months. And you can just see him deteriorating with madness. Because the jungle. You know, your boat. You know how many times I've tied up a boat to the side of the river? This just happened, like, a year and a half ago. I tied up through a lot, through Covid. I pretty much just lived in the jungle for a while. And there was nobody there, and there was no support. And I tied up my boat. And the rain is just hammering like. Like. Like the universe is trying to rip the earth in half. The rain is just going, and the river's rising. And I tied up the boat. But then you go to sleep. And you got to wake up every two hours to go check the boat. And the boat is thrashing back and forth. And so all night, every two hours, I'd wake up barefoot in driving rain. Like, you know, golf ball raindrops. And just go down, check the boat. And then by morning, I was like. I fell asleep, woke up, checked the boat. And then I was like, I'm just gonna go make coffee. I was so done. I was so, like, at the end of my rope every time. Bailing the boat out and stuff. And then we got 15 minutes of heavy rain that filled the boat, sank it. So now I'm stuck up river with no boat. And it's like that type of thing where it's like, no matter how hard you try, the jungle's just like, listen, you're nothing. You are nothing. And so it's that constant reminder. And so Herzog really threw himself into that in that film. And it's brilliant to watch.

What do you think he meant by the line that you include in your book? It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. Said in a German accent.

Yeah. Overwhelming and collective murder.

So he didn't really appreciate the beauty of the murder.

I think he appreciated it. But to him, it was very dark. I think he saw the darkness in it. And that's there. It sure is. As soon as you do ayahuasca, that door opens and you see the darkness. Because it brings you right into the jungle. Like the heart of it. But I think that for him, it is. I think that darkness is something that he embraces and that he loves. There's another film of his, and I don't know if this is accurate, but my memory has it that there's a penguin. And I think it's in Antarctica. And the penguin's going in the wrong direction, away from the ocean. And I feel like he goes on this monologue about how, like, he's just had enough.

Yeah.

He's. You know, this one penguin is just marching towards, you know.

Yeah. Well, he. His. Because I remember that clip from that documentary. And what Werner says is that the penguin is deranged.

Yes.

He's lost his mind. And I took offense to that.

Yeah.

Because maybe that's a brave explorer. Like, how do you know there's not some. A lot more going on? Like, it could be a love story. Those penguins get super attached.

Maybe his mate was over there and he had to go find her. Like.

Or it's a lost mate. And he. Last time he saw her was going in that direction.

Exactly.

So this is like the great explorer.

They.

We. We assume animals are like the average of the bell curve. Like, every animal we interact with is just the average. But there's special ones, just like there's special humans.

Yeah.

That could be a special penguin.

It could have been. And I had the same thought where I was like. I was like, he's. I found it beautiful how he interpreted it. What I took away from that was I found that Werner Herzog's monologue there was. Was brilliantly dark and also comedic. But. But maybe irrelevant, biologically speaking, towards penguins. Like, you know, which. Which happens a lot with animals, I find. Like, there's so many times where I'll find people be like, do you think that animals can show compassion? And you hear, like, a bunch of people that have never left the pavement talking about, like, wow, this. This one animal helped another animal. It's like. It's like, go ask Jane Goodall if animals can show compassion. Go. Go talk to anybody that works on a daily basis with animals, and they'll. And so, like, to me, there's always a little bit of frustration in hearing people sort of like, pleasantly surprised that animals aren't just, you know, these, you know, these automatons of, you know, just. Just. What's the word? Like, like, programmed, you know, nothingness.

First of all, what have you learned about life from Jane Goodall? Because she spoke highly of your book and you list her as one of the mentors. But what. What kind of wisdom about animals do you draw from her?

The wisdom from Jane is so diverse. It's. I mean, she. First of all, she's someone that, you know, the work that she did at the time she did it was so incredible because, I mean, she. She was out there at a very young fieldwork. She was naming her subjects, which everyone said you shouldn't do. She broke every rule. She broke every rule she was assigning. And everyone said, you're anthropomorphizing these animals by saying that they're doing this and that. And she was like, no, they're interacting. They're showing love, they're showing compassion, they're showing hate, they're showing fear. And she broke straight through all of those things, and it paid off in dividends for her.

Do you see the animals as having all those human, like, emotions of anger, of compassion, of longing, of loneliness? From what you've seen, especially with mammals or different species out there, do they have all that?

It depends on the animal. You know, if you talk, you know, on the scale of a cockroach to an elephant, you know, it's like a lot of these things, and I wonder about this stuff all the time. You know, I'll have a praying mantis on my hand and just go, what is going through your mind? You know? Yeah. Or you'll see it. You'll see a spider make a complex decision and go, I'm going to make my web there, you know, and you go, how. How are you? How are you doing this? How are you? Because he made a calculation there. You know, it's smart. I was in the jungle not that long ago, and I was walking, and all of a sudden this dove comes flying through the jungle right up to my face, lands on a branch, like, right here, right next to me. I look at the dove. Dove looks at me, and she's like, hey. And she's clearly, like, panting. And I'm like. I'm like, why. Why are you. Why are you so close to. This is weird. And she's like, I know. And then. And then an ornate hawk eagle flies up 10ft away, looks at both of us and just, like, scowls and, like, sticks up its head feathers, and then just, like, flies off. And the dove was like, sweet. Thanks. And then fluff flew in the other direction, and I was like, dude, you just used me to save your life.

Yeah.

The dove knew.

See, this is what. Because there's different. You know, there's Mike Tyson and there's Albert Einstein.

Yeah.

And I. Sometimes I wonder when I look at different creatures, even insects, like, is this Mike Tyson or is this Einstein?

Yeah.

Like, because one or other kinds of personnel. Like, is this a New Yorker or is this a Midwesterner, or is this, like, San Francisco barista of the insects? Like, there's all kinds of personalities. You never know. So you can't, like, project. Like you could if you run into a bear. And it's very angry. Like, if he's just the asshole New Yorker.

Yeah, sure, sure. As opposed to what he's saying about New Yorkers, man.

Exactly. Point well made. So speaking about communicating with a dove, you first met the crew in the Amazon. You talk about JJ as somebody who can communicate with animals. What do you think JJ Is able to see and hear and feel that others don't, that he's able to communicate with animals?

When I say, this is the most skilled jungle man I've ever seen, and I know so many guys in the region, he has libraries of information in his cranium that we cannot fathom. It's just stunning. I have seen him use medicinal plants to cure things that Western doctors couldn't cure. I've seen him navigate in such a way that he's not using the stars. He's not using any discernible. It's like when elephants. Sometimes you'll watch a herd of elephants, and they'll be like, yo, let's go. We're going this way. And you'll see them sort of communicate, but there's no audible sound. They'll just decide that they're going. That when they all do it, JJ has this way in the jungle of. You know, he'll stop and he'll go, wait. And you go, what is it? And he goes, there's a herd of peccary coming. And I'm like, where? Based on what? Yeah, you know. And he's like, just wait, you'll see. And he'll sit there.

You think that's just experience?

It's incredible experience. It's. It's. It's growing up barefoot in the Amazon. And the gift is that he can speak fluent English. And so when I bring tourists and scientists or news reporters down there, he can communicate with them. He's actually good on camera because he doesn't care about cameras. And, like, you know, for instance, we were. We were. We were walking up a stream a few months ago, and I went, hey, look, jaguar tracks. And he went. And I was like, what? Jaguar tracks? And he's like, no, look, look harder. And I was like, the. The toes are deeper than the back. And he was like, huh? And where are they? And I was like, by the water. And I was like, the jaguar's drinking. It was leaning to drink. And he was like, that's right. He's like, now look behind you. I look behind me and there's scat. There's a big log of jaguar sitting there, and it's got butterflies all over it.

Fresh.

Pretty fresh. And then there's another one that's less fresh. And so he's. He's teaching me. As he does. He's going, look at this, look at this. Is that one as fresh as this one? No. And then he goes, now look up, look up. There's three vultures above us. The kill is near us. The jaguar has been coming multiple times to the river to drink as it's feasting on whatever it killed. And he's going, it's within 30ft of us right now. And it's like. I'm like, oh, look, impressions in the sand. He's like, I just drew 19 conclusions from that. It's like watching Sherlock Holmes at work.

It's just constructing the crime scene.

Incredible.

Does that apply also to be able to communicate with the actual animals, like, read into their body movements, directly into their. Whatever that dove was saying to you to be able to understand, or is that all just kind of taken in the complex structure of the crime scene, of the interactions of the different animals of the environment and so on? Like, what is that? That you're able to communicate with another creature? That he was able to communicate with another creature.

He knows the intention of pose. He knows the habits. He knows the perspective. When he talks about animals, he'll talk about each species as if it's a person. So he'll say, oh, oh, the jaguar, she never likes to let you see her. And so he'll come back from the jungle and he'll go, oh, I was watching monkeys. And this jaguar was also watching the monkeys. But I was being so quiet. She didn't see me. And then when she see me, she feels so embarrassed, and she goes, and he'll tell you this story, like, as if he had this interaction with, like, his neighbor. And, you know, and he'll be like, oh, the pukakunga, it never does that. You won't see it do that. And so one time, one time he caught a fish. And I. I was such a big fish. It was this big, beautiful pseudopladystoma, this tiger catfish, this amazing old fish, and they're all excited to eat it. And I felt so bad watching this thing gasp on the sand. And I went, you know what? We don't need this. This is for fun. And threw it back.

Oh, no.

And then I took my hand and I went. And I made, like, drag marks, like, so I could say, oh, it. It snuck back in the water. And so he walks up, he looks at it, and he was like, I hate you. And I went, what? No. I said, I must have. It must have just. He went, that's not what happens. He goes. It goes like this. When it go. He knew the track of a fish. And I was like, oh, yeah. I was like, all right, jj, I'm sorry. I'll catch you another fish.

So stepping back to that way, you opened. Mother of God. Who was Santiago Duran? And what secret did he tell you?

JJ's father was at some point, he was a policeman. At some point when he was a teenager, he was working on the boats that before this little gold mining city of Puerto Maldonado grew, the only way to get supplies in was to take canoes up the Tambopata river up to the next state, which is Puno, and. And where mules would come down from the mountains with supplies, and then he'd pilot the boats down, but they didn't have motors at that time, so he would be pulling the boat. So he was. He became this physically terrifying man. And I met him when he was in his 80s and he was still living out in the jungle by himself. And I mean, he's seen an anaconda eat a tapir, which is the, you know, a cow sized mammal in the Amazon. He'd seen uncontacted tribes face to face. He once killed an 11 foot electric eel, opened the Back of the thing's neck, removed the nerve that he says was the source of the electric. Then he cut his forearm, placed that nerve into his forearm, wrapped it with a dead toad, and claims that it would give him strength through the rest of his life. And continued to be a jungle badass until the day he quietly leaned back at a barbecue and ceased to be alive. The man was incredible. But the secret that he told us was that if you want to find big anacondas, you know, if you want to see the Yacumama, he was like, you have to go to the Boayo, the place of Boaz, the place that we came to call the floating forest. And so he sent us there, and it became like this pilgrimage. And, you know, in the Amazon, a lot of the creation myths are based around the anaconda coming down from the heavens and carving the rivers across the jungle. And if you look at the rivers, it looks like that. It looks like the path of an anaconda crawling through the jungle. It's even the right color. And so from the reference to the tribes of women, the Amazons, to the Anaconda mother, everything in the Amazon is very feminine based, even the trees, the largest trees in the jungle. The mother of the forest, the Madre de la Selva, is the Kapok tree. And it's just this monster tree, these beautiful, ancient trees. And that was the beginning of the transition that we made from me being like, I hate school. I want to go on adventures. You know, Jane Goodall got to do all this amazing stuff. I'm just a kid stuck here. To eventually becoming something that had to do with where my identity became the jungle, where my life became the jungle. The secret that he told us opened that door, because when we started working with these giant snakes, it started getting attention. It started getting people to go, what are you doing? And it started. Started allowing me to have experiences that. That solidified and nailed down the fact that this wasn't just like a weekend retreat. This was. This was something that. That I was born to do.

And gave you more and more motivation to go into these uncharted territory of the Yakumamama, which just to step back, what nations are we talking about? Here is some geography. What are we talking about? Where is this?

So I'm in Peru.

Yeah, we're in Peru, which is a South American nation.

Peru is a South American nation. Brazil has 60% of the Amazon, which is unfortunate, because anything that happens politically in Brazil has a massive impact on the Amazon. Peru has the western Amazon and Ecuador Has a little bit of the western Amazon. And the western Amazon is where the Andes mountains, the cloud forests, which is a mega biodiverse biome, falls into the western Amazon lowlands. And so you have the meeting of these two incredible biomes, and that's what makes this, like, superlative, incredible, you know, glowing moment of life on Earth. So, yeah, we're in Peru in the Madre de Dios, which is the mother of God, which I always thought was such a beautiful. You know, the jungle is the source of all life. And so we were with the Saeja people, and they belong to a community that's called Infierno, which is given by the missionaries who, when they tried to go bring these people, Jesus got so many arrows shot at them that they just called it hell. And so Santiago Duran helped unite these tribes that were. That were sort of scattered through the jungle and get them status, government recognized status as indigenous people. So he was sort of a hero. He was sort of a legend for a lot of the stuff he'd done out barefoot with just, like, a rifle and a machete in the jungle. He had 19 children, and the last one, I think the 20th child that he adopted, was a refugee from the shining path that floated down the river. And he just took him in. And this is just a guy that was a. You know, everything he did, like, when he died, the whole. The whole. The whole region showed up. It was. It was. He was somebody. So just the fact that I know him gives me street credit. Like, the fact that I knew him, I can go like, oh, I knew Santiago. And people like, no. I'm like, yeah, yeah.

So you have to get integrated to the culture, to the place that me in every single way. Which is. Which is tough for you, for the being from. From New York.

Yeah, yeah, May. It could have been tough, but it was. I took to it. You know, the jungle, they. They were very. You know, JJ's teaching me about medicines. And we were doing bird surveys and, you know, taking data on macaw populations. And JJ was just like, you really want to, like, he goes, you gotta sleep. And I was like, I only have a few weeks here. I don't know if I'm ever gonna come back. I'm never going to sleep. So we'd be out every night looking for all the wildlife we could. I wanted to take photos. I wanted to see things. And. And then, you know, the. The exchange came with that. He was like, you know, I'm terrified of snakes. And I said, well, I've always worked with snakes. I said, I'll teach you how to handle snakes. And then we just had this little exchange. And when I left after my first time back in 2006, I said, how can I help? And they were like, look, we're out here trying to protect this little island of forest that is going to be bulldozed. And the more people that you can bring, the more knowledge and the more awareness that you can bring to this. It'll help. And so really at that age, at 18 years old, I sort of started dabbling with the idea of that I could be part of helping these people to protect this place that I loved. And of course at that time, that idea seemed like too large of a dream or too large of a, of a challenge so that I could actually impact it.

So what was the journey of looking for these giant snakes, of looking for anacondas? And what are anacondas?

Anaconda is the largest snake on earth. So you have reticulated pythons in Southeast Asia. They're actually longer, but anacondas are these massive boas, they give live birth. And unlike a lot of other species, so an anaconda starts off, you know, a little two foot anaconda, just a little thicker than your finger, a little baby. And they're food for cane toads, herons, crocodiles, you name it. They're pretty harmless, defenseless, but as they grow, they're eating the fish, they're eating the crocs, and then they grow a little more and they're eating things like capybara and they're eating larger prey. And then at the end of their life, a female anaconda. You're Talking about a 25, 30 foot, 300, 400 pound snake with a head bigger than a football. And these things, that means that they impact the entire ecosystem, which is very unique.

Moves up the food chain to become.

Basically an apex predator.

Apex predator?

Yeah, the apex predator of the rivers.

And so that's so interesting, just eating your way up the food, your way.

Up the food chain if you can survive. And like they, you know, they're constantly at war with everything else. But, you know, so I showed up in the Amazon, I was like, so where the anaconda is at? And they were like, oh, no, no, it's not like that. They're like, it's you, you have to find these things. They're, they're subterranean. They're living in the special swamps there. People kill them. And so we went to the floating forest after we'd come back from an expedition, we'd Call it like a 12 foot anaconda. And it's now it's become like this like classic photo of me and JJ with this anaconda over our shoulders. And we were like, we, you know, we 12 days out in the jungle on a hunting trip, and we, we came back and we showed his dad and Santiago looked at us and he was like, that's the smallest anacondita I've ever seen. He's like, you guys are pathetic. Foot. And he was like, look, you go to the. Go. He's like, go. He's like, I'm giving you permission. Go to the bayo. Go to the floating forest. And so we went to this place and we reached there at night and it was me, jj and one of his brothers. And his brother took one look at it and was like, I'm out. And he started walking back and me and JJ get to the edge of this thing and. And this is our friendship. It's both this two idiots pushing each other farther and farther. And like, I like, put a foot on the. On the ground and it all shook. And the stars are reflecting on the ground. And what we realize is that it's a lake with floating grass on top of it. And there's islands of grass floating on this lake. Very life of pie. And the tops of trees are coming out of the surface of the water. And so we start walking across this and JJ's going, these are big anacondas. And I'm going, JJ, that's a two foot wide, smooth path snaking through the grass. There's no anaconda that big.

Yeah.

He was going, sh. They're listening. I said, they don't have ears. He goes, they're listening. And it's like we're walking and we're walking, and then it's like maybe it's like 1am or something. And it was just like one of those moments where we saw it at the same time. And we're standing by the tail and the snake was so big that, I mean, this must have been a 25 foot anaconda dead asleep with a probably a 16 foot anaconda, like sprawled across her. And they're laying in the starlight and we're floating on top of a lake, standing there in the middle of the Amazon. And JJ just. I just. I could feel the blood drain out of his face. And as like a. However old I was, you know, maybe 20 years old, I just said, if I. If we could somehow show people this, we'll be on the front cover. Of National Geographic and we can protect all the jungle that we want. And so I tried to catch it. Yeah. So I jumped on the snake. And the only measurement I have of this animal is that when I wrapped my arms around it, I couldn't touch my fingers. And so I was, you know, my, my feet were dragging. And to her credit, this anaconda did not turn around and eat me because her head was, you know, this big. And she went. And she reached the edge of the grass island, and she starts plunging into the dark. And so I'm watching the stars vibrate as this anaconda is going. And I had to make the choice of either going headfirst down into the black, which, no, thank you, or stopping and just keeping my hand on this thing as it raced by me. And I just felt the scales and the muscle and the power go by and then eventually taper down to the tail until it slipped away into the darkness. And I was laying there just panting. Then I turned around and went, jj, what the. Like, where were you, man? He was just like completely white. Circuits blown. And I had to go then, like, kind of like, take care of him. I was like, are you okay? And he was like, no, he, you know, he just couldn't. And so we came back with that. And then after that, we were like, okay, clearly, clearly the parameters of reality that we thought were possible are just a tiny fraction of what's out there. Like, we now, that sort of recalibrated us. We were like, okay, we're rubbing up against things that are bigger than we thought were ever possible. And so we were like, okay, now we need to concentrate on this.

So how dangerous is that creature to humans?

To humans? Not at all. I mean, Mike, our cook's father in law, was eaten by an anaconda. But, like, you know, then again, like.

That'S the way you say that. Tell that story. Sometimes it happens.

It happens. I mean, come on. Every now and then, somebody gets stung by a bee and dies. Like, you know, it's once in a while. It happens. Happens. But you got to have a really big anaconda, really hungry. And like anybody that works in the wild, I mean, just, you know, if you. You walk up to a crocodile, even a giant Nile crocodile, you walk up to the most of the time, they're going to run into the water. They don't want confrontation. They hunt in their way, on their terms. Sneaky. You're not going to see them. And so with an anaconda, it's like, yeah, if you're I mean, the guy who got eaten, like, if you're drunk and you go to the edge of the water and you go for a midnight swim by yourself in an Amazonian lake, I mean, whose fault is that?

But if you jump on an account and try to, yeah, try to hold on, then you're safe.

Apparently. I mean, I think I've, I think at this point we've, you know, the research we've done, I think I've handled or caught, you know, over 80 anacondas in the field and not one of them has bitten me. They always choose flight over fight. They're like, just let, leave me alone, let me go. I'm just gonna crawl under this thing. They're not an aggressive animal. I mean, no snake. No, I actually like, I kind of like, the only time I get particular with like, you know, the words is like, people go, that's an aggressive. Black mambas are aggressive. And no snake is aggressive. A rattlesnake is going to rattle to say, hey, back up. Cobra is going to stand up and show you its hood. And people go, oh look, he's being aggressive. No, he's not being aggressive. He's going, don't step on me, don't make me do this. They're actually being very peaceful. That's the way I look at it. Because if there was a cobra in the corner of this room right now, he would crawl under the curtain and we'd never see him again.

Yeah, it's like Genghis Khan before conquering the villages. He always offered for them to join the army.

Doesn't need to be like this.

Yeah, join us. Nobody gets destroyed. If you want to be proud and fight for your country, then.

Then we're gonna oblige him.

Exactly. Okay, so how do you, how do you catch. Actually, let's step back because there is in part, you are a bit of a snake whisperer. So what, what is it that, that others don't understand that you do about snakes? What's maybe a misconception or what, what is, what have you learned from the language you speak that snakes understand?

I don't know, it's just, it's an animal that has has. Many times in my life I've been responsible for helping the. You know, I started catching snakes when I was very young. I'd watch Steve Irwin and go out and catch a garter snake or a black rat snake in New York and. And then I had a rule. I said, I have to catch 100 non venomous snakes before I'm allowed To handle a venomous snake, if I ever need to handle a venomous snake. And then, you know, I was on a trail one time, I think, in Harriman State park, and some guy, you know, like some big hero, he tells us, you know, he's like, back up, I'm gonna get this. And he like, picks up a stick and he like goes to like, assault this poor copperhead that's sitting on the trail. And so like at like 16 years old, I had to go and like, shoulder this guy out of the way. And I got the thing by the tail and used a stick to very gently just put it off the trail. Copperhead was not going to do anything to him, but he wanted to, you know, beat his chest and show his wife that he was tough. But then in India, you know, I've lived in India for five years at this point, in and out, you know, periodically, and. And snakes are always getting into people's kitchens. One time we had a king cobra get into someone's kitchen. An 11 foot snake, like a monster, like a God of a snake. This thing stood up, you know, stand up, it'd be able to look at you over the table. And this terrify monster thing, giant gorilla dog thing, like, we caught it with one of the local snake catchers and we brought it out and he goes, you know, I wonder why it was in the kitchen. Yeah, looking for food. And they go, no, they eat snakes. King cobra, ophiophagus, Hannah. They eat snakes. And he goes, she's thirsty. So we got a bottle of water and we got footage of this. And we. She's standing up, she's going, don't make me kill you. Don't make me kill you. You're scaring me right now. I don't want to kill you. We took the bottle of water and we poured it on her nose and she started. She started drinking. You could see her just drinking. And the snake just took this long drink. She drank a whole water bottle and then said, thank you so much and crawled off. And it's like, to me, the fact that people are scared of snakes, they have symbolic hatred of snakes. If someone's evil and sneaky, we call them a snake. And to me, it's like when I take snake volunteers or researchers or students out into the jungle and we find an emerald tree boa or an Amazon tree boa or a vine snake, and it's like, it's one of the few animals, like you can't really catch a bird and show it to people. You're Going to scare the bird. Its feathers are going to come out. You might give it a heart attack. Snakes. You can lift up a snake. If there's a snake in the room right now, I could lift it up and say, lex, here, this is how you hold it. And we could interact calmly with this thing and then put it back on its branch and then it'll go. And I've seen what that does to people. I've seen how the wonder in their eyes. And so to me, snakes have always been this incredible link to teach people about wildlife, about nature, because they have.

Naturally a lot of fear towards this creature. And to realize that the fear is not justified, is not grounded, or is not as deeply grounded in reality. Of course, there's always New Yorker snakes, right? There's always going to be an asshole snake here and there.

You coming for me, man?

Well, okay, so back to the anaconda. How do you catch an anaconda? Like what? How do you handle. Because it's such a 25 foot or even 12 foot.

Yeah.

These giant snakes. How do you. How do you deal with this creature? How do you interact with them?

We had to learn how to do that because one of the first ones we caught that I would say maybe like a 16 footer, which is no joke of a snake, you know, girth of a basketball. Let's say, you know, we're on the canoe and this is. This is the early days. Like, you know, now we're at a whole different level. But this is back when we were barefoot and shirtless and just guys in the Amazon. And JJ's like, get. You know, I just listened to him. He'd be like, get off the boat. You come from the top, we're gonna come from the bottom. So, okay, I just did as I was told. I came in, the snake is all curled up, dead asleep. She's got some butterflies on her eyes, trying to get salt and stuff. And all of a sudden I see the tongue. Soon, soon. And I'm like, sh. She's awake. And I'm like, guys, guys, guys, she's. And they're paying attention to not crashing the boat, to getting over there. And we're all trying to run. Snake starts going into the water. So I run ahead, grab this snake, get her by the head. So you got her by the head. You think, okay, she can't get me. I got her right behind the head. And it's about this thick the neck.

What's that feel like? Sorry to interrupt. Like grabbing this thing with his giant head.

It's Exciting. It's amazing. It's. It's scary.

How hard is it to hold?

It's not that hard to hold. The scary part is the moment of. It's like. If you ever done, like, a cliff dive or something, it's that moment where you go, do it. Do it. The time, like, do it. And it's. Your body's going, do not do that. Yeah. And then you're like, I gotta just do it. And you do it. Yeah.

Because you can't just gently, like, flirt with it.

You have to crack. No. And it's like. It's like crossing the street when there's a bus coming. It's like you hesitate. It's more dangerous, you know? So, like, you just. You go for it. And I got her. And I was like, I got her. And then a coil goes over my wrists, and all of a sudden my wrists slap together, and you feel this squeeze that can crush the bones out of an animal bigger than me. And the next coil comes very quickly over my neck. And now I'm on my knees with my arms tied. If I wanted to let go of the snake, I couldn't. And my shoulders are coming together, and my collarbone is about to break. And I tried to yell for JJ and all that came out was, there's nothing. And so that's what they do to their prey, you know? So I attacked. As far as the snake knows, I attacked. She doesn't know that. I just want to measure her. You.

You started out as the big spoon, but then the snake became the big spoon.

Very much became the big spoon. And I was. I would say I was 15 seconds away from having my entire ribcage collapsed. And then JJ showed up and grabbed the tail and just started unwrapping this thing. And then we got. But now we have a system. Now we know, like, you know, I'm always. I've done. I've gotten more head catches than anybody. So I'm usually point guy. And you're the. You're the.

The first. The point guy. Okay. The. The taking the big risky.

Yes.

First step.

Yes. Although it could be argued that there's a similarly large risk for the tail guy, because anaconda's defense is to take a giant projectile. Shit. And so the person that gets the tail is going to smell like anaconda for, like, at least a week.

Yes. It's the least pleasant. You're taking the most dangerous one there. They have the least pleasant job. This is fascinating.

But what's really fascinating, though, is that because of the apex predator. They're. They're eating the fish, they're eating the birds, they're eating everything. And everything in this riparian ecosystem is absorbing the mercury that's coming off the gold mining in the region. And so anacondas can be indicative for us of how is mercury moving through this ecosystem. And this is a region where we've lost hundreds of thousands of acres to artisanal gold mining, where they use mercury to bind the gold, they cut the forest, burn the forest, and then they run water through the sand. And the sand particles have bits of gold in it, not chunks, but just little, almost microscopic flecks of gold. And then they use the mercury to bind that, and then they burn off the mercury. And that vapor goes up into the clouds, just like everything else. It's all connected down there and then rains down into the rivers. And so the people in the region are having birth defects from the amount of mercury that's in the water. And so we were starting at one point when we were doing most of our anaconda research, we were learning things like these animals actually aren't just ambush predators. Which is what most of the literature would tell you, is that anacondas are ambush predators. No, they actually go hunting. They'll go find clay licks and salt deposits, and they'll wait there, they'll actually pursue animals. And we were trying to take tissue samples to find out if anacondas could be used to study how mercury is moving through the ecosystem. And so that was really, it became, can we use these animals not only as ambassadors for wildlife, because everybody wants to see the anacondas, but also, you know, what can we learn from studying this very, very little understood apex predator?

And one of the things you can learn is how mercury moves through the ecosystem, which can damage the ecosystem all kinds of different ways.

Yeah, it's brutal, man, the gold mining that's happening down there. It's funny because we've been hearing a lot recently about the cobalt mines in Africa. And it's like where we are in the Amazon. We were down there with ABC News, I want to say, like a year and a half ago with my friend Matt Gutman, who's the chief correspondent for abc. And he wanted to see the Amazon fires, he wanted to see some wildlife, he wanted to see the areas that we're protecting. And then he goes, well, I want to see the gold mining areas. And I'd never gotten in so deep. But we met these Russian guys. You can't go the proving they will kill you. Our Lawyer's father was assassinated for standing up to the gold miners. There was two Russian guys though, who had a legal mining concession somehow way out past the machine gun guarded limit of the pampas, which is where they do all this gold mining. And we got in there and took footage of the desert that is forming in what used to be the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest. And it's like there is a massive global scale ecological crime happening down there that you can see from space from this unregulated gold mining. And the cops can't go there because they will be murdered. It's completely lawless.

What's the machine gun limit exactly?

It's the border of this area that they call the pampas, which is where the rainforest has been cut and completely destroyed. And it looks like Mars, it's just sand. And inside of this area are gold miners. And we, you know, we tried to get in there to film years ago and there's just a lot of guys with machine guns who don't let that happen.

And what, the Russian guys have access?

The Russian guys had access. Somehow they'd come down with a bit of money and they had a new system. Yeah. And actually what was interesting is while I was in there, they're very friendly and really, really too friendly gold miners. And they, one of them while I was there, he, you know, he kind of tapped me on the shoulder. He was like, you know, look at those guys. He was like, those guys over there, he goes, I just heard them say your name. And he goes, that's not a good thing. He goes, they know exactly who you are. And he goes, I wouldn't keep posting to Instagram about gold mining in the Amazon. And I was like, thanks for the warning. And then, you know, in June somebody pulled up beside me on a motorcycle and I got a more stern warning.

But, but they pay attention to the flow of information because they don't want the world to, to find out oh.

The last thing they want is to be shut down. But the gold miners are notorious for, you know, just whacking people and throwing them in a, in a pile of, you know, gold mining leftovers. It's really like, like the Peruvian government has to get the military to go after them. Like the work we've done with gold miners, converting them into conservationists, has all been like. I mean, I've seen the Peruvian navy come down and literally blow up gold mining barges. And you know, it's, it's, it's a war, It's a war being fought in the Amazon.

So It's a. It's possible to convert them into conservationists. What's that process like?

We.

Or is that like. You say that in jest?

No, I say that in absolute sincerity. We. We went up river, up the Malinowski river several years ago, and I think it was 2018. And everyone, everyone was like, you are going to die. Like you will be shot and killed. And the reason we were able to do it with relative safety was that the gold miner that we were going with was the brother in law of one of my closest friends down there, our expedition chef and one of the directors of Jungle Keepers. And they said, look, you can go. Just keep a low profile. And so I went up with a photographer and we spent a week there. And dead animals everywhere, deforestation everywhere. I mean, the things that we saw were so horrible. And we're living with these gold miners that are, you know, they're getting their gold, they're burning off the mercury. I watched a guy smoking a cigarette burning the mercury off of his gold with the vapor going straight into his face with his child right there. I mean, unbelievable negligence of just sanity, just. And then, and then towards the end of the week, the Peruvian navy comes down the river and everyone starts scrambling. And I was like, I'm just gonna sit here with my hands up. Cause, you know, and they didn't even stop. They found the gold mining barge. They have a floating thing in the river that just plumbs the bottom of the river, just sucks all the sediment up. And they stopped and they strapped a bunch of explosives to this motor. And good Lord, the sound of this explosion. And there was just hot metal raining down all over the place. And then they just went, a bunch of guys in fatigues and they just kind of looked at us like peace. And I sat there with this gold miner and I went, now what? And he went, well, now I gotta go get a new motor. And I went, why don't you just do something else? And he goes, what else is there? And I went, look what we do. And I sat there with my phone and I was like, see this? These are pretty tourists. And we feed them food and we show them tarantulas and macaws and things. And he looked at this and he went, wow. He goes, that looks like so much fun. And I went, it is so much fun. I said, we show people. We bring students to the jungle. He goes, so you're saying if I build you a lodge, you'll bring people? I said, yeah. And I came back a year later and he sat There with a chainsaw, a hand saw, and some nails, and he cut down, like, 17 palm trees, and he built an ecotourism lodge.

So you gave him another channel of survival of making money.

And that's what we've been doing through jungle keepers, for loggers and for all kinds of extractors, is just saying, look, what do you make? You make $15 a day destroying the ancient trees of the jungle. What if we paid you $35 a day to have a uniform and a job and health insurance and security, and you just protect it and use all of the jungle knowledge you've gained as a logger to protect this place?

Who are the loggers trying to destroy the Amazon? Can you say a little bit more about it? Is that as a threat to the Amazon rainforest, a lot of them are.

Really close friends of mine. They're. They're. They're people that need to make a living, and they're jungle people who, you know, the rainforest is a very challenging, especially the Amazon is a very challenging environment. So you have these people who. They have a chainsaw, they have a job opportunity, they go out and they cut the trees. And a lot of these guys grew up fishing. They grew up in the jungle. They know how to do it. And so for them, it's a way to, like. They also love it. So this is the thing. These are outdoorsmen. These are guys that love the jungle. And so they. You know, in the 90s, we had the mahogany boom, where they went out after the mahogany, and you can almost can't find a mahogany tree in the jungle anymore. And if you want to talk about, like, carbon sequestration in the rainforest, the ancient hardwoods hold, like, 60% of the carbon of the whole rainforest. They have an outsized, disproportionate mass from the. From that ancient density of the wood. And so these. These. These loggers go out and they cut the wood that's most valuable, and then they bring it back to town and they sell it. And then people like us buy it and put it on our kitchen floors. And, you know, and so the thing is, is I, you know, when I got to the Amazon, it was, you know, loggers are the bad guys. And if you talk to, you know, a lot of, like, the PhDs that I worked with down there were, you know, always very at odds with the miners, at odds with the. With the loggers. And then I'd be with jj, and JJ would sit down and he'd be like, hey, let's pour a drink. Oh, they have masato let's all sit down and like, we'd all be chilling and throwing them back with a bunch of loggers. And then the opportunity through not vilifying these people came to be like, oh, these guys are great. And then, of course, out in the wild, every now and then, something will happen. You'll see somebody's boat flipped over and you go help them out. And then that creates a certain type of kinship.

There are ultimately people who love. Who love the same thing you love often.

Yeah. Even if they don't love it, they're people that aren't necessarily looking to destroy it. I've met loggers who have looked at trees they're about to cut and gone, Ah, this is a shame. Start it up. You know, they're just like, this is where the paycheck comes from.

Let's come back briefly to anacondas. Can you tell me this whole situation with discovery is eaten alive? There's some drama and controversy around that. Can you explain that whole saga with Discovery, with. With your whole effort? Maybe outside of even the drama, the. The initial thing, which I now feel you're sufficiently insane to actually do, of being eaten by an Akanda? Is that actually possible to survive something like that?

I mean, if anaconda swallows you while you're wearing the suit that they made, maybe. But that was. In hindsight, that was the result of. Look, I go to the jungle, and you start seeing these beautiful places, these incredible species. You start developing a relationship with these animals, and then you watch it get destroyed. Every year, we watch it burn every year. Places that are crucial to my soul I have seen leveled and turned to ash. And at some point we started going, someone has to do something about this. And you look to your right and you look to your left, and there is no one. Because it's the middle of the Amazon and the rainforests have been being destroyed since the 70s. It's a cliche. And so we started trying to do something about it. And so I started putting a little bit more emphasis on. On publicity, a little bit more emphasis on getting the message out there. And so I started trying to see how what was going to work. You know, you just start firing shots in the dark and seeing and, you know, JJ's going, you have to help us do something. And I'm going, okay. You know, and so from 18 years old now, now I'm 23 years old, and all of a sudden, this place isn't. Isn't foreign to me anymore. It's. It's home.

You're trying to think of all the different ways you can bring attention to this place that you care about that's being destroyed.

Yeah. You're standing next to a boulder of progress, of destruction, and it's about to roll onto the forest and just destroy it and snuff out all that life and no one's there to do anything about it. And so you go, is there any way that I could put myself in front of this boulder and hold it back? And you're talking about, you know, the globe, the global economic reality. It's just, it's just such a massive, it's systemic.

So what's the most dramatic possible thing I could do?

Exactly. So when you find yourself flown to LA as a 23 year old dude and you're sitting there with some guy, you know, who's like spinning a pen and got his feet up on the desk and going, you know what? Can you show us down there? And you go, I could show you the, the biggest anacondas in the world. And we could talk about mercury and bioaccumulation and we could show people how these animals are misunderstood. And we go on a big expedition and we could be the coolest show ever. And he goes, yeah, not good enough. Okay. And so those, that, that, that, that cycled through a bunch of times and someone at some point in one of those meetings said, you know, what if we show people that anaconda really can't eat humans? And I went, how is that a good show? You want me to feed someone to an anaconda? And I said, I said, I mean, and I kind of joked like, what if, you know, I said the only way that's feasible is if you like, make a suit with a breathing apparatus and let the snake eat you and then come back out safely and make sure you don't hurt the snake. And they were like, kid, you're on. And I was like, oh.

So I should mention a small tangent. I think I mentioned to you offline due to travel troubles, where I traveled to the totally wrong part of the United States on my way to Boston. And on my way to Boston, I did a conversation with Mr. Beast. Jimmy. And I got a chance to hang out with him for the day. And one of the things we did is have a lengthy brainstorm session with his team. Or I was, I was observing it.

Sure, sure.

But it was interesting because he's probably way better at that conversation that you had with, with the guy in L. A. Yeah. Than the guy in L. A, obviously, because he's made, he's Revolutionizing entertainment. And he's also doing philanthropy.

Yeah, yeah.

Which he's trying to figure out how to help the world with that kind of stuff. So I would love to actually, I'll send him a message to see what, what his thoughts. Just brainstorm. He's so strong at this.

Yeah.

Literally take the situation you're facing. Yeah, here's the place that I really care about is being burned down. It's being destroyed. What's the sexy video?

Yeah, well, how do you get, how do you get people to watch something that's, you know, we all change a channel when they show us the kids in Africa with the swollen stomachs. Nobody wants to see it. And it's like with the rainforest, like, we know, we know, we know. And I'm going, I could give data all day long. I could show photos of burning forest. And so I was looking for what would do it. And so the eaten alive thing, without spending too much time on a massive misstep, was I agreed to do it. They paid me at the time more money than I had made before, which I very much needed because nobody pays you to be a conservationist. So I was a very poor 23 year old that was like, yes, I would love that, please. And I thought, you know what, this is the start of a TV career. We got shafted so bad. I mean, they used. Somehow they changed our voices, they changed the things we said, they changed the message of the film. There was one point where we had caught a 19 foot snake and I was holding her head and I said, this is such a beautiful animal. The queen of the Amazon. This is such a great moment for me. I kissed her on the head. I said, she's made so many babies. Look at the scars. I was talking about just the poetry of this incredible dragon. And then the producer goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Listen, if that was to bite you, what would happen? And I was like, oh, well, if it bit you, you'd bleed out. Because it would lacerate down to the. That's what they put in the film. And so day of, they didn't show me the film until the night before. I went on Matt Lauer's show and I said, I am not endorsing this film. And they had called it Expedition. On the call sheet, they'd called it Expedition ea, Expedition Amazon. All of a sudden they changed it to eaten alive. And I went, wait, guys, wait, wait, wait. I said, you're gonna make people think that it actually happened, not that we're attempting it. And I Said, I'm not. And then they called me and they said, you better. You're going on live TV tomorrow. They said, you let us know what level of control we. It was a very threatening phone call. And so I had to go out and smile for the cameras and endorse something that was a train wreck. And the scientific community was like, you're an idiot. We don't want to ever see you again. I lost a lot of opportunities. PETA came. Which PETA, whatever. But PETA came out. People were like, you were trying to hurt a snake, Which I would never do. And then the American public was like, you said you were going to get eaten by a snake and you didn't. And so everyone was pissed. I basically had to exile myself to India for, like, six months and just. I mean, I had death threats coming through. All my messages were furious with me.

What gave you strength to that? How difficult was that psychologically? Just everything you care about being completely kind of flipped upside down.

I've spent so much time on the ground with the local people, learning from the wildlife. It's such a devout and important thing to me. And it got turned into a sideshow. It got turned into a joke. And then not just a joke. It got turned into that I'm somehow bad to animals. I'm irresponsible scientifically. Jimmy Kimmel told me to have sex with a hippo as my next stunt. It got really ugly and it misfired so bad. And when you hear these motivational speakers talk about, you know, you just got to keep trying, and sometimes you're going to fail hard. It was like that one, I got hit in the head with a baseball bat. That one was tough. And at the time, I was like, I'm fine. And I was like, I'm going to go away for a while, you know, And I learned a lot, though. Like, at this point, I'm still glad I did it, because, man, did I learn a lot about what? A room full of people that you don't know, who could look you in the eye and shake your hand and say, trust us.

Oh, boy, do you have, on a human level of resentment towards discovery, towards the people involved. Are you able to forgive them?

I don't care. It literally. That's what they do, you know, they literally put out a documentary saying that mermaids were real. You know, it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute. They're not.

Listen. No, I said that. I'm not even touching that one.

It is true.

The document. There is a.

There is A documentary where they duped a bunch of scientists who are, like, oceanographers, and they, like, showed them ancient footage of, you know, mariners saying that seals were mermaids. Who cares? I was young, I got brought to Hollywood, and I got spit out the other side, and that's on me. That's not their fault. You know, there's that parable about the frog who gives the scorpion a ride across the water, and then at the end, he says, I'll give you a ride. Just don't sting me. And they get to the other side and the scorpion stings him, and the frog goes, why did you do that? And the scorpion goes, I'm a scorpion. Yeah, that's. It's not their fault.

That's my nature. But now that you've become much more well known and much more successful, what you do, you have a platform. Can you return to those people and use it, the machine, to get more and more attention? Is that something you work on, or do you prefer to work completely outside?

I think that most of the success that we've had now in protecting the rainforest and. And it's the levels that we've reached are so far, I think back to those barefoot days of catching snakes with JJ and the boat, and now the massive ecological reserve we have, and the team of rangers and the converted loggers, and all of that is because of the ability to communicate and to show people. But that's all been through social media. And so I'm open to the fact, you know, if. If somebody came and gave a sort of, like, Bourdainian Pass, where they said, look, you can be yourself, you can swear, you can fart, you can smoke, you can do whatever you want to do. Go out there and show us the real thing. I would love to, but now I know how those contracts need to be. I need to have right to refusal, and they can't change them. And so I'd almost rather just do it. Like, the way I think Mr. Beast does stuff where it's like you get a crew of guys and some seed money and go film the episodes and put it out. I mean, a committee never helped real art be better. It has to come from the source of inspiration. So I think you get JJ and a crew of people or the guys in Africa that I'm working with right now doing elephant conservation and, like. But you got to show real. I mean, look, that's why. I mean, look, that's why Joe Rogan is important right now. That's why you're important right now is because it's not being filtered through this ridiculous system of polishing it and dumbing it down. Yeah.

That's why Joe has been an inspiration. You don't need a crew of a bunch of people. You don't need a crew, period. All you need is one or two other people and that's it. And in my case, you don't need anybody. I've been doing this by requirement. I just need to be by myself. There's a few other folks now that help with the editing and so on, but it's just. They make life more awesome. As opposed to a boss that's. That tells like a creative director. Yeah, Somebody told me, actually, I was visiting la. I think it was in la. They were saying that now for all intimate scenes in Hollywood movies, there's an intimacy director. So when there's a two people having sex, there's a third person that ensures that on film. So it's not real, but there's still intimacy, that there's a third person that ensures that, like, everyone is comfortable. And the actors say that this, like, always ruins the. The chemistry of the scene.

Yeah.

And so it's a very Hollywood thing. I understand there's creepy, so I understand.

Thanks, Harvey Wines.

It's usually, I think, comes from the director pushing things too hard. If you just leave it to the actors, they know their boundaries, they can control their own boundaries. So the intimacy director is more for the, like, the director pushing things. You know, there's Warner Herog.

I understand the. I understand the logic. Like, let's make sure that we don't have anything happen here that shouldn't be happening. I get it. But I. Yeah, but. But no, I think that authenticity is. Is. Is the greatest currency. And I think that in order for me to tell the stories that I can tell, like, you know, what changed the game for me was I want to tell you this story. Sure. So in 2019, the Amazon fires started popping off. And we had just gone to. To film, like a month earlier. We'd filmed like a small documentary. And they'd been following me as if I was on a. As if I was on a solo, which, you know, we did the best we could. I lived on my own, but we. As we were driving, we passed a spot where the flames were 70ft tall. The forest was being destroyed. And I went out there with my phone, which overheated in like two minutes and said, you can't use it. But for a second, I was out there in the flames picking up animals and throwing them off to try and Just get them cooled off. I was trying to get snakes out of there. Everything was. The birds are flying and I lost it. I. I was red eyed, I was crying and I was going, this is happening every day. I was screaming. And it's the first time that I'd done that because I've seen the burning so many times. And I just lost it that day. And I don't know what made me pull out my phone because usually in those intense moments, I, I say, forget the documentation. This is real life. We got stuff to do and I'm doing, I'm not documenting. And then a month later I'm home and I'm in New York and all of a sudden I see these articles like, you know, the Amazon's burning worse this year than it was last year and blah, blah, blah. And I was like this, you know, and I threw it up on Instagram like 8 o' clock at night. And I'd never, like, I'd never cursed on Instagram. I don't know, you know, why? I just never did. And my phone was on 100% and I put it on top of the refrigerator and I went to bed. I woke up in the morning and my phone was on the floor on 2% and it was ringing off the hook. And it was like the news and they're like, are you the guy that posted that viral video about the Amazon? And I was like, what? Yeah. And that was the start. That's where it broke. And that's where we went from barefoot in the Amazon to all of a sudden I was a talking head for three weeks and going around on all these news stations. And all of a sudden I was like the spokesperson for the Amazon. And JJ's calling me and he was like, go, go, go, go, go. Like, get us, get us that support. And it was just, you know, so, so communicating with people and bringing them into that reality. And whether it's, you know, rhino poaching and elephant poaching or the Amazon being destroyed, it's like, to me, it's like being able to, to, to take people into that is something that I would love to do.

Yeah. And you do it directly with authenticity on your Instagram. People should definitely follow your Instagram. I think Rogan follows your Instagram too.

Well, the end of that story actually kind of involves him because. Yeah. Cause I went to all these news outlets and I was living in green rooms and traveling around and I was all strung out and I hadn't seen anybody I actually know in a few weeks, which was Starting to get to me. And I finally got home and I went to a family party and everyone's like, dude, it's been crazy. And I was like, yep. And then I left. And my cousin Michael calls me and he's screaming and I'm going, what?

What?

What, what, what? And he goes, joe Rogan just shared it. Joe Rogan, you shared it?

Oh, nice.

And everyone was losing their shit, and it was so amazing. And it was like, yeah, that's when it really took off. And what happened as a result of all of this is that a Canadian entrepreneur who started Lightspeed reached out. And several months later, after Covid, after that, boom, you know, I'd been in the game for maybe 13 years or something, had no money, no savings, no job, no nothing. And after that great publicity thing, nothing happened. The waves came and everything got real exciting. Everybody reached out and they said, we care so much. Nothing happened, though. You know, we can run into battle, but if we don't have our arrows in the quiver, what can we do? And I actually. I made a phone call to my friend Mohsen right at the start of COVID and I was going through divorce and I was broke and I said, I'm going to get a job. I said, I give up. So this is stupid. I said, the ecotourism business is done. Jungle keepers is dried up. We're done. And then this guy Dax de Silva called me on the phone and said, listen, I'm in. What do we got to do? And so if the analogy was me and JJ and a few other people trying to hold this boulder back from just destroying the rainforest, all of a sudden Dax comes in like a titan and just puts his arm out and just goes, I'm going to help. And he gave us the funding to start actually developing a ranger program, to start actually bringing loggers to be protectors of the forest, to be supporting smaller conservation things. And now we're protecting 50,000 acres of rainforest, we're protecting entire streams and ecosystems that I love, and we're soon going to double that. And it's like this whole thing. So, yeah, the communication of these things is crucial. And I actually think it's incredible that that social media has played such a big role in it.

Well, I mean, just because I. I know Joe well and I love him so much, I definitely think you should do his podcast, but also just be friends with him. I think, you guys, he's one, you know, not the meme, but he's one with nature and not much more with the. I'm one, while I do appreciate and love nature, I also love technology.

I know. Yeah.

And robots and so on. So we're in that meme type of way. We're very, very different.

But, well, either way, at some point, make sure you tell the guy thank you. Because it definitely really helped push us over that. That limit where, you know, if enough people see it, you get someone like Dax who. Who. Who says I can help and I have the resources to help. And that. That changed our whole lives, changed everything.

Back to the jungle. You had a bunch of interactions with jaguars. How are you still alive?

Like, what, man? Dude, Jags. Jags aren't the Jags. I'll tell you this. Jags are not the danger. The falling trees are the danger. I'll tell you some elephant stories, and then you'll. Then you'll wonder why I'm still alive. But Jags, I've. I've just one, you know. So JJ started, and Santiago, his dad, started challenging me to do solos. Go out alone, into the wild style. You know, I'd have a hammock, a headlamp, three days worth of food, some fish hooks, a machete. That's it. And so, like, one of the stories that. That happened early on was I was out there, and it was raining, and I was lost. And this is how we test your jungle knowledge. Can you survive out there? Do you know how to find food? Have you listened to the things that we taught you? And there was one night that I was in a hammock and a jaguar came up, and I was asleep when it happened, and she came up right next to my head, and she was. And I could hear her smelling me. And then my first instinct was to turn on my headlamp and just the sound of my arm moving against the material, and she just, like, she just. Right here. I could feel her breath. And I just laid there in the dark. And that's one of those moments where you go. You really learn a lot about yourself. Because I wasn't scared. I felt like I understood the intentions of the cat. If she was hunting, I'd already be dead. She was curious, and I was lost. And I didn't know if I was ever going to get out of that jungle. But what she did was energize me because it was an experience like the giant anaconda, where I said, this is so wild that it's. That it's so almost cinematically outside the realm of what I thought my life could be like, that it made me, like, wait, because the previous day I was lost, tired, confused, kind of devastated, tail between my legs. After that, I was like, man, you've been waiting for this your whole life. Go get it. And I, like, woke up and I was like, I am going to navigate. Even though I've been in this swamp for three days, I'm going to find my way out of this swamp. And, like, like, she just, like, breathed fire into me where it was like. It was like, if that's possible. If I could be six inches away from a jaguar's face. Then I got. I got that energy from her.

So that you're able to start to really hear and feel the. The jungle around you. Yeah, that was. That was a sign. Do you know what you're doing?

It really felt like a sign. I really did.

How do you survive in a solo. Solo hike through the jungle? What are the different components? What are the different dangers? So you said you had a hammock, you had some food. What kind of food, by the way?

Are we talking about nuts? Stuff that won't go bad because you can't. So you can't really start a fire in the Amazon. I'm a good. I mean, I camp all over the place. I'm a wilderness guide. Starting a fire in the Amazon is futile. In fact, a lot of survival manuals will tell you, don't do it, because if you're really lost, it'll break your spirit. You're not going to be able to do it.

That's dark.

Yeah, they're like, don't even try it. But you can still get, like, hypothermia from if you get wet and you lay out in the jungle. You could. You know, you could still. Exposure can still get you. So you want fire. I. Even in the beginning, I used to bring, like, ramen noodles, which is. Which is the nutritionally is irrelevant. And so I started bringing, like, nuts and then supplementing that with fish, which forced me to become a very good fisherman. And now, of course, JJ knows that he can, like, they can cut certain roots, and they bash it up and they put it in the stream, and the fish just float to the top, and they take what they want. So, like, he's got, like. He's got all the cheat codes. Whereas, like, I'm sitting there with a hook, and he's like, he'll go, now find bait. And I go. Bait. In the most competitive ecosystem on earth, Good luck finding a worm. You can't do it. What does J.J. do? He takes the machete, looks at his foot, cuts a slug of callus off of his heel because he's got this thick rhino skin. Puts that on the hook, catches a 6 inch fish, chops it in half, puts it on a bigger Hogan and in 15 minutes he's got a four foot giant catfish that could feed a family of 16. And he's happy. I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm gonna try to like stick a beetle on a, on a, on a fishing hook. And like, you know, do you have.

Just a line and a hook or is there a rod too?

Just a line and a hook and then you just chop a, you just chop a rod and tie it to the, you know, you just chop a little sapling.

So are you still able to start a fire or.

No, I like for the food that I bring to not be fire dependent.

Sure.

And so if I have some nuts I can, I can shove in a few enough calories to get me through the night or like and leave a fishing line out and there'll be something there in the morning. But yes, I can start a fire. But a lot of times what I'll do is I'll bring a flask and not with, with alcohol, but with diesel. And so you have a tuna can and you put the diesel in the. This is what the local guys do. Everything I do, I'm sure there's going to be someone listening to this and they're like, how could you do that? And it's like, this is what we do down there. Sorry, it's a tuna can. You pour a little bit of diesel in it, it burns slow. You light it and you put your sticks, you make your pyramid over that and eventually that will burn through the moisture and finally you'll get a very reluctant little fire. Enough to burn, to make yourself a cup of tea or to pour that into the noodles. Something, something. Or you just eat a fish raw.

How important is it to stay dry? Is it basically impossible?

It's impossible to stay dry. You're wet all the time. You're wet all the time.

What does that mean? That means infections are more efficient.

Yeah. So, yeah. I don't know if you saw the picture in my book where I have.

The, the yellow spots.

Yeah.

So yeah, there's a picture with your like entire face consumed with yellow spots is basically, I guess that's mrsa.

Yep.

Oh boy.

Yeah.

So how did that happen? What, what was the infection like and. Yeah. And how crazy are you for letting that infection stay in you for a prolonged period of time without treating it.

Or you had no choice No, I. I did have a choice. I was 19 years old and I was taking care of a giant anteater that was orphaned. And this is like my dream animal.

Yeah.

And she was mine, and my job was to teach her the jungle. And so when I started, like, noticing that I had an infection and that I was. I think I had dengue at the time, too. I went back to town, probably picked up MRSA in the hospital where I got tested, came back into the jungle and then got progressively sicker and sicker and weaker and weaker as I was two weeks, three weeks in the jungle. And then it got to the point where my vision went black and white. And I passed out one day and I don't know why, but at the time I had shaved that day. And when I woke up the next morning, I couldn't open my eyes because the. The pus had come out of my eyes and out of my. The pores in my face, all those little micro cuts. And the pillow was stuck to my face. And I was stuck upriver with no help at 19 years old. And also when you. When you see that picture, you can imagine that I assumed that my life was over because I didn't know what it was. And I also didn't assume that, or at the very least, I figured I'd be disfigured the rest of my life. I didn't think there was any getting better from that. And so I remember sitting by the side of the river praying that a boat would come by, but it was the rainy season and there aren't going to be any boats because the river is psychotic. And so it was a long time before I got back to town and I didn't want to leave the anteater. But it became like I was. Like I realized I was dying. And then I finally got a boat with some loggers, a death boat just loaded with. These guys were. Had gone into the jungle and shot everything they could and taken all the babies and they were going to go sell them. And so it was like baby monkeys and toucans and birds in cages and pieces of crocodiles and anaconda skins and jaguar skins rolled up. And it was just like I was just laying there with all these dead animals in the boat with all the flies on my face and got back to the hotel, called my mother, said, please book me a flight out. Like today. Like today. And then I sat on the plane and somebody sat next to me on the plane and I had a hood on. And I do remember that in the haze at this point, I was having trouble staying conscious, but I do remember that she, like, looked over, like, trying to see what was sitting next to her. And then she got up and never came back. And when I got to immigration in New York, you know, the cop, he like, takes my passport and he goes, yeah. He goes, so what are you doing in Peru? He's looking down and he goes, yeah. And he, like, holds up the passport, looks at the passport, looks at my face. He goes, bo, buddy, what the fuck? And I said, no, that's what he. I was like, I'm trying to get home to go to the hospital. He goes, he stamps it. He goes, go, go, go. God bless, God bless. He's like, oh, yeah. And then they put me in the room in the hospital with like the hazmat suits and they didn't know what it was. And I spent like five days on IV antibiotics with like four different things running through my veins. And the. The doctors were like, don't let it go that close. They're like, you went real close on that one.

Yeah, that's what. That picture. I mean, people should check out the book just to see the picture, because I imagine you just laying there, unable to see, have a fever probably. So you're like half hallucinating.

Yep.

And there's no. There's no boat. There's no. No way out.

There's no help coming.

Plus there's this creature who you've become a parent of.

Yeah.

That you love.

Yeah.

Boy, that's a dark place to be as a 19 year old. I mean, most people have never, will never be in a place like that. Like, where did you find strength in that, in those. In that place? I don't know.

I just remember writing like a goodbye letter to my parents because I said, if I die out here, it was really dark. Like, it was, it was. It was terrifying. It really felt like it was the end. And I was writing, you know, if you find me out here, I'm sorry, and all that. All that type of stuff. And it was, you know, I don't know about strength. There's no strength. It was just like, move forward. And at some point it was like, if you'll take me down river, take me down river, you know?

And you just got lucky with the loggers, with the death boat.

Yeah.

That they found you. Well, how did the infection start, by the way?

I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, we always have some sort of little. But the thing is, now, JJ taught me that there's like three different trees that can cure infections. I didn't know this at the time. I didn't know the cheat codes. Now there's, there's. If you have a small infection, you can use sangre de drago and it'll, it'll cure it right away. Like, let's say you have a bot fly and it gets a little pussy. There's a fly living in your skin. You put that on there, not only will it kill the fly, but it'll heal the infection. Now if you have a worse infection, you can go to ohe, which is ficus insipida, and you can use that and that will completely heal. That will murder. It's like crocodile blood. It will murder infections. So, like, forget Neosporin. That's a joke. These are heavy chemical compounds running through these trees and they know all about them. And so whatever it is. So now at this point, that's no longer an issue, like, because we know how to handle it. Which at that time, if JJ had been there, I would have been fine.

Well, learn the hard way. So these are open wounds and then there's creatures that start living in them is basically. What is it?

Well, that's separate. That's bot flies. Yeah, there's. There's a, There's a creature that unfortunately, very, very, very unfortunately likes to make its home inside the flesh of mammals. Yeah. And so the flies attach their eggs to mosquitoes. The mosquitoes go and seek out warm blooded animals. The eggs, microscopic eggs, fall into your skin and then begin to grow. And sooner or later you feel a twitch and it's a worm living inside of you that's like vertical down in you and it's eating you. And at first it's not a problem, but when they get to about as thick as that pen, it starts to hurt because you got a hole in you. And they have a little breathing tube that comes up and they breathe and they go back in and then they eat and they come back up to breathe and you have a hole. You have a friend living in you. Yeah.

And if you've had one of those.

I've had lots of those. It's tough to take them out. They have hooks.

Do you have to. You gotta love the junkie. So how do you take it out to come 100?

You gotta, you gotta put an irritant. So like a lot of times what we'll do down there is someone will take a massive drag of a cigarette and then they'll spit the. They'll, they'll power like exhale. And get some of the. Some of the tar, which also shows you how much tar you get out of a cigarette. And then with a knife. And you put that right over the hole. And then you slap some Vaseline or something on top of that so they can't breathe. And eventually, over the course of a few hours, they'll come up enough looking for air, and then you got to grab them with a tweezer and try not to rip them, because then you're going to get an infection. And you got to squeeze from the. It's a whole ceremony. When people have bot flies, we're all like, oh, it's bot fly time. Let's go. And then, like, JJ will squeeze. He's got, like, pliers for thumbs.

Yeah.

He can, like, take a piece of your neck. And you think he's going to break your skin. He'll just squeeze until this thing comes out.

And you don't want to. There's an open wound right there.

And, yeah, you don't want to bathe for a day or two after until that closes, because otherwise you're gonna have, like, water sloshing around in, like, a little pocket of yours, just kind of gross.

And that water might have other organisms.

Water in your skin tends to. Yeah. I mean, the jungle water is clean. We drink it. Like, I drink the water fresh out of the stream.

Oh, that's interesting.

Well, it's just a giant filtration system. All those roots. The whole jungle is constantly purifying everything.

People might be thinking about that with the jungle, there's insects probably all over you all the time.

It's not as bad as you think. Like, I've been to. To. To Finland, Lapland in the summer, and the mosquitoes are horrendous, like, devastating the Amazon in our area. If you're sitting in a hammock reading a book out. Our research stations don't have walls or anything. You're good for about one mosquito every half hour, which really is not a lot. I mean, it's worse in New Jersey. It's really not that bad.

Tell me.