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

Summary

Modern Wisdom, Episode #1052

Guest: Paul Rosolie
Title: Uncontacted Tribes, Jungle Warfare & Being Eaten Alive
Date: January 29, 2026
Host: Chris Williamson

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Episode Overview

This episode of Modern Wisdom features wildlife conservationist, explorer, and author Paul Rosolie, whose life has been dedicated to the Amazon rainforest and its inhabitants—both human and non-human. The conversation traverses Rosolie’s harrowing and humorous jungle stories, the profound challenges and philosophies behind conservation, the reality of uncontacted tribes, and the existential motivations underpinning his life’s work. The narrative is immersive: stingray stings, jaguar sightings, the ethics of intervention, and what it truly takes to change the world, all recounted in vivid and unfiltered detail.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Surviving the Wild: Pain and Local Wisdom

[00:34-06:34]

• Stingray Ordeal:
  • Paul tells the deeply visceral story of being stung by a stingray in the Amazon, equating it to "a steak knife" stabbing and flaying the foot. The subsequent venom-induced pain is described as "level 10," and local Amazonian remedies ultimately rescue him where Western medicine sometimes fails.
• Jungle Medicine:
  • "The local guys are like, dude, we know how to deal with this. We have trees for that. There's a sap for that. They have it. They know." (Paul Rosolie, 03:31)
• Perspective on Pain & Worry:
  • Chris and Paul unpack how anticipation is often worse than reality. Paul notes, "We suffer more in imagination than we do in life... I was on my feet in two days." (Paul Rosolie, 05:15)

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2. Life, Death, and Living with Danger

[05:38-11:19]

• Philosophy of Mortality:
  • Paul is keenly aware of life’s finitude, but says: "I want to live very much... but scared of death now? Not."
• Barefoot in the Jungle:
  • Counterintuitively, going barefoot is standard for expert trackers and native people, giving more tactile sense and quieter movement. Wearing boots makes too much noise: "If you go barefoot now, you're moving quiet and... your toes become balancers." (Paul Rosolie, 06:59)
• Creatures of Pain:
  • Bullet ants and their extraordinarily painful stings are described. "That venom... gives you this, this panicked feeling... It’s to cause you debilitating stress; that you go away." (Paul Rosolie, 08:53)

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3. Jungle as Organism: Sounds, Silence, and Sensory Overload

[11:19-14:29]

• Amazon Soundscape:
  • The Amazon is never silent. For Paul, true silence in a hotel is unsettling. "Nature is not silent. At least the jungle is not silent. It’s loud in the morning... and at night... I'd have to scream to talk to you right now." (Paul Rosolie, 12:02)
• Jungle Comfort:
  • The "throbbing chorus" of frogs, insects, and birds provide comfort and a sense of safety.

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4. Eaten Alive: The Anaconda Incident

[14:29-17:16]

• Discovery Channel Disaster:
  • Paul recounts being cajoled into a TV stunt labeled "Eaten Alive"—intended to raise awareness for Amazon conservation. He describes feeling misled ("they said we're changing it to Eaten Alive. I said, but I didn't actually get eaten alive. And they said, but we're going to tell everybody you did.").
• Backlash & Career Fallout:
  • The fallout led to public outrage, ostracization from the conservation community, and personal exile: "It destroyed my career professionally...you got lied to, cheated, and in fact, you should probably get out of here."
• Lessons from Failure:
  • "The successes are easy. It's those failures that teach you. And then you become confident because you've survived." (Paul Rosolie, 17:50)

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5. Origins: Childhood and Early Motivation

[23:37-27:24]

• Jane Goodall as Inspiration:
  • Paul credits his parents for reading about Jane Goodall and Sherlock Holmes, instilling a hero's complex.
• Self-Perception:
  • "I hated being stuck in a desk asking permission to go to the bathroom...I said, why do they get to do it and I don't?"
• First Journey to the Amazon:
  • The jungle felt like "the first scene in Jurassic Park"—a world bursting with life and possibility.

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6. Conservation Philosophy: Selfish Altruism & Urgency

[27:24-34:34]

• Not 'Selfless':
  • "My need to save the rainforest is extremely selfish. I like it. I think there should be a continuing world."
• Risk of Tipping Points:
  • Describes the Amazon’s fragile water cycle, the looming tipping point, and the feedback loop that could irrevocably destroy the forest.
• Visceral Cycle:
  • "You cup your hands and you drink from a clear stream...the river and the sky are flowing through you." (Paul Rosolie, 30:11)

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7. Threats: Gold Mining, Organized Crime, and Uncontacted Tribes

[40:26-53:12]

• Destruction Mechanics:
  • Illegal gold mining "scar[s] the earth," and logging is often a desperate economic choice.
• Conversion of Loggers:
  • Innovative approach—employing former loggers/miners as rangers instead of adversaries: "We'll pay you three times that...instead of your chainsaw, you have to carry binoculars."
• Narco Threats:
  • Narco-traffickers use inaccessible jungle for growing cocaine, posing mortal danger to Paul and his team; explicit death threats and need for security.
• Existential vs. Physical Fear:
  • "The most afraid I've ever been was...not fulfilling my dream by far is the thing that gave you the most terrifying..." (Paul Rosolie, 63:21)

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8. Failure, Relentlessness, and the Hero’s Journey

[63:54-71:38]

• Stubbornness over Consistency:
  • Chris: "Stubbornness is functionally the same {as consistency}, but much more accessible to a lot of people."
• Obsession as Fuel:
  • Paul: "Now we're responsible for millions and millions of heartbeats...all those ancient trees would be blackened to earth if we stopped."
• Paying Forward the Legacy:
  • The power of Jane Goodall’s encouragement and the duty to "tip her candle to mine and pass on that light."

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9. Amazon Realities: Jungle Warfare and Uncontacted Tribes

[76:48-119:04]

• Solo Expeditions:
  • Terrifying encounters with uncontacted tribes ("naked people who are pre stone Age") and the existential threat of being hunted.
• Uncontacted Tribe Protocols:
  • "The prevailing anthropological strategy...is leave them alone. They want to be left alone, we leave them alone."
• Historic First Contact:
  • Paul witnessed and captured clear footage of the Nomole tribe—“people from a thousand years ago walking out of the jungle.”
• Ambiguous Relations:
  • Sometimes peaceful, sometimes deadly; violence can erupt suddenly, and mutual incomprehension reigns.

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10. Spirituality and Deep Ecology

[95:10-98:41]

• The Jungle as Church:
  • "To me, the jungle is church... the apex of life...the greatest proliferation of terrestrial biodiversity on Earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record."
• Responsibility to the Future:
  • Discussion of “ethical inheritance”: “There’s something called generational amnesia with nature... with nature there's this authenticity that you can't replace a thousand year old tree." (Paul Rosolie, 101:26)
• Blueprint for Change:
  • Junglekeepers’ model of empowering local communities is pitched as a blueprint to be scaled globally.

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11. What It Takes to Change the World

[126:14-End]

• Scaling Change:
  • To protect the Amazon, the model must be replicated "thousands" of times, with both governmental action and local empowerment.
• Hope and Relentlessness:
  • Despite danger, bureaucracy, and scale, the work continues fueled by collective action—“it’s better to do something than to do nothing.”
• Invitation & Legacy:
  • Paul invites Chris to the Amazon, underscoring the role of story, lived experience, and international collaboration in driving real-world impact.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Surviving Pain:

  • “...I was making deals with God. I was in so much pain. ...The doctor goes, ‘what are you feeling at, a 2 or an 8?’...this was a 10. I can't imagine more pain than that.” (Paul Rosolie, 02:48)

• On Bullet Ants:

  • “You slap a bullet ant like that, they'll just sting you harder 100%...It will hurt enough, your glands will swell up...You’ll get a fever.” (Paul Rosolie, 08:42)

• On Modern Conservation:

  • “We started asking our enemies, the loggers and the gold miners, if they'd like to join our team.” (Paul Rosolie, 41:44)

• Jane Goodall’s Endorsement:

  • “She [Jane Goodall] waved her magical, very powerful wand in my direction and gave me a career. ... She empowered other people to do it.” (Paul Rosolie, 62:48)

• Existential Terror:

  • “Not fulfilling your dream by far is the thing that gave you the most terrifying [fear].” (Chris Williamson, 63:21)

• Action as Antidote:

  • “Action's the antidote to anxiety. It always is.” (Chris Williamson, 75:48)

• On Purpose:

  • “My need to save the rainforest is extremely selfish. I like it. I think that there should be a continuing world.” (Paul Rosolie, 28:03)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Section | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------------------|---------------| | The Stingray Story & Pain | 00:34–06:34 | | Mortality, Pain, Jungle Barefoot Philosophy | 05:38–11:19 | | Jungle Soundscape & Sensory Experience | 11:19–14:29 | | “Eaten Alive” TV Disaster & Professional Ruin | 14:29–17:16 | | Childhood, Early Inspiration, Jane Goodall | 23:37–27:24 | | Conservation Urgency & Amazon Tipping Points | 27:24–34:34 | | Destruction, Mining, Loggers-to-Rangers Conversion | 40:26–44:35 | | Narco Threats and Human Danger | 49:18–53:12 | | The Power of Stubbornness & Obsession | 63:54–71:38 | | Solo Explorations and Uncontacted Tribes | 76:48–119:04 | | Culture, Death, and Interventions | 119:04–126:14 | | Scaling Conservation, Model for the Future | 126:14–132:35 | | Close, Reflections, and Invitation | 132:35–end |

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Conclusion

Paul Rosolie’s life exemplifies relentless obsession in the service of something bigger than himself. Through stories of pain, risk, failure, and wild beauty, this conversation offers a deeply human look at conservation, existence, and legacy. Whether describing being stung, stalked, or slandered—or celebrating ancient trees, indigenous wisdom, and Jane Goodall’s grace—the episode is a reminder that change is possible, but never easy: “It's better to do something than to do nothing.”

Learn More / Take Action: junglekeepers.org

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For Listeners

This summary captures both the sweep and intimacy of a conversation that oscillates between adventure memoir, philosophy, environmental crisis, and actionable hope—an episode for anyone “called” to live with purpose, resilience, and curiosity.

Transcript

[A]

People of Australia and New Zealand and Bali. I'm coming to you live this March and April. Imagine that, me on stage in your city. It's a night of big ideas, unfiltered stories, and the kind of conversations I don't get to have on the podcast live in a room together. Perth and Brisbane are already completely sold out, but there are still tickets available for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Christchurch, Auckland and Bali. And you can get yours right now by going to the link in the description below or heading to ChrisWilliamson dot live. See you there. How was getting stung by a stingray?

[B]

That's. It was wonderful. I loved every second of it. Because people pursue ice plunges and ayahuasca journeys and. And people. People are constantly looking for the edge. And I found the edge, right. I thought I was tough. I thought I'd been through pain. I didn't know anything. I was. I was making deals with God. I was. I was in so much pain. And you don't think, you know, you think like your chest cavity or your head. You didn't think that your foot could throw you into agony. I got, you know, so it. It stung me in the foot. And what happened?

[A]

Where were you?

[B]

So I'm in a stream in the Amazon rainforest and I had my shoes on just because I'd been hiking. And I reached this waterfall and I said, I'm going to take my shoes off to enjoy the waterfall and swim around. And as I'm playing in the waterfall, I just. You instantly know it. It's like you got shot in the foot. And this stingray, I stepped on the stingray and it stuck its barb and it's, you know, it's the size of a steak knife. It sticks its barb in through the skin. And the thing is, it wagged its tail under the skin, so it flayed the skin off of the meat of the foot and then swam out.

[A]

So just what does a split second. What does a stingray. Because it's flat.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's the. Just the tail. So have you stood on the tail or has it been looking for you?

[B]

No, no, no. It's flat. Flat. The whole thing is flat. And then if scared, it stings to make you go away. Oh, they're not trying to attack you. They want to be left alone. I stepped on him. It's my fault. I couldn't.

[A]

Then the tail came up.

[B]

Tail went straight up in the. The. And the arch of your foot is sensitive. And so. So steak knife to the arch of the foot injected A ton of venom. As it flayed the skin off, pulls out. And so I'm like. I'm like, look, this hurts. But the flesh wounds don't hurt that much. And I'm like, that hurt. Getting stabbed hurt. And so I'm over there, I'm about to film, and I'm like, I'm in the Amazon rainforest and I just got hit by a stingray. My friend comes up to me, he goes, we don't have time for this. He's like, you're going to pass out soon. And when you pass out, we can't carry you to the river. I said, how do you know I'm going to pass out? He goes, it happens to everybody. And sure enough, the next thing I know, I'm on a cart getting wheeled through the jungle. I don't remember the boat ride at all. And then they got me to the research station and I was in so much pain. I was, you know, making every deal with the universe. If you just make this stop, I promise I'll do whatever, you know, just everything. And they, they luckily, as with the local guys, so they were scraping the trees, gathering medicinal barks that they baked in a pan. They. They wrapped it in leaves and they baked it into a poultice. They put that on the wound. Boiling hot poultice, which actually, weirdly enough, felt good. Boiling hot, but the skin was already off. They put that on and then they wrap it to your foot and they leave that there for a few hours. And that sucks out the venom. But for about four or five hours, it was the worst, most blinding pain, like level 10. You know, the doctor goes, you know, what are you feeling at a 2 or an 8? And I was like, this was a 10. I can't imagine more pain than that. It's like being just. Just the venom. It's like having an electrical wire shoved into your veins. But the last guy I know that got stung by a stingray, he went to a hospital and he had permanent nerve damage. Didn't walk for two months, had a systemic infection. Because he went with the Western medicine way. The local guys are like, dude, we know how to deal with this. We have trees for that. There's a SAP for that. They have it. They know. They've learned from their grandfathers and grandmothers.

[A]

You know that Post Malone song? I got a guy for that.

[B]

I don't think I've ever heard a Post Malone song.

[A]

It's impressive that you managed to evade it. That's actually also made of bark and herbs.

[B]

Oh, I thought you was also made of post Malone.

[A]

It probably is. No, there's a bark and herbs. He's got a song called I Got a Guy for that. And the indigenous people of the Amazon, I've got a tree for that. That's their equivalent.

[B]

Yeah. And Apple used to have an ad campaign, you know, if you need it, we have an app for that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Amazon. We go, we got a SAP for that.

[A]

Very cool.

[B]

Yeah. Ye.

[A]

What's the reason for the pain extending for so long? Is it. The particular type of toxin is unusually. Yeah, the venom is unusually massive amount of venom.

[B]

And the people that get stung by coastal saltwater stingrays, they're like, oh, yeah, you put something hot on, it gets better. That's not the way it works with these guys. It's much, much worse. The venom is much more intense. And again, you're getting. I mean, just look at a steak knife next time you're eating a steak and just imagine just stabbing yourself through the foot with that.

[A]

And while it's in there, it's gone like this.

[B]

And then it swam away.

[A]

So it's an electrical steak knife filled with venom.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it was great. But. But again, the. The whole experience was so visceral. The only. The only part that I was truly upset about was I was, you know, as I'm laying there was the anticipation. We suffer more in imagination than we do in life. I was just going, how much of my year is this going to cut out? Am I going to be off my feet for three months? I was on my feet in two days. So again, there's no point in worrying about it.

[A]

Are you conscious of the finality, the finitude of life? Is that something you think about a.

[B]

Lot as someone that I think has come close to dying more than most people? Very much so. Very much so. Yeah. And I'm not like, I want to live very much because I want to be around my family and I want to experience things. But scared of death now. Not.

[A]

Not even a little bit, but conscious of time.

[B]

Conscious of time.

[A]

Conscious of time in that. How long am I going to be off my feet? How much of my life am I going to maximize or potentially lose from this sort of a thing?

[B]

Yes, but only because I want to. I need to be saving the Amazon. I need to be running around, I need to be helping other people. I don't want to be off my feet. That's. What am I going to do? What am I going to do then? I'm useless off my feet, you know, surely Ever.

[A]

Being barefoot in the Amazon is dangerous.

[B]

We are always barefoot in the Amazon. I'm actually. It's remarkable. The only reason I had shoes on was because I was doing an ad for Vivobarefoot and I was, I put them on to film because they're like a barefoot shoe company. And I, and then I, I was like, all right, that's enough with shoes. I took them off, I walk around. I learned from the natives, right? And so when you go hunting with the native trackers, if you were wearing boots in the jungle, it makes so much more noise. The leaves, the report, the amount of sticks that you break, the slurp in the mud. It's just, you know, if you go barefoot now, you're moving quiet and you can hit over vines and things. You can pick out the rocks much easier. You also have tactile balance, control. Your toes become balancers. And so you're much better off barefoot. The only problem is in the Amazon you have thorns that are 10 inches, 12 inches long. You have bullet ants, venomous snakes, stingrays, and it goes, the list goes on and on.

[A]

Bullet ants or fire ants. The most painful venom. That, that gentleman who did you see that guy that did the self study on himself where he allowed all of these different animals to bite him or inject him with venom. And he described the sense of it happening like a sommelier would the notes of wine and he would talk about sort of dull, smoky textures and sort of sharp, fiery electrical senses and stuff like that. I'm pretty sure that bullet ants are fire. An ant.

[B]

Bullet ant answers the top.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So, yeah, I mean they're, they're horrible. And even now I'd say they, they would end a day. If you were me right now in the studio, you know, if he was billeting, crawling up your leg and hit you good, you know, you didn't brush it off quick. If got you good. They sting you, they hold on to you, they grab you with their mandibles. They have these chopping mandibles. They grab you with the mandibles. So they grab you with their, with their face and then they drive that stinger home. Oh.

[A]

So they don't inject the venom through the, through the mouth.

[B]

They have a stinger like a wasp. And so they hold on to you and they thing. And if you smack them, that's not. You can't kill them with your hand. You need like a hammer or a shoe.

[A]

You can't kill them with your hand.

[B]

No. You slap a bullet ant like that, they'll just sting you harder 100%. And it will hurt enough. Your glands will swell up in your armpit and your groin and your neck. You'll get a fever.

[A]

Immune system's going crazy.

[B]

And that the most creative thing of that venom is that it makes you feel like something's going wrong. You go, something's not right. Something's gonna happen. It makes, it gives you this, this panicked feeling. You're fine. I mean, I've always been fine. I've been bitten by like 12 or 13 times, but sort of impending doom. Yeah. It always gives you this really stress response where you're like, oh, man, there's. I have a blood clot. Or, you know, it's like it makes you think that the, the venom is causing damage and you, you just. But that's the point. The point is to cause you debilitating stress that you go away. That's the same thing with wasps. I mean, they come and they just sting the shit out of you so that you leave their nest.

[A]

So ingenious, isn't it?

[B]

It's so ingenious. And I also love the wasp philosophy of. I think it's a good philosophy to embody in our own lives as well as we are peaceful here. We are in our nest. We're attending to our babies. Do not fuck with us. And if you do, we're going to chase you. And it's kind of this like warrior peace thing where it's like, you know, you see a wasp nest, you go, I'm not going anywhere near that nest. And if you do, if you by accident hit it with a machete, they're going to chase you all the way to the river. Like they're going to make sure they make their point.

[A]

What is the fuck? There's a ton of wasps coming after me. Water. That's the solution. Water.

[B]

But then, see, in the jungle, you can't see 10ft in front of you, right? Because it's dense. So when you're running from the wasps, that's the most dangerous part, because as you're getting stung, you're making bad decisions because you're running forward and there's vines and there's spikes and there's other bullet ants and there's snakes. And so as you're running, you're, you're, you're, you're in a, a high likelihood of getting into more trouble.

[A]

It is kind of insane that anybody is able to not be killed in the Amazon. It sounds like there's, it's just filled with things that could kill you pretty easily.

[B]

It's, it's not as bad as we're. So far we've started talking about all the worst things. We started talking about stingrays and bullet ants. But I mean, you could totally. There's. Most of the time I'm there, I'm walking barefoot through beautiful forests on trails that are quiet with macaws above me and frogs singing. And it's, it's, it's not, it's not as bad. It's really just those, those, those moments. You know, you go through six weeks of wonderful and then you step on a stingray. The jungle is actually very, very serene. It's very calm. There's no honking car horns, you're not going to get mugged, you know. The most dangerous thing is falling trees.

[A]

Is it ever silent?

[B]

No. And I don't know what Rage against the Machine song it is. He says something about silence makes me sick. And I always think of that when I have to come stay in a hotel room because I fall asleep to the throbbing chorus of frogs at night. And so I come and you get into a, into a room and there's silence. Nature is not silent. At least the jungle is not silent. It's. It's loud in the morning. There's howler monkeys and macaws and birds and everything's going crazy. You hit 4am, the jungle explodes into song. It's loud. And at night you go in the swamps. The frogs are all coming down from the canopy and mating. I couldn't. I'd have to scream to talk to you right now.

[A]

No way.

[B]

All that would. We would be. I'd be screaming at you like, look at this one. It's so loud. No, it's incredible. It's. It's magical. It's absolutely magic on Earth.

[A]

You know what it makes me think about? That humans have survived in pretty ancestral environments in very varied ecologies. And how different the nervous system set point of somebody who grew up in the jungle versus somebody who grew up on the plains.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because the planes presumably would be much quieter. You know, there's big, big chunks of space, nothingness between animals. And there might be some wind, there might be the blowing of. You might be able to hear something, some birds over the far side. But I spent a good bit of time in Zambia and that at night, apart from maybe the sounds of some buzzing of like a few insects and stuff, it's pretty fucking quiet.

[B]

Interesting. No? The jungle is almost this. Its own superorganism and it's like it Has a consciousness. And when you're inside of it, you have to imagine a human, you know, let's just say for six feet and below you're. The jungle is 160ft tall in places. So you're. You're not. It's a three. It's a 4D environment. You're underneath. It's like being at the bottom of the ocean. But the ocean is made of tree branches and leaves and animals, and you're under all of it. So when you're walking on a trail, there's most of what's around you. Like a cathedral is above you. And so when you walk around at night, you have this little headlamp. You're this tiny little orb of light walking below this throbbing, teeming, murdering mass of wildlife that's all around you that you can't see. There's frogs and snakes and nightbirds and kinkachus and jaguars and all of this stuff moving around you. And so it's very, very loud. Very loud. And I think that to me is comfort, you know, people I don't know to me, to fall asleep to that. People come to the jungle and they're shocked by the fact that the sounds of the jungle are calming. You put your head down and you hear all of that and it just lulls you to sleep. I mean, as a kid, it was the cicadas in the summer, you know, the summer sound that throb. I love it. Winter when it's quiet.

[A]

Didn't you try to get eaten by anaconda?

[B]

Some producers at Discovery Channel tried to get me to do that, yes. And I did do it. I did try to get eaten by an anaconda. Because they said that if I tried to get eaten by an anaconda, it would get us such high ratings. Because I said, look, we're going to do research on the biggest anacondas on earth, right? We're gonna do something no one's ever done before. But sitting at a desk in Hollywood, they were like, that's not good enough. They're like, we wanna go bigger. How about we make you a spacesuit and we feed you to an anaconda when you have a breathing tube so you'll be fine. And snakes regurgitate all the time. And so at the time, I knew the snake wasn't gonna eat me. And so in the room, you know, you shake hands, you go, sure. And then they produce. They. They told me the show would be called Expedition Amazon. And again, I'm 20, 24, right? And they're telling you, you can go to the Amazon, you have millions of dollar budget, you can take all your best friends and expert scientists and start research that's never been done before. The only thing that you gotta do is pay the piper by doing this one thing. And so at that age, at that time, I went, how else do we tell the world that we have to save this river? Because it was just starting to crystallize in my head that if me and jj, my local friend, if we didn't start to save this river, that nobody was going to do it. And so I said, this seems like the opportunity. This was my first experience. I was young. I had not learned yet. I was not yet a Jedi. I shook the hands and they said, don't worry, kid, we're going to take care of you, okay? They called it Expedition Amazon. And while we were in the jungle, they had, you know, they were like, we need danger beats. We need you to be scared. I said, scared of what? And they were like, we need you to be chased by piranhas. And I was like, I'm in. We swim in the water every day. We shower in the river. We're just playing in the river. Backflipping into the river. Yeah. Anyway, at the end, right before I was supposed to go on the Today show or the Good Morning show or whatever it's called, the Matt Lauer show, they called me, they showed me the show and they said, we're changing it to Eaten Alive. Eaten alive. I said, but I didn't actually get eaten alive. And they said, but we're going to tell everybody you did. So they watched the show and I said, you can't do that to me. So they did me hard and I had to exile to India. The hatred was so bad, I'd be in the street and people would be like, yo, fuck you, man. Why talk shows? Because the PETA was mad because they thought I risked the life of a snake. The American public was mad because they thought that they were going to see a guy get eaten by anaconda. Everybody was somehow outraged. Like, all, like the late night shows, Kimmel was like, oh, for your next stunt, you should go have sex with a hippo. Like, it destroyed my career professionally.

[A]

No way destroyed it.

[B]

So every scientist that I work with, every legitimate conservationist, I mean, someone actually said, you're not, you're not welcome in Brazil. I was supposed to do work on a giant anteater project. Like, and so I took. And this is where, you know, you hear people say, you know, what's the Winston Churchill go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. This was a big one, right? And I'm in my mid-20s. And I went from thinking, I'm going to have this opportunity where it's like, we're going to, me and my team, we're going to get to have the chance to save the rainforest and carry on that Steve Irwin legacy of being on Discovery Channel. And then it goes to. Everybody hated it. It was a complete disaster. You got lied to, you got cheated, and in fact, you should probably get out of here. And so for years that set us back years because then we weren't taken seriously. And then if we wanted grants to protect the rainforest, if we wanted to work with other organizations, everyone would just go use that on Anaconda Guy. I mean, to this day, I think my Wikipedia still says, Paul Rosalie is an American who is the host of Eaten Alive. It's like, it just, it's like you got branded with it. It's like that's the guy that got eaten by the anaconda. And it won't, it wouldn't leave for a long time. And so that was a very, very informed. I mean, at the time it was true. You can only see the tragedy of it at the time. Right. At the time, you know, six months after that, I was just devastated. I didn't know what happened. It's like a car crash. Wait, wait, hold on. We caught the world record Anaconda. We started research that no one's ever done before. We put together an amazing film that they chopped up and they ruined. But the backlash and then the professional backlash and then, but then it's funny because now, all these years later, that was, what, 2014. So more than 10 years later, that was one of the best things that ever happened to me because now I know how to, I can, I can spot that, I can spot that false handshake a thousand miles away. Now, you know, when we, when we do deals, we know, we learn through those experiences. You know, you're. The successes are easy. It's those failures that teach you. And then you become confident because you've survived. If you can survive those, that thing of, you know, it doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. Yeah, unless, unless, unless it maims you. But, you know, because that does happen, whether it's mentally or physically. But if you, if you survive enough of those hits, the, the, the confidence you have going into the hunt, then you know exactly what it's going to do. And so, you know, think of it from an animal perspective. You you know, you know, you think of a lion going after a gazelle. I've seen a cheetah going after a gazelle, and I've watched cheetah cubs learn. You know, the mother will maim the gazelle and let the cheetah cubs sort of finish it off. So they learn. And you see them get poked as they're learning by those horns. They'll come on from the back and they'll get poked. It's like, yeah, go down for that windpipe on the other side. They learn. And some lions, you know, some cheetahs, some. Some predators don't learn. They'll get. They'll get that straight through the eye and that's the end of it for them. They'll get that infection. And so that, professionally, the discovery thing was great because it was a huge train wreck. Destroyed everything I had going on. And so I had to just exile it to go live with elephants. I had to go spend more time in the jungle. And so I couldn't, I couldn't do. If I had gotten a TV career at that point, it would have. It would have been terrible. I wasn't ready. It would have been the worst thing. That's a perfect example of life not giving you what you want and instead giving you what you need. It was, it was. I was being moved. I was going, I want to go this way. And God went, no, this is where you're gonna go, and I'm gonna spank you for it. Like, it was great. And I got all these experiences that I never would have had otherwise. I went and lived with a herd of semi wild elephants. I went out on solos in the Amazon rainforest by myself. It led to long period of isolated reflection and years of. Then I said, okay, well, forget, forget trying to, you know, at that time, in early 20s, you know, you want to. You have that, that young man's sort of need to prove yourself and to go, I'm. I'm the guy. And so then when you get. You get knocked on your ass and then you go, okay, I'm just going to do the work. And so we just started doing the work. We said, okay, what are we really trying to do here? Trying to save the forest? How do we do that? And there was a day where we saw smoke on the horizon. Me and jj, who's this local conservationist who grew up in the Amazon, didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old, has been working his whole life to protect the forest, and we saw smoke on the horizon, and we have 300,000 acres of jungle behind us, and we see the destruction coming. And I was like, there's got to be somebody we can call. There's got to be something. This can't be legal. We're watching these millennium trees go down. It's like Avatar. We're just watching this destruction. And I said, there must be someone who can stop this. And he looked up river, he looked down river, and he goes, do you see anybody else? I said, no. But I said, but then how on earth can we have anything to do with stopping this? And so we had to start from beyond zero. How do you stop people from cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest? How do you. How do you start an organization? How do we find rangers who can be rangers? And so we had to answer all these questions. And so we just. It was just years of just being in the jungle, answering these questions. If we want to protect those monkeys and those birds and those millennium trees and the ecosystem that creates climactic stability on our planet, how do we do this? Or are we supposed to just watch this get destroyed? Are we part of the last generation that's going to have functioning ecosystems on this planet, and we're doomed to watch the ecological apocalyp? And that was the question. And there's that, that quote. They said, you know, the search for meaning is only valid if you're willing to take action on what you find. And it's like when I was a kid, I grew up with the extreme environmental stress. They tell you the world is ending. They tell you We've lost 50% of the wildlife on our planet, that elephants are going extinct. We're going to lose gorillas in our lifetime. And I couldn't deal with that. I couldn't sleep. And so I left. I dropped out of high school two years early. I got a plane ticket to the Amazon. I was like, I have to go out and see it for myself.

[A]

That was how this started.

[B]

That was how all this started. My mom, my parents made the huge mistake of. They read me Jane Goodall. So it's a perfect storm of. So I'm severely dyslexic, right? So I can't read. Well, I couldn't read until I was probably 11. But my parents, incredible. They would finish their day as parents and then read us. They read me and my sister, Sherlock Holmes, Lord of the Rings, Jane Goodall stories, James, Harriet. And so I got my Heroes, Complex Heroes, Complex Hero's Journey from Lord of the Rings, got the need for adventure and wildlife from Jane Goodall, Got the love of animals from James Harriet and all this stuff. And then, and then sometime around teenager years, you know, when you're getting detention, detention, detention, detention. Why didn't you do better? Why didn't you do homework? Because I don't want to do any more homework. And I'm going, why did Teddy Roosevelt and Jane, they, they got to lead adventurous lives. And I'm stuck in a desk asking permission to go to the bathroom. And I was like, why do they get to do it? And I don't? And so I literally just again, amazing parents. I said, I hate this so much. I was so depressed, I was so frustrated. And my parents just said, why don't you just leave, get your ged, leave high school. We want you to go to college. So you have to, you have to go to college. But in between semesters you can go wherever you want. I bought a ticket to the Amazon, went down, met JJ and it was like, it's like the first scene in Jurassic park when you saw the jungle for the first time. It's like the first scene in Jurassic Park. They arrive and they're like, okay, this is gonna be, you know, it's gonna be cool. They said, there's some stuff here. It's like the first time they see the dinosaurs. The first time I saw a Millennium Tree 160ft tall and leaf cutter ants carrying le from the canopy into their thing and macaw is going across the sky. I was like, that was like the start of the movie in my life. That's like the color came on. I was just, I went, this is where, this is where I belong. I was like, this is incredible. Just limitless things to learn, limitless wilderness to explore. Just incredible. That's why I said we should do the. You got one time you got to come down and we got to hang.

[A]

I'm going to come, I'm going to come and see you. I'm going to come see you. Let me get Australia, New Zealand and Bali out of the way and then you're next on my list. Before we continue, I am a massive fan of reducing your alcohol intake, but historically, non alcoholic brews taste like ass. You don't need to be doing some big reset. Maybe you just want to crack a cold one without feeling like garbage the next morning. Which is why I am such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Company. They've got 50 types of NAS, including IPAs, goldens and even limited releases like a cocktail inspired Paloma and Moscow Mule. And here's the thing, you can drink them Anytime, late nights, early mornings, watching sports, playing sports doesn't matter. No hangover, no compromise. And that is why I partnered with them. You can find Athletic Brewing Co's best selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you. Or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped right to your door. Right now, you can get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com Modern Wisdom that's athleticbrewing.com ModernWisdom what is it, what is it that drove you from those early days? Because talking about conservation as a young man in his teens, most young people aren't that selfless. They're looking to be driven by the need for status and recognition. People that they admire accumulating wealth or chasing girls or doing whatever. What were the contributing motivations to this?

[B]

That's a great question. I've always loved animals. When I was a child, I would go, and specifically wild animals. People get this confused. You know, domesticated animals is a different thing. Cats, dogs, cows, chickens, we've made those. Those aren't wild animals. There's something beautiful to me, wild animals on Earth have formed our ecosystems. There are wild brothers and sisters. You know, we grew up in the ecosystems that they created. And people think that animals live in the forest. And the animals make the forest. They carry the seeds, they pollinate the flowers. The trees grow because the animals move them. And so I was, even from the time I was this big, I was, I wanted, I said, did my parents take me to the streams? I wanted to find frogs, I wanted to find snakes. I liked places where there was. I liked, always liked big trees, like the parts of the forest where there were poplar trees and big oak oaks. So I was born in Brooklyn, and then for a while we were in North Jersey. And so I always had access to these, like, lower New York forests. And it was just beautiful trees. But my motivation was not selfless. Everybody confuses that. My need to save the rainforest is extremely selfish. I like it. I think that there should be a continuing world. And when I look at the fact that the Amazon formed in the Eocene, 33 to 55 million years ago. And so this cycle of speciation and these trees growing has been happening for millions and millions of years. And for us to break that cycle to the point that it no longer works, you're destroying part of the system on Earth that makes life possible. A fifth of our planet's oxygen comes from the Amazon. A fifth of the fresh water on Our planet is contained in that system and that system produces the moisture that rains back down on the Amazon. So if you cut too much of it, you destroy the Amazon rainforest. And for that reason we've lost 20% of the Amazon. We're the first generation in history that has a planetary crisis on our hands that we can stop. So we're the ones, all of history has taken place. We're the first ones where we're looking at 20% of the Amazon is cut. If we go past that threshold, there's a tipping point that we don't come back from. They've cut too much of the Amazon, it dries out. It's no longer the Amazon rainforest. So then the tropical sun bakes it, human degradation destroys it. And then, then you're looking at post apocalyptic nightmare.

[A]

So it becomes a feedback loop, a snowball feedback loop. Because once, can you just dig into, can you just dig into that a little bit more?

[B]

Sure. So every day the Amazon rainforest trees produce lift up off the, out of the ground and into the air. 20 trillion liters of water. It's, there's a larger invisible mist river above the Amazon rainforest than is on the ground in the Amazon river held.

[A]

In the trees, floating through the sky.

[B]

The trees each morning. And so I've seen this from the branches of the tallest trees. And when the sun comes up in the east, you could just see it for a few minutes. It illuminates the mist river that's flowing over the Amazon. And so there's this invisible particulate mist river that's larger than the largest river on earth flowing through the sky.

[A]

There's more water in the air than there is on the ground in the.

[B]

River holy in the Amazon. That's the largest river on Earth. And, and at the same time it's also being, it's also being fertilized with compounds from the Sahara Desert. So the Amazon and Africa are exchanging nutrients. And so when people say that the Earth is connected, like you don't, you don't realize the degree to which it is. And one of the things the locals down there that we've done is, you know, you have this, this thing we do, it's kind of like a, a physical form of prayer. It's a bit of a, a natural sacrament. You, you cup your hands and you drink from a clear stream. You hold your arm in the sunlight and you watch the vapor be lifted off your skin. It'll, the sun will lift the sweat right off your skin and you can see it joining the vapors coming off the leaves. You watch it become thunderclouds in the afternoons and then it rains down and then you drink it again. You're part of the cycle. It's flow. The river and the sky are flowing through you. And so that 20 trillion liters of water that's coming off the Amazon rainforest, which is bigger than the continental United States, it's tremendous. So globally it's this huge force. And so in the last century, because of chainsaws, deforestation, expanding countries, agriculture, we've lost 20% of the Amazon rainforest, this system that is the heart of our planet. And so their scientists are warning now that if we lose more, we could cross a threshold where that, that missed river, that 20 trillion tons of water, liters of water, gets broken. So if that's not coming up off the ground because there's not enough trees to produce it, then the rain stops. And if the rain stops, the forest dries. And if the forest dries, then it burns and then we lose the Amazon rainforest. And that's a reality, It's a realistic possibility right now.

[A]

Is the reason that there is a tipping point here because there's a critical mass that's needed in order for rain clouds to form. I'm trying to work out if you cut 50% of it, why wouldn't you just have 50% of the water that would go up and you would have 50% of the trees that would need watering? So surely it would be self limiting. But it seems like there's a tipping point here.

[B]

No, it's what we've, what we've seen in practice, in reality, is that there is this tipping point. Even with the 20%, we're starting to see the droughts get, get worse. And another huge misconception people have is they say wildfires in the Amazon are out of control. There are no wildfires, there's no fires in the Amazon.

[A]

People going super hard to start a fire in the Amazon.

[B]

You actually can't start a fire in the, you could napalm that forest. I mean, there's been times where we're trying to start a fire when we're camping. You know, you start a fire, you try and start an authentic fire. No chance. All the sticks are wet. You try and find some tinder, you hack into a stick, even the center of the stick is wet. So then you get the gasoline, you pour it all over your fire, you light that, the gasoline burns and the sticks are wet. So then you just eat, you know, you have like a ramen noodle pack, you dip it in the river until it's a little moist and cold and then you just eat it and you just sprinkle this stuff on top. It's great. Or you just eat the fish. A lot of times we have fish that we can't cook, so you just eat the fish out of the river like it's a Snickers. But I mean that, that Amazon tipping point, the extinction of species. I truly believe that this is the defining issue of our time. I think that we were born in the most important time in history. Civilizations rise and fall. Nature has always been a constant that we have existed we within. And for the first time in the story of our species as a global society, we have to contend with the fact that we have to decide what the future of Earth is going to look like. Because if we destroy the Amazon past the point that it can be repaired, then, then we're cursing all future generations with those actions.

[A]

Who owns the Amazon? Who owns most of the Amazon?

[B]

60% of the Amazon is contained within the territory of Brazil. The next largest country is Peru, which is where I work. And that has the headwaters of the Amazon. The headwaters is the most important part because you have the edge of the Andes Mountains and then you have the lowland tropical Amazon and the Andes cloud forests are considered a mega biodiverse biome. That ecosystem is considered mega biodiverse. Tons of plants and animals. The lowland Amazon is also mega biodiverse. And so at the confluence of those two where I work, it's also higher up. If you think of the Amazon rainforest, the, the main river is a tree and then all the millions of tributaries are the branches where I work is on the tip, tip, tip, tip, tip, tip top of the branches high tributary. And that's why it's the wildest place on Earth because people haven't been able to access it. There's been no access to this place for until now. And so it's still this forest that's been growing since the dawn of time, untouched. And so you think some of these trees were saplings when they were painting the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Some of these trees were already giants when World War I was happening, when World War II was happening, they were towering 130 foot, you know, now you're talking about 160 foot trees. Me. And you could walk around on the branches of these trees. Some of the branches that I've. Some of the branches that come off the trees that I climb are as big as this room with bromeliads growing with, you know, the size of a Volkswagen bug. Like, you know, there's, there's species in the canopy of the rainforest that have never been seen. There's. Because many of the species. 50% of the life in a rainforest occurs in the canopy. We think about that. 50% of the life in the most biodiverse place on Earth occurs in the canopy, which is 160ft off the ground. So it's one of the least explored things on the planet. Even if a scientist can climb one tree, you got to know the ropes. You got to get up there, you got to survive. The bees and the wasps and the height and the gravity and everything else that's gonna.

[A]

I guess you couldn't even send drones because they're just gonna clink, clink, clink, clink, and then fall down.

[B]

Yeah. And animals hate drones.

[A]

Just looks like a predator.

[B]

It's like a giant wasp. They, they. Birds are terrified of them. Elephants hate drones. Oh my God.

[A]

Spooks them.

[B]

Really scares them. Well, they're scared of bees. Elephants don't like bees. Right.

[A]

Like David and Goliath relationship. Well, they probably Tom and Jerry thing.

[B]

They have sense that this is. We're. Now we're moving out of the Amazon for a second. But, but yes, and in my experience, they're very. They have sensitive skin. They don't like. Even though they can, they can move through thorns. And they actually had, in one sense, they have very thick skin. They don't like bee stings. And there's something about the buzzing of bees. They actually are using bees in parts of Kenya, on the borderlands of Marshalls. They, they put bee boxes on the edges of farms to keep the elephant. Because the elephants are like, look, we're just not going to get them.

[A]

They're the border collies of the elephant world.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

The sheepdogs of the elephant world just hate them. That's funny. It's making me think about a wonderful analogy that you made about the ocean. And it's almost like the rainforest is the inverted ocean. We talk about, well, how little of the ocean floor has ever been. Yeah. Where you're talking about the canopy. Isn't that cool, dude? So sick. Okay, so canopy, 50%.

[B]

50% of the life of the, of the life in the rainforest is in the canopy. And so a lot of the species that are born up there never touch the ground.

[A]

So are you, what are the, what is the bulk of those species made up of? What are the sorts of animals that are in the canopy?

[B]

I mean, you have spider monkeys, howler monkeys, saki monkeys. Capuchins, macaws, harpy eagles. I mean there's hundreds of species of different birds. There's, you know, I think there's 50 something species of ant birds, there's all the toucans and arasaris and unbelievable amounts of birds, butterflies, dragonflies, millions and millions, just unbelievable amounts of wildlife, undiscovered medicines. Orchids, bromeliads, cactuses, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals. It's just teeming. And so you think of again back to this, back to this sapling that started a thousand years ago. Think what the world looked like a thousand years ago. And that sapling today is this millennium tree with these giant branches as thick as this room. And how many, if you time lapse that over a thousand years, how many species, how many millions of species have lived on and in one tree home? One tree. And there's 400 billion trees in the Amazon. How many grains of sand are there on earth? You know, it's like this, this place defies. And then, and then when you, when you see all this magic and you, you know, the, the sky and the river are flowing through you and everything's interconnected and there's this energy exchange and you suddenly understand. The sunlight hits the leaves, goes into the trees, the animals eat the leaves and then they hunt each other and everything makes sense and keeps rolling and it all produces oxygen and makes our lives possible. Because of them, we're here. Without them, we couldn't be here. And then you see the bulldozers and the ch. Black smoke and they're literally erasing all of the beautiful color, all of that avatar riotous grandeur. This, the, the cacophony is silenced.

[A]

In order to get rid of 20% of 400 billion trees. That's a big operation.

[B]

Yeah, but we've taken a, you know, a century to do it.

[A]

Right, but still.

[B]

But it's accelerating now.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, you know, that's a high velocity operation to be able to get that to happen. It must be a really, really big industry.

[B]

Well, I mean you have to think, you know, Brazil's formation, the deforestation that's occurred in Peru, the various sources of it. There's illegal gold mining where they have to cut the forest, burn the forest and then suck the land up through hoses to get the sediment. Because the gold is not in nuggets, it's in, it's in the sand. So they have to completely destroy the.

[A]

Earth, like get tiny shards of tiny.

[B]

Metal, tiny miniscule, almost microscopic pieces of. And you can see this scar from space across the Amazon, you can see the Amazon. It looks like it caught mange. You see human roads moving across the southern Amazon. And so, I mean, to summarize it for the people that don't know, it's. I've been working with the locals for 20 years to find an answer to this, because either. Either we say we're going to have ecological collapse, we just give up on it. Because life on Earth used to come standard with fish in the oceans, air, oxygen in the air and water that you could drink, and now we're ruining those systems. And so we have it. We're the last generation that's going to have a chance to save the Amazon rainforest. And what we've done over the last 20 years is we found a way to do that. That.

[A]

How.

[B]

We started asking our enemies, the loggers and the gold miners, if they'd like to join our team. The people that were cutting down the rainforest, we would go have a beer with them. The people that we thought were our mortal enemies that were causing all of the death and destruction and flames and silence, JJ would just go and let's. Let's go see how they are. We'd go and sit down and have a beer with them and go, how you doing? I go, good. How you doing? They go, well, we moved down here from another part of the Amazon. There's no trees there. So we came here because you guys still have really old trees. I go, cool. How much you make a day? I go, $15 a day. They go, you like that work? And they go, no, the trees falling is dangerous. We get bitten by bullet ants and stung by things, and it's hard, and there's no food, and $15 a day really isn't worth it once you subtract the gasoline it takes to get all the way. Five days away from town. Okay, go. You guys want to be jungle keepers? We'll pay you three times that. You get a really cool T shirt. You get medical benefits, a steady paycheck, and a community. And we'll take care of the boat. And instead of your chainsaw, you have to carry binoculars. It's a lot lighter than a chainsaw. And now you protect the forest instead of destroy it. And they go, where do I sign? And that's it. And so we've been doing that. We've been converting loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers, giving the local people opportunities that they didn't have. Because what we discovered is that. That the reason they're destroying the rainforest is because they don't have anything else they can do.

[A]

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[B]

50. 50.

[A]

Right. So the second one is going to be much harder.

[B]

The second one's going to be much harder.

[A]

If you go and take away worker number three.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And make him work for you. Then guy from the street becomes worker number three.

[B]

Yes. And they'll continue to recruit. But the good thing with that side is that you can, you can put pressure on those companies. Right. You can come and lobby restrict. Yeah, that's accessible where we are. We, we're so remote. It used to take two days to get to the research station that I started working at deep in the jungle. And so when you meet these people, it's the bottom up guys. It's people that just have a chainsaw and they're driving their little tiny motor through the Amazon rainforest.

[A]

They know where to sell the sediment or sell the tree or sell the whatever it is that they're going back with.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, JJ grew up, his father, his brothers, they would go out for three weeks at a time. They'd go 10 days up river, they'd find mahogany trees, they'd fell them. Then they would spend time in the jungle milling them into boards. Then they would pile the boards in the river on balsa wood that floats, and then they would float it down the river. They'd put their motor on the wood and use the wood, and they would. And they would pilot that down through the Amazon, and it would get stuck in places. They got to get in the water and pry it out. Brutal work. And then when they finally get to town, they get. They get paid practically nothing for that wood. And then when that wood hits the international market, a mahogany tree goes for a million dollars. And so the people on. These poor people on the ground, they have no. And if you go, what would you do if you weren't logging? And they're like fish, you know, hand to mouth, live out of nature. And so it's not. There's not a lot of opportunities. And so by giving them the opportunities to protect their forest, to attend classes, to become park rangers, to become boat drivers, chefs, guides, we're just changing the narrative in this place. And so now we've protected 130,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest, which is like, I believe it's nine times the size of Manhattan Island. It's more than half the size of Singapore. And the Peruvian government has taken notice, and they've said, if you guys can. Can protect 300,000 acres, we'll sign it over into a national park. So we're almost halfway. Wow. We're almost 20 years in. 20 years ago, I left home because I wanted to see for myself if it really was an emergency in the Amazon rainforest like I had heard. I wanted to see for myself if what I had heard was true. And when I got down there, I found something more magical than I could ever have imagined. And 20 years later, we have an organization and we have a global movement, and there's people all over the world that contribute monthly that make it possible for us to pay these rangers and protect this land and keep it safe from the loggers. And we found a way to change the narrative of conservation.

[A]

Where can people go if they want to help donate money?

[B]

Well, we have junglekeepers.org and it's the most direct way to save the rainforest. And so I have people talk me that, you know, traditionally with organizations, they say, you know, I made a donation to an organization to Protect nature. But I don't know where it went. And so the thing that we started doing was just showing people this is where your money went. Land acquisition, ranger pay, little bit of admin, that's it. And if you look at most of these nos, what we started realizing was.

[A]

That expensive C suite, private, oh, playing.

[B]

Their CEOs, $500,000 a year, and the next 10 people, $500,000 a year. And if you look at the breakdown, their pie chart, 90% of their donations going towards advertising. You take the top 10 environmental organizations you could name, 90% of their donations go towards advertising to further their brand. The money that we get, I think 85% goes to land Acquisition and ran ranger pay, direct action. And so some people will come to us. Somebody reached out to me on Instagram not that long ago, and he goes, I just made a donation to Blank. Huge organization that we all know. And he goes, I have no idea where my money went and it's really driving me crazy. He goes, I saw you on a podcast. And he goes, I really want to help. He goes, what are you working on right now? And I said, well, we're actually in a state of emergency right now. There's a road coming in. The narco traffickers are attacking us. I said, there's this, like, you know, the sector on the northern boundary of the park. And he goes, well, how big is it? I said, several thousand acres. I said, but it's like $250,000 and we don't have it right now. He goes, I got you. This guy Michael, he just. He reached out, he goes, it'll be in your account tomorrow. He wired us $250,000. He spoke to me for a half hour. We'd never met each other. We took the money, went to the landowner. We said, landowner, do you want this road to come through your rainforest and they're going to completely cut it down, old guy? He goes, no. He goes, I don't want this. He goes, but then they're going to hurt me if I don't do. We bought it and we got the cops to come in and we completely protected over 5,000 acres of rainforest like that.

[A]

How much are you fighting against crime? When I think South America, sometimes there's going to be some organized crime floating around in there. How much? You're talking about the dangers of the urchin or the worries of the bullet and the jaguar, but what about the modern human concern?

[B]

That's the scary thing. That's the scary part is, like the loggers and the Gold miners. The local people in Peru. The local people in Peru are incredibly kind. The people of the Madre de Dios of Peru are rural people. I rock up in a raft or in my boat and they'll let me camp at their house. It's like these people live in thatched huts. They eat monkeys and turtles. They're wonderful rural people. We also have narco traffickers coming in now, and they are not local, they are not from there. They heard that there are extremely wild parts of the Amazon where the police can't get to. Deep, deep, deep, deep jungle. And so what they do is they launch expeditions deep into the jungle and they figure no one's going to come out here.

[A]

But what are they doing? Why would you want to be cocaine. They're what?

[B]

Growing cocaine.

[A]

Growing cocaine.

[B]

Growing cocaine.

[A]

So it's like thumbs up.

[B]

Yeah. But again, it's the artisanal guys. It's not the big crime bosses. It's like a couple of brothers that got together and went, hey, man, you know what we should do? We should go grow some cocaine.

[A]

It's the. Except it's the equivalent of being a weed farmer in California, like 30 years ago. Yes, but doing it with cocaine in the Amazon.

[B]

Yes. And the difference is, like the weed farmers, I feel like, you know, I don't feel like they'll shoot you. There's something about the cocaine grower culture.

[A]

So this is. Even though the more small time, more grassroots, they're still kinetically protected.

[B]

Yeah. And so when it comes to the uncontacted tribes, when it comes to us, they've made it very clear, if we get the chance, we'll kill you. They say it. The. They've. We. The. The cops actually intercepted one of the people they arrested. They said that gringo and jj, they said to anyone in our network, if you see them take them out talking about you. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[A]

How does that make you feel?

[B]

Very unsafe. I mean, it's very stressful trying to do anything because it used to be that we drive around with a boat. I would just have machete, no shoes, just be driving on my boat through the Amazon. And now you have to be very careful. And then, you know, even passing through a city, you can't sit down. I can no longer sit down in a cafe and have a coffee. You know, you just think someone's going to come up behind you.

[A]

You.

[B]

You can't.

[A]

That's how much of a hit list you're on now.

[B]

Oh, yeah, No. I travel with a. With a huge security team. When I'm there now.

[A]

A security team is not to protect you from the animals of the Amazon or even necessarily the uncontacted tribes or.

[B]

None of those things are going to try and shoot me in the head. It's just the narcos. And so, yeah, you have a, I have a circle of armed men around me at all times, outward facing, because.

[A]

Of the, because you're like the president.

[B]

You're like, yes, a very. No, yeah, yeah, not at all. But no, I hate it. And so the good thing is that the Peruvian police have been working on this narco problem and, and really just they, they just came in and so they're, they're starting to just move them out. It was, there was a small group of them and they're starting to move them out. So we're hoping that, that calms down because again, it's when, when people hear, oh, you're, you're 50% of the way to making this national park, that's incredible. Then they hear narco traffickers and it's not even like they're the ones in the Amazon rainforest. And they go, you're going to fail. Nobody can beat the narcos. And they stop donating. It's a bit of a stop helping us. And which I think is like, I mean, cowardice on a level I can't even imagine. It's like, it's not like I'm asking you to come fight. I'm just saying, just, just, just help us. And they're like, not. So it's a lost cause. It's like, no, we're fighting, we're not giving up. Why should you give up?

[A]

What is, is there a time in your mind that sticks out as the most fear that you've felt, the most afraid that you've ever been? I wonder whether it's come from threats from humans or threats from jungle or threats from something else.

[B]

The most afraid I've ever been. I mean, I can give you the most afraid I've ever been from an animal. I can give you the action version. But the most afraid I've ever been was when I was young and starting out and didn't know I was dreaming so badly that we'd be at this point one day. I saw it 20 years ago. I wanted to do this and, and from, and at that time, you know, if you wanted to, if you wanted to protect species and save rainforest, you had to be a conservation biologist. And I didn't have the grades for that. I hadn't even finished high school.

[A]

Did you Go back to college. In the end, I did.

[B]

Okay. Did I finish college?

[A]

Kept the promise to your parents? Yes, but by the skin of your teeth?

[B]

By the skin of my teeth. I would show up late to a semester because I was raising an anteater. You know, my. Great.

[A]

Didn't I hear that you nearly died because of raising an anteater?

[B]

Well, I got a really bad staph infection. I got a MRSA infection across my whole body. My whole face was rotting off. But I kept. I have this really bad habit of trying to walk it off. You know, horrific things. I almost chopped the tendon that connects your kneecap. I chopped most of that tendon. And I was like, I'll walk it off. You know, the stingray. When I'll walk it off. And so I got this horrific infection. I kept going, oh, at some point, it must. At some point it's got to get better, right? No. An antibiotic resistant staph infection will eventually kill you. And so I was taking care of.

[A]

From an anteater?

[B]

Absolutely not from a hospital. I had dengue fever and I'd gone to the hospital to, like, get a shot.

[A]

So what's this got to do with the ant? It just happened while you were looking after an anteater?

[B]

Well, because the only reason I didn't go home and get help was because I had this baby anteater that needed me. So I kept letting the infection get worse, weeks and weeks and weeks. My body was.

[A]

So that you could look after the anteater?

[B]

She needed me.

[A]

You know who else was a massive fan of anteaters? Salvador Dali.

[B]

Yes. That picture of him coming out of the subway.

[A]

Do you know why he said that he loved walking an anteater through the streets of Paris?

[B]

No, I do not.

[A]

He said because anteaters are never in fashion. He just loved the idea of. I'm researching him for my next live show. The number of stories that he's gotten. One of them being, yeah, he walked an anteater through the streets of Paris because he said they're never in fashion. He also sued a man for dreaming about him and said, because the subconscious belongs to me. Oh, boy, that was so cool. So sick. Anyway, so you've got the worst Mercer of your life. You need. That was. And that you were young.

[B]

Yeah, I was 19 at the time. And I remember, like, writing a journal entry to my parents and being like, goodbye, thank you for everything, sweet life. Yeah, like I really was saying, I really was sad. I also said, even if I live, I couldn't Imagine I'd ever have a normal face. So I really thought it was the end. So I've lived through my own death many, many times in many different ways, whether it's being chased by an elephant or laying on the side of the. That time, I had to wait three days just for a boat to come by. That's how remote in the jungle I was. And there was no one else. So when I finally realized I was in trouble, I said, I got to get a boat. Well, there was no boats. So you lay by the side of the river, and you have all these pustules of infection boiling out of your skin, and so the flies are feasting on you. And I lay in that state several days before I. The only boat coming down river was a poaching boat stacked with the carcasses of animals. So more flies, dying spider monkeys, crocodiles, maws, all things destined for the illegal pet trade. And I laid on that boat for two days on the way back to town. Finally got to the remote, the. The first town with a telephone and called my mother, and I said, you got to get me out of here. She got me a plane ticket. And the next day I got on a plane. Everybody moved away from me at the airport. It was like. It was like fish moving away from a shark. People would look at me and they'd hide their children. I mean, I was leaking out of my face, yellow and green pus. I had my hood up like a freak. And I. I somehow they let me on the plane, and I arrived at jfk. You know, the. The Port Authority cop looks down, he goes, okay, Paul, Rosalie? He goes, yeah, where were you traveling? He goes, holy, dude. He goes, what happened to your face? And I was like, that's why I'm home. I need to go to a doctor. And he just stamped it. He goes, go, go, go, go. He was like, please go. And I went to the hospital and spent, like, four or five days on full IV antibiotics to kill the infection and bring me back. And the doctor said, if you'd waited just a little long, a few more days, they said, we wouldn't have been able to bring you back. The infection would have been so established. But, you know, in those early days, my reasons for doing these things were. Were I wanted so badly to be. To follow in the footsteps of someone like Jane Goodall or some of the conservation heroes and like Alan Rabinowitz, people who have made national parks. And I wanted to save these things, but I also just selfishly wanted to have adventures. I felt so I Felt so meaningless as a kid, feeling like, oh, so I'm going to finish this and I'm going to get a good job. And I was like, but there has to be. Like, I want, I want, like, like the stories.

[A]

Adventure.

[B]

I want to go out on an adventure. I want to find some stuff. And. And so the Amazon was that the Amazon was just, you know, horizon to horizon of jungle. And they said, there's these uncontacted tribes out there and there's, there's animals you've never heard of and there's all these rivers that no one's explored. And so I said, this is, this is where I can, I can, I can live out my life here, even if I, if I can never hold down a normal job and if I can't be a conservation biologist, at least I could just go on am. Amazing adventures. And so that's how it started. But that was the scariest part to me was that longing of knowing what I really wanted and thinking I would never, ever have it. Knowing that I wanted to be an author one day, you know, and writing these little chapters, you know, in my journal and thinking, no one's ever going to read this. No one's ever gonna, you know, And I even had people, you even have people in your life that say, I even had someone, you know, tell me, say you're crazy, like, to publish a book. You know how hard it is to publish a book? They're not going to. That's never going to work. And you have people, you know, you notice the people who encourage you and who disparage you.

[A]

My friends, my housemate, George calls them sofa friends and treadmill friends. Some people, after you've spent time with them, you need to go and lie down on the sofa. And some people, after you've spent time with them, you want to go and run on a treadmill.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And his goal is to spend as much time around treadmill friends as possible and little time around sofa friends as.

[B]

Possible to get rid of the sofa friends.

[A]

Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, 2026 is the year that you're finally going to launch that business you've been thinking about for ages. Because as you've heard me harp on about, making a to do list for the thing isn't doing the thing. Telling people you're going to do the thing still isn't doing the thing. But here's the good news. Shopify makes it unbelievably easy to actually do the thing. They make it very simple to Create your brand open for business and get your first sale. They've got thousands of customizable templates, so all you need to do is drag and drop. You don't need coding skills or design skills, can manage things like shipping, taxes, payments, all from one simple dashboard. And when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with shop pay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Shopify takes all of the messiness of running a business off your plate so that you can focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. And right now, you can sign up for A$1 per month trial period by going to the link link in the description below or heading to shopify.commodernwisdom all lowercase, that's shopify.commodernwisdom to start selling today. Well, you've also got a new book which, yes, people can go and check out.

[B]

I have a copy of this for you.

[A]

Oh, very cute.

[B]

Yes, you need to Jungle Keeper what.

[A]

It Takes to change the World.

[B]

And so this is the whole story. This is from the frustrated kid to. And it's crazy because I wish I had a time machine now to go back because, you know, 18 years old, getting on the plane for the first time, leaving for the Amazon. Never in a million years would I imagine that we would have, you know, caught the biggest anaconda and met the uncontacted tribes. And now that we're actually protecting 130,000 acres of rainforest and on the cusp of making history by saving a whole river.

[A]

And you've got one of the heroes that inspired you writing a blurb on behalf of the forest that I love. Thank you, Paul, for writing this book. Jane Goodall. Dude, that's so amazing. I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of you.

[B]

Jane. Jane. Jane. Also, Jane taught me something very incredible, which is the grace of attention. Someone who's as luminary and famous and busy as she was. I came up to her at a talk when I was in my early 20s with, with chapters about the anteater that I was taking care of. I lived in the, in the rainforest with my anteater and I took care of her and we did this and we did that and I waited in line with hundreds of people after a Jane Goodall talk in New York City. And I handed her a manila envelope. You know, you have two seconds with her. Hello, you're so inspiring. She goes, yes, everybody says the same thing. And she takes a picture with you and then you move on. And I just said, I've been living in the Amazon rainforest and I have a story I think you'd love. And I had included a message in there and I said, my dream is to become an author and it would mean the world to me because you're one of my heroes if you would endorse my book. And she incredibly actually read the material I gave her. This random kid out of hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people. She would travel 300 days a year. She actually read it and had her team get back to me and said, as soon as you find a publisher, tell them you have Jane Goodall's words.

[A]

Let's fucking go, dude.

[B]

Dude. She waved her magical, very powerful wand in my direction and gave me a career. And by giving me a career handed me the Excalibur sword to go and actually start Jungle Keepers and protect an entire river. And so what she did was she empowered other. She wanted to save nature, she empowered other people to do it.

[A]

It's interesting that of all of the things that you've done, of all of the terrifying situations that you've been in, not fulfilling your dream by far is the thing that gave you the most terrifying.

[B]

Absolutely. I mean that's a state I get.

[A]

Asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or non fiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.

[B]

Of agony. That's a state of, you know that.

[A]

That young, protracted as well. Right. It's like drawn out over time. It's the Bob being in your foot for decades.

[B]

Yeah. It's the state you live in. And it's the, it's the existential question of am I going to have these ambitions and never see them to fruition? Which, what? Which. You know, there's that line, many are called, few are chosen. That's the other thing. Am I going to invest 20 years in this and then fail? And there's a part in the book and there's a part in my life where after the Discovery thing. And after I'd gone, I'd been going on expeditions with my local friends in the Amazon for years. And so I already was the guy in the Amazon. But I had tried. I'd written the first book. I'd done the Discovery Channel thing and failed. I'd gone and lived with the elephants. I'd even started Jungle Keepers. Book wasn't working yet. There was something missing. And it was like, kept trying and kept trying, kept trying, year after year after year. And there was a point where my dad. We pulled over somewhere in the car, and my dad went, hey, before you get out, he said, I just want you to know we love you no matter what. And I went, what? And he went, you know, you just keep doing this jungle thing.

[A]

Did he think that you were doing it to try and prove your worth to your parents?

[B]

No. What he meant was, even if none of this works out, it's okay. He was like, you know what you're doing? You're not making any money doing this. You just keep going to the jungle and getting new injuries. And, you know, we see you trying real hard. And he was like, it's okay.

[A]

He sounds like a good man.

[B]

He's the best man. My parents are angels on earth. They were the best parents, and they're just very good people. But. But the horror of that moment was him saying, you know, it's okay if you just. If this is all there is. And I just. I went, no. And so, you know, the. The. Because I went, it's. It's happening. You know, I go, you 32 years old. And I go, I've been doing this since I was 18. And. And. And, you know, the. The. You. So you. Slowly, you learn that relentlessness is the greatest skill you can learn because there are so many opportunities to give up.

[A]

I have a slightly contrarian opinion on consistency and relentlessness. For a very long time, I always said that my superpower is consistency. I've slightly changed my opinion on that recently. I think it's stubbornness. I think that stubbornness is functionally the same, but much more accessible to a lot of people. Consistency sounds super sexy. There's a really famous visualization by my friend Jack Butcher from Visualize Value, and it's a graph that explains my life and your life and a lot of other people's lives as well.

[B]

Yes, that's. That's my life. How'd you know that, man?

[A]

For the people that are listening, it's a. It's a bar chart, and it's very, very long and it's completely flat.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And there's a little arrow pointing to a point where it's completely flat, saying, this is pointless. And then the bar chart starts to lift off in an exponential curve.

[B]

That is the first 17 years of my adult life and the last three. That's exactly what happened.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You felt like you had that as well.

[A]

I think for at least the. At least a good bit of what I was trying to do, what I've been trying to do with the show. And it comes in waves. It's interesting with the way that sort of. Of momentum occurs on the Internet for a very long time. I think it took 5, 400, 500 episodes for us to get to a hundred thousand subscribers. Yeah, it's like, you know, four or five hours of I was booking every guest, researching every guest, sitting down with every guest, doing the edits for every single audio episode, doing the ad reads for pennies. Because I wanted to keep on going and I wanted to do this thing. And I didn't care because I just. I kind of liked it. So it was less mission driven. My outcome was not to get to a stage where it was. It was simply sort of the doing of the thing. But if you were to look at the trend on a graph, there is a. This is pointless. Yeah, exactly. And as you start to zoom out a little bit, everything looks puny in comparison. And you realize that for every conversation that you have now, the impact can be greater and the opportunities and so on and so forth. And yeah, the stubbornness to stick something out when it seems like it isn't working. But the thing that you've got, the confluence of what you were interested in, what you were inspired by, what environment gave you the opportunity to do, the people that were around you, chance meetings with heroes and opportunities, all the rest of the stuff. Jj, Even just the fact that you found a guy that has stuck with you for so long, that is sort of the genesis of obsession. I've been thinking a lot. I wrote this week a really. I think it's an interesting article about the relationship between discipline, motivation and obsession. So the relationship is to do with friction. Discipline is friction accepted. You accept that there is an amount of friction that's going to be bestowed on you and you're going to use effort and habits and willpower and patterns in order to move through it. It motivation is friction removed and there is no longer the friction. You want to do the thing. So discipline. I will make myself do the thing. Motivation, I want to do the thing. Obsession, I can't not do the thing. So obsession is friction, inverted.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And it pulls you into it, and it causes you to stay awake at nighttime, and it ruins your relationships, and it destroys your sleep, and. And it causes you to forget your health, and it does all of these things. But the problem is discipline is relatively easy to engineer. Motivation is tough, but can be engineered. And obsession is impossible to engineer. You cannot engineer obsession. And this is why the whole thesis of the argument is, if you have an obsession that's worth something, allow it to climb inside of you and stare out through your eyes. Because most people for most of their lives don't have an obsession that's worth anything at all. And it's destructive or pointless or. Or just. It simply is not going to move them in the direction that they want to. What they're obsessed with is politics or the toxic ex or porn or gambling or some sort of porn. You know what I mean? Like, the obsession is just not moving them in direction that they want to go to. And if you're one of the people that's being gifted with this and the coolest thing.

[B]

And it is a gift. Yeah.

[A]

The coolest thing is that when you look at most people as they age through life, people who are serial obsessives, they have this period of obsession that's maybe a few years or half a decade or multiple decades. And then what you see after that cools and hardens is something that looks more like identity. So you look at someone, that Dorian Yates, bodybuilder guy who now continues to go to the gym. The gym is no longer his obsession, but his. What looks like discipline from the outside is just the echo of an old obsession.

[B]

Whoa.

[A]

So it's what happens. Discipline is often what happens when it cools into identity.

[B]

He's the guy that goes to the gym.

[A]

He's just the guy that goes to the gym. I'm the guy that records the podcast, the guy that wants to sit down. I'm always looking for people. Wouldn't it be cool to talk to? Wouldn't that be a good idea? It's like, it's just what I do. And that's. If you deny yourself what you did. Yes, you're still obsessed, which is great. But much of what you're doing now is you're just the guy that goes to the Amazon.

[B]

I'm just the jungle guy.

[A]

Now you're just a jungle guy.

[B]

Except yes. And now it's so funny how many of those things are just the hero's journey. So you've been through It, I've been through it. The ruining of the health, the constant obsession, the graph going nowhere until it goes somewhere. I mean, you have to have the experience and in a way have those stories and have that knowledge and have those failures so that you're able to play the game at an expert level. You have to put in your 10,000 hours to the point that you know, know what you're doing. And so, yeah, it's, it's. Now, the thing though, here is that even if I wanted to get off the train now, I can't, because now we're responsible for protecting millions and millions of heartbeats. Now those anteaters and those monkeys and all those, all those ancient trees would be blackened to earth if we stopped and, and coming and talking to yourself and, and, and writing a book like this. And now we're, we're spreading this message to so many millions of people and we've created a way for them to. Because so many people care about the Amazon rainforest. People, this. I get messages from fans, I get messages classically, I tell this story. A mother messaged me and she said, you know, I work two jobs. She said, I can't donate a lot. She goes, we give $5 a month to jungle keepers, but I tell my kids they're part of saving the Amazon rainforest. And that means so much to me. And so whether it's a billionaire giving a few hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars or it's a mother giving $5 a month, the fact that people have the opportunity to change the narrative of destruction and actually make the world a better place, that is, to me, that's such a crucial thing, that in these fallen times where everyone seems so disassociated, the modern nothingness wave, that everyone seems to be feeling the antithesis of that, or the antidote to that is radical action, is that there are people out there who are making things better, helping people, finding water for people that don't have it, fixing ecosystems and improving technology and the way the world works. And it's like we've never lived at a more exciting time.

[A]

What, drinking water? What is the state of drinking water in the Amazon? Can you drink the Amazon water?

[B]

I wouldn't drink from the main channels. There's a lot of sediment and also most, again, even in the Amazon rainforest that a lot of us imagine to be very, very wild. There's boats and some gasoline and like rivers anywhere humans go gets polluted. But the river that we are on, the river that I work on, is so remote and so pristine. That we drink straight out of the river. You can bend down to a waterfall and drink. And that's a rare thing on earth these days. You know, I don't. I don't know in the US how many waterways they would recommend that you drink. I've been in national parks, and I've had the rangers tell me, you know, whatever you do, don't drink out of the streams. And I'm like, we're in the Rockies. You know, like, what's. What's polluting?

[A]

I would have imagined that there would be maybe some dangerous parasites.

[B]

Well, there are. There's giardia.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I think a lot of. A lot of. A lot of it is, you know, you. At some point, you just start. You go, I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna fully embody. I'm gonna play this game on. On full. You know, we're going to walk barefoot. We're going to go on that adventure. When you get to the scary part and there's a waterfall, you go, you know, let's just go over the waterfall sometime along the way. You know, they say, play the game like you can't lose. And it's like, I think I apply that to just about everything in life. You just go, it's going to work. And if it doesn't work, you die. But. But that's okay. I mean, do you think of a Comanche warrior going out on horseback with their bow and arrow? They might die or they might win. How did we get so soft that everyone's worried about their little 401k and what their, you know, their feelings and their journey? Go, try.

[A]

I think they would have been scared, too. I think the Comanches would have been scared before they left home. They've got wife, they've got kids. When the mission calls. Yeah, they. They go and they do the thing.

[B]

When it's time to. When it's time to go, you go.

[A]

But the problem is that there is much more time to consider going and much less time that's spent going now.

[B]

Yes. And I think that the edge of anticipation and action is interesting.

[A]

Action's the antidote to anxiety. It always is. And unfortunately, there is way less action. There's less opportunity, and there's more time to consider. And that means that you vacillate and ruminate and talk yourself out of doing what it was that you were going to do.

[B]

Yeah. And I mean, that goes, you know, there's the warrior analogy of that, and then there's also the execution of whether it's starting that business or it's pursuing that relationship or it's moving to that country or whatever it is. It's. Yeah, you might. It might not work out, but that's okay.

[A]

I've been playing with chat GPT backgrounds for my phone and currently the one.

[B]

Yes. Do it anyway.

[A]

Do it anyway. Do it anyway. Dude, scared.

[B]

Do as high as do it scared. Yeah.

[A]

Do it scared. Do it tight. Do it uncertain. Right? Do it with. Do it uncertain. That's a big one for a lot of people. Do it anyway. Okay, so that was the existential fear. What about the kinetic fear?

[B]

Sure. I would say that the, the, the. The two times I've been the most scared. I'll give you two. One, I. Because of this existential fear of not having adventures and not having a meaningful life, I said I want to go out like the great explorers did, but better. I want no porters, no guides, no nothing. I learned. For a few years I trained in the Amazon, and then I went out on solo expeditions. And so I took a boat three days deep into the jungle with some poachers. Then they left me on a beach. And then I walked another few days into the jungle along the river.

[A]

Totally on your own?

[B]

Totally on my own. Camping at night, under the stars, backpack. I had a raft with paddles. So if things got bad, I could. I could get to the main river channel, fishing and eating. And that was the first time I was told that this tributary was so remote that there was nobody on it. I wouldn't see a human. It was just wild nature. And sure enough, the animals. It was like the Galapagos. The animals were so unfamiliar with the. With humans. The jaguars would walk out on the beach and there'd be. You know, the animals just don't care. They don't know what you are. They don't care. Jaguar doesn't care. Tapirs and capybara and cayman and just. Just incredible amounts of life. And I was. These are the experience that. That I wanted to absorb because I wanted to see what raw nature looked like before humans touched it. So this was an incredibly important thing for me. And I was out there enjoying this. And then I went up this one tributary. I pushed a little bit too far. And it just happened to be where the uncontacted tribes, nomadic tribes, a small band, they had a campfire on the side of the beach. And these are naked people who are pre stone Age. They don't have stones. They've been living out there for thousands of years. They've missed the sistine Chapel in the world wars and everything else that's ever happened. And they don't even know the name of the country they live in. They've never seen a spoon. And now they're looking at me.

[A]

You're on the water.

[B]

I'm on the side of the river and they're on the other side of the river and I see them see me and they're holding bows and arrows and they're naked and they have face paint and they're staring at me and I'm staring at them and I know that any help is about three weeks away by foot. And I just ran for my life, and I ran for my life through the jungle for about as long as I could. And then I opened up my pack raft, I inflated this raft, it's a pretty durable raft. And I started paddling. And for the next few days I didn't stop because even if I stopped I would go to sleep or put up my tent, fall asleep. And the first dream you have is that you hear the voices that they're coming because these people are, you know, pretty famous for they have seven foot arrows and they don't, they don't have modern much like the Comanches. They're, they're, they're a warrior clan. So they don't, it's okay if they kill you. They don't care, you know, so they think your shirt is cool. They'll, they'll shoot you in the leg because they don't want to ruin the shirt. Hurt, you know, so to them it's, it's a whole different. And also they've been, they've been as a society traumatized by the things that happened in the past, like the rubber boom where outsiders came to the Amazon in the industrial revolution and made slaves and basically had this massive genocide making people go out and tap the rubber trees that only existed in the Amazon. And so these tribes have learned the outside world is trying to kill us so they're very happy to shoot first. So that was fear on a level. That was like the, the, the fear equivalent of the stingray thing. The idea of being hunted in the deep wilderness, it wasn't a, a paradise expedition through the rainforest anymore. All of a sudden I was like, wait, I have a mother. Like I have people that are going to be broken hearted at when I disappear or that I just into the wilded myself. Like there's, this is stupid. And then I was, you know, days of running scared and pack rafting all night. Although I'll tell you this when you're pack rafting at night with a flashlight in the Amazon and you're sort of going down river with the crocodiles and the anacondas, it's incredible. It's an incredible ride.

[A]

What's the difference in the Amazon between day and night? Apart from the fact that it's light? Apart from the fact that it's light and dark.

[B]

Dark.

[A]

How does it feel? Oh, feel different.

[B]

It's different reality. It's a totally different world. It's. It the, the daytime in the Amazon, again, dawn. Every moment is different. Dawn is this. It's. Every dawn is like the world is being created again. When you're in the mountains or the desert or the jungle, when you somehow living outdoors, you, you end up seeing the sunrise. And I think that that's something that we lose with modern society where you, you end up experiencing the sunrise and seeing when the light is coming directly into your eyes. And the dawn chorus, and then dusk, you hear it switch over to the night chorus. Nighttime in the Amazon is wild. I mean, the Amazon has been called the greatest natural battlefield on Earth because everything is eating everything else. Everything in that vast ocean of forest and branches and jaguars and everything will be digested at some point. So in this churning energy transfer, life is a momentary stasis in the entropic march of recycling. It's just, it's just being. It's just an eating machine. And it's just, it's just marching and marching for thousands of years. And so when you're there, you start to feel it. You go, you know, you get one mosquito bite, two mosquito bites. Some wasps land on you, they start eating your skin. It's like they, the, the jungle wants to eat you. It's like, give me your, give me your carpet happen. Give me your energy.

[A]

You're decomposing while you're still alive.

[B]

They want you to you. They want to start you. The wasps will land, they'll start pulling pieces off you. They, they can eat. Like if you leave a piece of meat out, they'll tear it apart. And then flying piranhas, they're like flying piranhas. And the worst thing is that the bullet ants sometimes grow wings. I saw a bullet ant with wings the other day, but no. So running from the tribes was the most scary thing. The other most terrifying thing happened actually not in the Amazon in India. I set out to see a wild tiger. Now you can go. In the turn of the century, 1900, there was 100,000 tigers on Earth. When I was growing up, there were 3,000 tigers on Earth. So tigers are almost completely extinct. We almost lost the greatest predator that we have on our planet. Planet.

[A]

And then the tiger king came along.

[B]

Well, the people cut. There's more tigers in captivity than, than the wild. And what people don't realize is people go, well, at least there's tigers in captivity. What they don't realize though, it's a one way door. Unless a tiger has its mother to teach it how to hunt. You can never take a tiger that's born in a zoo or in captivity and release it. It's never been done. Never. Well, you can do it with a rhino, you can do it with a deer because they'll go eat grass. A tiger has to learn how to stalk, how to hunt, what things to hunt, how to.

[A]

It's functionally useless.

[B]

It's functionally useless. So the fact that there's 6,000 tigers in captivity across the world, useless. I think that might just be just in the US they're good to stay.

[A]

In captivity and breed for captivity, but.

[B]

They'Re good to entertain people, educate kids at zoos in the best possible.

[A]

Interesting. It's like a genetic dead end for that type of animal. Yeah, this irreversible door. Okay. So you ought to go and see one actually. Wild.

[B]

I wanted, I had a dream of seeing a tiger. Said there's only 3,000 tigers left on Earth. This is the greatest predator that we have. This giant striped thing that, you know, I mean their shoulders so much bigger than you think. You think of them as like kind of like a Great Dane. It's like. No, it's like a horse. They're gigantic. I mean their paws are dinner plates. And it was just, you know, the, When I finally. Years and years of walking through forests and hoping and hoping and hoping. When that moment came that I was standing on my own two feet in the forest alone again, just as I had always imagined it. You, you, you, you work towards these things and, and then all of a sudden it happens and there's a tiger standing there and this giant thing just looking. And the tiger did the thing that scared me the most. Which was, which was that I was not acknowledged. You know, if you take a step, a raven will react. You know, a deer, a deer will stomp a hoof. Tiger didn't care that I was there. Tiger looked straight through me. Tiger didn't, didn't once make eye contact. I was irrelevant to her majesty. Just kept walking.

[A]

Would that not have been less scary.

[B]

Than going, no, it was so that almost would make sense, right because she would look at you and go, oh, I'm scared too. Or I'm taking notice of you. This was.

[A]

You'Re a sandwich I don't want to eat today.

[B]

Yeah, you're irrelevant. You're a blade of grass. And it was like the power in that statement was, was wild, that sort of disdain. And now I've used that in the human world too. If you really, really want to mess with somebody, someone you really are trying to insult, you shake their hand and look right through them.

[A]

Just move straight on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy focus and performance. But most people have no idea what theirs are or what to do if something's off. Which is why I partnered with Function, because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. Seeing your testosterone levels and dozens of other biomarkers charted across the course of a year with actionable insights to genuinely improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but. And be a nightmare. But with function, it's just 499 bucks. And now you can get an additional $100 off, bringing it down to $399. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save 100 bucks by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com modernwisdom that's functionhealth.com Modern Wisdom. What's the most unpredictable or dangerous animal in the Amazon?

[B]

Unpredictable or dangerous animal in the Amazon? The thing is, the animals in the Amazon is they're all sweethearts. I mean, my jaguars.

[A]

They sound like tree tigers. Jaguars sound like tree tigers.

[B]

They are the jags. Okay, so the Jags are. They call them the pit bulls of the big cats. They have the strongest bite of the big cats. They're 250 pounds. They're thick, they're muscles. Leopards are very lean and live. Yeah, they're way more about jumping up into the trees, get away from the lions. A jaguar is heavy. They think nothing of jumping onto a caiman and biting its skull. They have this crushing bite force and so you look at, you know, that thick, that thick face of a jaguar. They can just crush everything. But whenever you see, whenever I've seen a jaguar in the Amazon, it's always, it's peaceful. It's always this, this kind of.

[A]

You can't be that peaceful if it was that hungry. You look like a nice meal.

[B]

Yeah, but they're never their mothers again with the big cats. Their mothers teach them, see that deer? You can eat that. Deer don't go after porcupines. The, the baby caimans are safe. The mother would have taught the baby what to eat. And again, they're thinking about jumping on the back and biting the neck. Or they're thinking about coming underneath and closing the windpipe. They've been taught to go after horizontal prey. Now suddenly this vertical thing that smells like deodorant and conditioner and all this weird stuff that they've never smelled before. This quite large vertical animals walking around, they're usually curious. They come and they, they do the bob. They look at you from side to side and then they're gone. And even that, most of the time you won't see them most of the time. A big 250 pound yellow Jaguar. I have literally been in one's presence and not been able to see it because the pattern disruption of their spots somehow blends them into the forest. The dappled light in the forest and you know, you're just looking around and you go, you have this moment, foot of realization or one time I was checking a camera trap and I was down on my knees, you know, just arranging this camera trap. And I heard loud footprints, footsteps, and I turned around with my finger up to, to tell whoever it was. I thought maybe it was one of my friend to be like, yeah, walk quieter in the jungle. I'm out here being quiet. You could be there's a jag just walked by, looked at me, cat walking, walking, never even broke stride. It was just like, hey, tongue out, big teeth out. And I was like as close to him as I am to you. He walked right by me. Didn't care. Didn't care at all. Whoa.

[A]

So is it rare that humans get attacked by jags?

[B]

In our region of the Amazon, no one's ever been attacked by a jaguar. There was one old. Old. This was 20 years ago. One old jag. You know, their teeth go with big cats, usually the first thing is their teeth. And one old jag attacked like an old farmer attacked an old man and his wife defended him with a shovel and they ended up shooting the jaguar but it was such a feeble old jaguar that it said the only thing I can go after is a human. And there's that classic story of, I think Jim Corbett was the guy that eventually got it. But there was a tiger that was in North India and was killing hundreds of people. This one tiger, she's preying on hundreds of people. And you know a tiger has to eat, you know, about a deer a week to live. And so this tiger started eating about a person a week. And so she went through her first hundred people and they brought in hunters to try and get this tiger. And she was smart, so she moved over into a different village. And then she, another few years went by.

[A]

She's a sama bin Laden of tigers.

[B]

I mean she just, she was just hungry, but for some reason she figured out people I could just run into it. They said one woman was working in the field and this tiger came, grabbed her by the waist, right. And just ran off with her like a stick, like a, like a, like a, like a dog running off with a squirrel. That's how big and powerful they are. And so another hundred people got eaten over here. And then, and then finally they burned the forest down. They just surrounded the forest and burned it down. And she managed to escape again. So they hired expert hunters, they got hundreds of elephants, they surrounded the forest with elephant back hunters and they had this, this hunter, Jim Corbett and they, they burned and, and they had drummers on the elephants and they, they, they flushed her into a ravine and finally they finally got to see this tiger and he shot her. And they realized the reason this tiger had been eating people was because when she was just a sub adult, barely above being a cub, she had been shot and to have taken out her canine teeth. Teeth. And so she hadn't been able to hunt deer and wild boar and so she had to eat people. Poor tiger had been shot and so she was just trying to survive. But that, that made her the most legendary and prolific man eating tiger, I think in history.

[A]

Because the full circle of this situation, from Genesis back.

[B]

Yeah, around.

[A]

I remember watching some David Attenborough documentary, one of the newer ones, and the final episode was how wildlife are starting to interact with human civilization metropolises. And is it maybe India where some big cats have learned to hunt orphans, that the kids who are orphans on the street have learned to become nocturnal? Yeah, because if they sleep in the day and stay awake at night, they're less likely. But there was a bunch of cats that were going down into the city because there's These little meals on short, stubby wheels. They can't really run that fast.

[B]

The orphans can never run that fast.

[A]

Poor orphans.

[B]

So I've spent significant time in India while I was tiger hunting in Mumbai. There's beautiful photos of the leopards that have. Have begun living in the city of Mumbai. And what's really cool is people's security cameras on their house. They go after. I haven't heard about the orphans, but I've heard about the dogs. They love dogs. There's literally videos of the dog curled up asleep on the porch outside someone's front door. And the leopard coming up completely quiet and just biting this dog on the neck. And they can, you know, again, they have that bite force.

[A]

That's it, your mind now.

[B]

No, you're. You're shut off. They just break the spine. And for them, domesticated animals are easy. The difference between a wild animal and a domesticated animal is unbelievable. Like, so it, for example, handling an anaconda that somebody has in a terrarium that has been raised in a terrarium. Anaconda has never done anything athletic in its life. It's never hunted in its life. They're soft. They feel soft. If you, if you, you know, you go to those guys that have like the boa constrictors and you hold them, they're soft. You find the same snake in the wild. It's like holding a giant steel cable. It's a different thing. It's a totally different thing. And yeah, it's very fascinating. Even the same thing goes for the chickens. We've noticed that if we bring a chicken from, you know, they say you are what you eat. Well, you are what you do. And it's on a very physical level. The chickens that we bring from the town, same chickens? Yeah, the chickens that come from an enclosed area. When you process a chicken and get it ready for dinner, the meat is soft and there's fat on the bones. And it's easy to. When you get the farm chicken that's been running around its whole life and hunting bugs and running away from jungle cats, they're lean and they're cord like. And their meat is not as good to eat because it's more gamey and tight. And it's like you literally, there's the same animal. They could have been born in the same clutch, but they.

[A]

You are what you do.

[B]

You are what you do.

[A]

What's your sense of spirituality in the jungle? Something more transcendent than mission, which is still on the physical, but a connection to something even greater.

[B]

Well, I think that.

[A]

That.

[B]

Humans have been given this planet where all of these miracles are happening. And first of all, if you think a single one of us knows the answers, you're. You know, no one does. No one's ever come back. I think the jungle, to me, is where I feel God the most, where you feel this incredible proliferation of life. And life is the antithesis to all the. The majority of the universe, which is black nothingness. And we're on this glowing example of beautiful life where there's this concert of biological organisms that create a living biosphere that allows us to be doing this. And so to me, the jungle is church. To me, the mountains, the ocean, but specifically the jungle, because it's the apex of life. There's nowhere. There's been nowhere. It's the greatest proliferation of terrestrial biodiversity on Earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yes. There's never been more life on Earth in one place than the western Amazon. And then we have to remember that no matter how much we want to think about aliens and Mars and everything else, this little blue planet is the only place where we know for a fact that life exists. And I feel like we've gotten into an age where people are very quick to go, you know, oh, but soon we're going to go to Mars. Okay, sure. You know, and the aliens, okay, Santa Claus is going to come at Christmas as well. But what I'm saying, if you want to talk about whether or not we're able to breathe, whether or not we're able to eat, whether or not our children have an impoverished world, there's a great Jane Goodall quote where she said, you know, she said we're stealing, stealing, stealing from our children. And it's shocking. And it's the idea that we borrow the Earth from the children of the future, that we're the stewards, we're the ones passing this on. And we can pass on a destroyed reality or one that's healthy. And so in this particular case of do we want a world that doesn't have elephants in it? Do we want a world where there are still healthy ocean fisheries that is still filled with millions and millions of fish, where life and biodiversity is thriving? We do. Nobody, nobody should want the. I mean, we're in a. We're in a period of extinction. They're calling it the sixth extinction. And so this is a human. This is an anthropogenic extinction because we're taking up too much land, we're destroying ecosystems too rapidly for wildlife to adapt and keep up for things to regenerate. And so becoming aware of that, that is crucial. So that's why what Jungle Keepers is doing by saving this river, what I hope is that it can become a blueprint on how other people. So we can save rivers in Africa and we can save rivers in New guinea and India and other places, because everyone's fighting the same fight right now. They're going, okay, human civilization is moving up, population is moving up. These poor people in these rural areas are realizing that in order to get the gasoline to provide for their families with the boat, even if they just want to do some basic farming, they need money. If they need money, they need to go get timber or gold or wildlife products. So how do we get them out of poverty so they can start becoming stewards of protecting the natural environments that they're a part of?

[A]

You got to align the incentives.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think, you know, the. One of the saddest things is going to be if there isn't sufficient intervention to protect tipping points being reached with stuff like this. What you end up with is a world in future where there's significantly fewer people. I think population's going to peak at about 2090, 2100, something like that. We might just kiss the bottom of 10 billion people. Ish. Just about. And then it is going to be a very precipitous drop. It's going to be lower. I would guess that in 200 years it'll be significantly lower than it is now. South Korea, 96% fewer people in 100 years. Time for every 100 Koreans, there's four great grandchildren. Interesting, because demography is destiny. You know how many one year olds there are and you can't make any more. And you know how many two year olds there are and you can't make anymore. And population is increasing while birth rates are going down because people are living longer.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the saddest thing would be if this brief swell, this brief fat bit in population caused damage that this thin bit and whatever continues exactly. The rest of time. Then inherits William MacAskill, who was the youngest tenured philosophy professor in history. I think he's a Scottish guy. Youngest maybe that was alive right now. He wrote a book called what We Owe the Future. It's got this philosophy around long termism. I think he'd really like it. It's pretty accessible read. And it is what it sounds like, that we kind of have a duty to unborn humans and it is this ethical inheritance.

[B]

Ethical inheritance.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. My words.

[B]

Not his no, those are, those is, that's a good term because there's something called generational amnesia with, with nature where, you know, growing up in the forests of New York, I would, I would go, these are, you know, these are beautiful forests. But I grew up, there was no bald eagles, there's no wolves. And it's the trees that I was growing up in, they were small. I didn't know that. You know, within the last 50 years that Forest had been cut. And those are oaks and maples that have been growing for a certain amount of time. But it wasn't an original forest. No old growth. There's no old growth left on the east coast. And so old growth forest was something I said. Wait a second. So, so what I'm seeing is already an impoverished version of reality where somebody else already shaved these mountains and this is just what grew back. And so it's beautiful, the woods are beautiful, but they're not the original woods. And with nature there's this authenticity that you can't replace a thousand year old tree.

[A]

Well, not to bring it back to fucking demographics, but it's a really wonderful, much more long, much more highly invested illustration of exactly what you're seeing when it comes to birth rates. And that's not to say that you need to have as many people as possible, but what it means is that you can't create any more ones that have, you can't make any more hundred year old trees. Yeah, you can only make zero year old trees and give them 100 years.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And yeah, this, this view of long termism, trying to zoom out and give yourself a little bit more perspective and think if you knew, if you knew what was coming, is this how you would behave if you were going to stick about? Especially given that people are living longer? I would have assumed maybe given that people are extending their lifespans that we would have more long termism, but it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily seem to be that way.

[B]

Again, I think it depends on, I think it's getting better. I think it is getting better. I think people are understanding that if we can. Again, I'm coming at this from the environment and from the wildlife conservation. I feel like I am the voice for animals, for the trees. And we, what we want to do is make it through this period of, of, of adolescence as a global society.

[A]

That's a good way to put it.

[B]

Where our technology is stabilizing, our population is stabilizing. So do we want to make it through those periods without losing polar bears? Right. Without costing the lives of the other things that we share our world with and I think reparable damage, irreparable damage. Because, you know, if. If elephant populations diploma and then come back because, you know, for a while there was a lot of habitat used, and then they come back, well, okay, great. But we don't want to wipe out elephants. That would be tragic. And the same goes for tigers. Thank God tigers have gone from 100,000 down to 3,000. And I think now we're back up to about 5 or 6,000 countries like India and a bunch of other countries, Nepal, Bhutan, are working to get their tiger numbers up. It matters to people that we learn to. That we find a way to live in symbiosis with them.

[A]

Have you seen what Ben Lam's doing at Colossal?

[B]

I heard about the Colossal guys. Yeah.

[A]

Yes. So one of the things that might be interesting for you to look at, he's trying to bring back the dodo bird. The first one that he's trying to do is to bring back the woolly mammoth. I can see there's a face being made here. Let me give you the.

[B]

For the people just listening, I'm making a face.

[A]

You're making a face face.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Here's the reason that I think what he's doing with the dodo bird aligns with your worldview. The reason that he wants to do the dodo bird.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Is that the dodo bird was killed almost exclusively due to human expansion.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And what he wants to say is to basically use this entire project of the dodo bird.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Look at how much work and technology had to go into undoing the encroachment of human civilization on natural animal habitats.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

This is what we had to do just to get one thing back. And what is it? 50% of biodiversity in the last however long has been lost.

[B]

Since 1970, we've lost 50% of the wildlife on our planet in terms of species, but in terms of abundance, overall number.

[A]

Right. Okay. So maybe not biodiversity, but. But I understand that people assuming that there's just a command Z, like undo button on extinction probably isn't great. But I think the way I spoke to Ben a long time ago and have kept in touch with him, I don't think that that's what he's trying to do. And the. The prospect of him saying, look at how fucking arduous and all the technology and all the rest of this stuff to bring back this thing that we destroyed, let's stop doing the fucking ecology thing that breaks down these habitats. I think could Be an interesting marketing campaign.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, the idea that they're trying to theoretically help extinct animals, I suppose aligns with a conservation viewpoint. But until I see a woolly mammoth, I don't care. We're trying to save the animals that are here. And I find it highly suspicious, the idea that. Because every scientist that I've spoken to. And this is going to get me in trouble, because everybody loves this idea. No, everybody. Everybody loves this idea. And when this came out, I did an Instagram post about it and I said, you know, even if you can clone Grandma, it's not the same person and the meatballs won't taste the same, and she's not going to remember you. And, you know, the fact that you can genetically engineer a gray wolf to be white or whatever they did. And, you know, or a woolly mammoth.

[A]

From an Asian elephant, which is.

[B]

Yeah. Make a genetic freak of a. Of a. Of an Asian elephant that has some hairy traits or whatever. What you're doing is fundamentally misunderstanding what an animal is. You're fundamentally disrespecting what a species is. And. And you're fooling people into believing that you can resurrect dead species, and you can't. You're not gonna get a dodo bird. You're gonna make something that you think is a dodo.

[A]

It looks like it. No. Side, I don't disagree. And I think that he would also say. Or most of the guys at Colossal would also say, this woolly mammoth is the closest approximation from us filling in some bits of gene code with Asian elephant and all the rest of it. That being said, I'll sort of stand the ground for at least the first time he told me about his idea of explaining to people this thesis. We're going to have to jump through all of these hoops technologically to make something that's the closest approximation we can to something which was driven to extinction by the expansion and the dismissal of the fragility of ecosystems. Stop doing it. Think about what you're doing now that is causing that to happen.

[B]

Yes. That's where we align, is that.

[A]

I think that. That that's the conservation method, the intersection between your two things. You mentioned uncontacted tribes. You recently just found another one.

[B]

We were. So as of right now, we have employed numerous local indigenous people as conservation rangers. People that were maybe living in the Amazon. They grew up eating monkeys and turtles. And then as they grew up, they said, well, I need to provide for a family. And so they got a chainsaw and they might Go out and become loggers. We've said, hey, instead of becoming loggers, work for us. So we're working with these communities to figure out how they want their future to be, because they live five days from civilization, deep out in the jungle, and they're now working with jungle keepers. And so the donations that we get from people around the world go to their salary and towards protecting land. And so we were at one of these remote communities with our friends, planning for the future, making ranger patrols, doing all this, and we got news that one of the uncontacted tribes was approaching. Now for all of now, the time that I saw the uncontacted tribes when I was on the solo, nobody believed me because I wasn't taking pictures. I ran for my life. All the pictures that you look at on the Internet, traditionally, historically, the. It looks like pictures of Bigfoot somehow. They're always blurry. They're always far away. And it's. There's a reason for that, because the people that are seeing these, these, these naked warriors coming at them aren't sticking around to take pictures. And chances are they're long.

[A]

Just wait there a second. Yeah, yeah. No, eyes, eyes. Just eyes over here for me.

[B]

Don't shoot yet. Yeah, I want to just get this picture.

[A]

You're out of focus.

[B]

Yeah. And they're probably loggers, you know, because the only. It's not like you're getting photographers and PhD students out six days into the middle of nowhere. They're at the usual research station, eco lodge. But we were off at the end, world's end, and these people came out across the beach and we had this incredible moment where, you know, you see them with their bows and arrows and you see them stalking across the beach looking at us. And there's maybe 30 something of us, and there's over a hundred of them and they're moving through the forest and there's. At different times, there's different amounts of them that we can see. But they came to the side of the river and we were at the other side of the river. So it was sort of. Sort of shirts versus skins. And it was. They were all naked, penises tied up, rope around their waist. And we're all standing there waiting. What are they going to say? They put up their hands and they said, nomole. Nomole is brother Nomole. They said, we are the brothers Nomoles. We are the Nomoles. Traditionally they're called the Mashco Piro, which really means the wild Piro people. And so the Nomole seems to be what they call themselves. But the. What's crazy is you're in this moment and, you know, we all say, oh, I wish. I wish I could see, you know, go back in time and see the world in the 1800s. I wish I could go see the Comanches riding across the plains 200 years ago. But this is people from a thousand years ago at least, walking out of the jungle because they've been in this natural time capsule. Human beings from another age stand across the river from us, and we're sitting here. I mean, we have iPhones and airplanes, and we had professional. I had professional photographers with me, my friend Mohsen and Stefan, who are also Jungle Keepers directors. And so we're watching as this. So need to be very clear on this. They came out and contacted the local. The indigenous community we happened to be at. We didn't make contact. They came out and they started asking for things. So they came out of the jungle a thousand years late to the show, and they said, we want bananas. They asked for plantains.

[A]

Someone's able to communicate in a language that's close enough.

[B]

There's enough of a overlap between the Yine language and whatever the Mashco Piro speak that they can communicate at a percentage. So there's a good degree of miscommunication as well. And, but. But one thing they were able to make very clear is that they wanted gifts, they wanted food. And so the anthropologists put bananas in a boat and pushed it across and. And they. They fell on the boat. And as they, as this happened, we, you know, we were shooting the world's first ever clear footage of the uncontacted tribes. And. And since then we've released that footage and it's become controversial because people go, should you be releasing this footage? What if. What if they want. And leave them alone? And it's like, listen, we are the only people on Earth. Jungle Keepers, the local people and the international experts on our team are the only people that are actually tactically fighting to save these people's forest. And if you look at what's happened to indigenous cultures through the centuries and how much has been wiped out, this is one chance again to get it right. These people are living in isolation, and it seems like the one thing they want to continue to do is live in isolation. That was their second message. We want bananas and stop cutting down our trees. They didn't want to come close to us. They didn't want to join us. They didn't want anything. I mean, they stole a machete. They're like, this will be useful. My friend was like, oh, they have me machete. He's like, put down the machetes. Yelling across the river, go back and get it. Yeah, yeah, you should go get it. Exactly what they with. He smiled, he went, yeah, you come. And then right as they were leaving, one guy walked out, looked at us real proud, put one seven foot arrow on his bow, Shot not at anybody, just. Just shot an arrow. Be like, that's that. He walked off into the jungle, but like proud. And so the prevailing anthropological strategy on these guys is leave them alone. Alone. They want to be left alone, we leave them alone. But now with jungle keepers in that 130,000 acres that we're protecting and the 300,000 that we're ultimately trying to protect, well, they exist in that territory. A lot of that territory is land that even our rangers, we can patrol the border of it. But the interior of that, these people live somewhere in there. And I don't think that generally people understand how large of an area we're talking about, but it's so vast, you couldn't explore. You know, if you. If I said walk from one side of our reserve to the other side of the reserve through the jungle where you can't see 10ft in front of you, it would take you years and by yourself, you'd never make it. And so the fact that these people live in this tiny little, you know, nomadic life under that ocean of canopy, and the fact that they came out once, I mean, even the anthropologist who, the local anthropologist, he said it had been 10 years since they had come out and he'd never seen this clan before. It was first contact. Contact. And so he was, you know, he was trying to tell them, you know, we are also nomoli. We are also your brothers. Brothers. He kept saying nomole.

[A]

He's the foreigner.

[B]

Yeah, they did. They asked about that. They said, you. And they like, they like pointed. They go, we want to see that guy. And I think I'm a little bit taller than most of the Peruvians that were there. And I'm the only person that's a little bit built and he's got a beard. And then they called me forward. He goes, show them that you don't mean harm. And I put up my hands. I put up my hands and they sang no more back. And I just had this moment of sort of the most basic form of communication with these people.

[A]

What'd that feel like?

[B]

It was beautiful, actually, because they were, I think when they came out, it was very, well, terrifying seeing these people come out like stone age warriors with their. And there's no way to communicate or reason with them. And you have people around you with shotguns in case we get, get in case this is an ambush slaughter. You know, it was a moment where you go, is an arrow going to come through the air and go through my neck? You know, so that we, we were very on edge the whole time. And so right before they left, when I was able to raise my hands and go. And then they, they sang back and there was, it was sort of, it was sort of easy. And I said, oh, wow. You know, and, and, and also just there's something about the, the, the uniqueness of a moment that, you know, it's 20, 20, 24 at that point. And how many, you know, when we're old men, is this still going to be the case that there are still uncontacted tribes or. That will be a thing of the past. And it was just, it felt like an aperture into history. It felt like something historically significant to communicate. It's almost like you were communicating through a time machine. Just waving and they waved back. And then they took the bananas and they took the machetes that they had gotten on their backs and they hiked off and just, just vanished into the jungle. And then it's the moment that they were no longer visible. We were all rubbing our eyes. That really happened.

[A]

You know, Check the tape.

[B]

Yeah, you check the tape and you're like, it really, really did happen. And of course there's an arrow sticking out of the sand on our side of the river. So, so it happened.

[A]

Are the locals scared of them?

[B]

Terrified.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Terrified because they will murder you without thinking about it. It.

[A]

Do you think the uncontacted tribes are aggressive or scared?

[B]

They're scared and defensive and so, but that, but that manifests itself in like a lot of people. Like my friend was fishing with his father when he was a child and they surprised a group of uncontacted. And the, the, the mashko shot the father in the stomach. Just impulsively. Seven foot arrow. Arrow. His guts fell out. I mean, it's like a knife. It's a big knife. It's like a machete.

[A]

What's it made of?

[B]

Bamboo.

[A]

Single piece of bamboo.

[B]

Single piece of huge bamboo. But it's, it's this big at the base and then it comes down like this.

[A]

They got flights. How does it fly? Oh, because it's sat.

[B]

Well, no, no, it's a big Piece of bamboo. That's the, that's the arrowhead, right?

[A]

Oh, okay.

[B]

Then there's a seven foot shaft. Then, then they have, they use vulture feathers for the feathers and, and, and they, they even twist him so the arrow spins so when it hits you it's a huge knife wound. And so as a gut shot, it spilled his guts on. So my friend had to watch his father's guts fall into the stream. And they were surrounded by the tribe and the tribe was arguing. And again they understand, my friend understood enough of what they were saying that some of the tribes people were like, kill the kid, kill the kid. And the other ones are going, why did you kill him in the first place? You shouldn't have shot him. Now they're going to come shoot us. And like they were having a discussion. But it wasn't like the biggest deal in the world. It was like, man, why did you, you know, drop the shopping bag? Like you shouldn't, you shouldn't have done that. Like. And he was some, he got away from that situation and went back to town. And, and then of course there was a response from the community where they came out with guns and chased the uncontacted tribe and were shooting at them. And so there's this violent exchange as well. And so then when they come for these, for these semi peaceful exchanges, no one knows what's really going to happen. It could end in violence at any moment. And sure enough, the next day after we had gone back, my friend George, who was one of the ones putting the bananas on the boat for them, he was driving the boat and 200 of the tribe came out onto the river and started firing rain of arrows. So everybody got down under the benches in the boat and because he was driving, he could, couldn't take cover. And the arrow went in just above his scapula and poked out just by his belly button, went straight through his body. So he got shot with the seven foot arrow and went straight through him and somehow he lived. But you know, if you could ask the tribe like, what were you doing? We just helped you yesterday, what do.

[A]

You think they'd say?

[B]

They probably say the motor spooked us or it seemed it's very hard. There's also another story where this one man was very peacefully, very calmly contacting them by himself. This was over near Manu National Park. He was a local guy, jungle man, and he knew he would see the footprints and so he would start leaving some bananas in the forest and the tribe would come and take the bananas unseen. Then he would go and leave some rope and some sugar cane, and the tribe would come and take that, and he would never see them. And then after some time, he would wait and the tribe would come and he would see them, acknowledge them. They would acknowledge him, take his gifts, and they would leave. And then over time, he began to talk to them. This is very, very, very slowly, very slowly. And then over time, over years passed, and it became that he was kind of friends with them. He could mingle with them. They would show up, he would have some gifts, they would give him some stuff. They'd give him some meat, he'd have some clothes for them. And so he developed a relationship of hand gestures and a few exchanged words. And then one day they found him face down with so many arrows in his back that they said he looked like a porcupine. Zero explanation.

[A]

What's strange about it is that although it's the same species, the environment has sort of crafted. And time and. And inability to communicate and so on has crafted such a. Like we're trying to. It's like saying, why did that horse bolt?

[B]

Yeah, it's.

[A]

What is it? What. What is it that caused that to happen? Why, if you were to ask them, why would they say that they had shot in that way? And what's particularly sort of strange is that you're saying this about an animal that is you. That functionally, all of the. If that. If that person. If that person who fired that arrow and hit your friend had been born in Brooklyn.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

They would have had the exact same language that you do and. And ability to write and. And all the rest of this stuff. And would have been domesticated.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

In the manner to which you have.

[B]

Trained, the way we have in the skills and this communication, all of the things. I mean, even if you're in the middle of the most foreign country you can imagine and somebody points a gun at you and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't mean any harm. Unarmed. All good. They're, you know, unless they're just trying to murder people, they're gonna, oh, okay, you know, well, we'll get on the ground then. You know, it's like, you can. You don't need to speak the same language.

[A]

It's the most wild that humans can be.

[B]

Yo. These are the wildest people on Earth. And. And again, we don't know if that's necessarily good for them. You know, some people, like, they're free. You have to leave them that way. But if you talk to the anthropologist, they'll tell you say, you know, the, the rates of infant mortality, the fact that they're all clearly starving, the inter tribal warfare. God only knows what things they don't know. I mean I remember hearing that during the Gold rush people were using lead to stop up. They would open cans of beans or something and then they would use lead to plug the hole. And how many thousands of people died of lead poisoning because they didn't know? And I've read anthropological studies from. I think it was in New guinea where they found a tribe and the tribe had misconceptions that, that almost every time anyone got sick or injured it was because of a spell that was cast by somebody else. And so these people were like in the trees living scared too. Like their whole culture was based around fear on stuff that was made up. And so, you know, there is a certain amount that education helps to humans to live well.

[A]

Yeah, I suppose the problem that you have there, the storytelling animal that we are, as Will Storr says, because if those stories don't get corrected by facts and you're just, they're allowed to. What it is is basically like the most extreme echo chamber that's never penetrated and allowed to persist for many, many, many generations. And then you end up with. Yeah. People who live in trees or this is where superstitions would have come from. Or rain dances, you know these.

[B]

Well, it's like this. No, but I mean at least a rain dance. You're trying to call in the rain. It's a positive ceremony. It's a cultural ceremony. This is like the Salem witch trials forever.

[A]

Yep, yep, she's a witch.

[B]

Burn her. Yep. And then the whole society becomes based on.

[A]

And no one steps in to correct it. It's like, yes, she was a witch and we should have burned her. And actually we should burn more. And actually the reason.

[B]

And you're a witch. And you're a witch. I mean, my God. And then.

[A]

And there's no corrective.

[B]

I mean it's like the word. It's like the joke they were making in Monty Python but turned up to a thousand.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so a lot of anthropologists will say, you know, what we want is for them to. Their right is to remain isolated. But in order to do that we have to protect their forest. Then once their forest is protected, which is what I'm working on with jungle keepers, if they want to start interfacing with their nearest neighbors, which are the indigenous people of the Amazon, if they want to, they can, but that's their right.

[A]

Well, hang on it also is a responsibility of the indigenous people who keep on getting fucking shot.

[B]

Yeah, that's the thing. They.

[A]

Right, it's not, it's not a costless interaction. No, what you're asking of the indigenous people in order to educate the uncontacted tribes is to put themselves on the line.

[B]

Well, that's, that's what they would say is incredibly accurate. They would say, you know, we fuck you.

[A]

I don't want to do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're telling me it's not only is it my obligation to live in the jungle and to help you protect it, but also to potentially be kebabbed by the fucking local tribe?

[B]

Well, to be fair, these communities have not been there as long as the tribe has. So if they've been there for 30 years, the tribe's been there for 300, you know, 3,000 feel afraid to fuck off. And this tribe is very happy to do full on warfare, whereas these are more, more domesticated people that have been taught it's bad to kill. And it's like, so they're like, well, we're not going to just shoot them on sight. Yeah.

[A]

The same may not be true in the reverse.

[B]

It's not true in the reverse. And so now they're living here and they're friends of ours and they are part of the jungle keepers thing and they're going, okay, well cool. Now that we live here, I mean, they've said, you know, can we have like a safe house? Because they live in thatched huts, there's no real protection, they can't lock a door.

[A]

Yeah, give us a steel box.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

It was a big steel box with a lock. You know what the solution might be? More T shirts, More Jungle Keeper T shirts. More T shirts. Could be. So a question I have is of the work that you're doing, you're trying to get to 300,000 acres protected. And if that happens, the Peruvian government will denote it as a national park, which would make it, give it even more protection, I have to imagine. In order to do what you think needs to be done for the entirety of the Amazon, how many Paul Rosolis.

[B]

Do they need to be or how.

[A]

Many Jungle Keeper operations do there need to be?

[B]

Well, okay, so this is the thing is like the Peruvian government, we, we do this as the blueprint. We lead by example. And so if we're successful and we create the we, you know, we're at 130,000 acres protected right now. In the next 18 months we have to rate, we have to raise $20 million more. It's only, only $20 million to protect the next. The rest of the national park. We get the national park. If we had $20 million. Tomorrow, National park tomorrow. We have lawyers waiting. The landowner's ready to sell. We have the Peruvian government willing to do it, but they're like, we don't have the resources. If we can establish this. That's part of an already. There's already a huge legacy of conservation. There's Alto Purus national park, there's Manu national park, there's a Tambo Pata Reserve.

[A]

What does the national park thing, how does that help calling it a national park? What does that mean?

[B]

Because then it's officially protected. Because there's a lot of land in the Amazon that's sort of just land in the Amazon. It's someone's land. And so what happens is you inherited 20,000 acres from your father, who was a real jungle man, but now you kind of live in the city and there's 20,000 acres on there, and you got to pay taxes on it once a year, and you never go there and you don't want to. And it's dirty and dangerous and there's bullet ants and jaguars and. And then your friend comes to you and goes, yo, I'm. I'm getting into the logging business. I was thinking, could I go on that land you got and take down some of the ironwood trees and, and clear some stuff for farming? He goes, yeah, I don't care. I don't care at all. And they're like, cool, I'll throw you a few bucks. And so then they go out there and they do that. So if we go talk to you and we say, actually, can we buy that land? How much was he going to give you? We'll give you double that. Give us the land. And so we've just been doing that. We go into land acquisition. And again, as an organization, what we do is there's something called a990 that you have to file with the IRS when you're a501C3. So when people donate, you can see where the money goes. Unlike every other organization on earth, when people donate, donate, we protect the Amazon rainforest. When people donate, we hire more rangers. And so it's like, bang, bang, bang, bang. And so all these people are coming out of the woodwork as heroes. It's large and small. It's the masses as well as some huge donors who have helped us along the way with large chunks of land. And so if we protect this, though, it shows a model where those indigenous communities can work as rangers. And then you don't have the problem of narcotra. They don't become narco traffickers. And so then the Peruvian government's happy. The Peruvian government says, well, they're, they have their, their, our citizens are taken care of in that region. Well, this is great. And we have clean water flowing out of that region that feeds this city and this city and this city. And that's good. And so it's a win, win, win, win, win all around. So then you go, why don't we do that over here too?

[A]

How many times do you need to say, why don't we do that over here? How many of the. Is it 3,000? Is it 200?

[B]

It's thousands. But so much of the Amazon already exists protected in indigenous territories. I mean, the best, the easiest and best way to protect these natural areas is just hand it over to the people that have it. So the area that's protected by the Yanomami Indians, the areas that are protected by the Machiganga, there's different tribes all over the Amazon. If you look at a map, there's, yes, there's national parks, but they're not as big as the tribal areas. And so, and so what we have to do though is, is unfortunately work with world leaders on a, on a, on a large scale level to, to, to make slowing deforestation a priority so that we get past this, this huge population boom and this adolescence as a global society. But you can't protect the whole thing from the start, but you have to start somewhere to protect the whole thing. And so, you know, a lot of people have said that to me, like, oh, you're great. You're gonna protect 300,000 acres in the Amazon. You'd have to replicate that a million times in order. Yes. Okay, well, great. It's better to do something than to do nothing. And we've, and we've, we've risked our lives and spent 20 years, you know, in the mud and the blood and the, and the mosquitoes trying to do this. And now we're getting this groundswell of people that want this to happen.

[A]

Are you going to be sad to have to move on to a new area that needs to be protected after spending so long becoming intimately familiar with this one?

[B]

No, because I don't think it's ever going to end. I think that we're going to protect this and turn it into a national park. And then comes the fun stuff. You know, if we weren't fighting to protect I don't want to do this job. I would have so much more fun being like, man, why don't we go up that stream and find out? We'll do a biological inventory of that stream dream, you know, and so as directors of the national park, we can have education, we can, you know, so what they did with Sequoia national park, which was very similar to this where John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a three day camping trip, I think that was for Yosemite. And he was like, look, we have to protect this because it's so beautiful. And then they did. And so today we still have the Yosemite Valley. We still have sequoia trees. I mean, imagine missing out on the biggest trees on earth. They could have been cut forever and we'd never get them back back. And so this is the same thing. But you know, once, once we, once we save it. Oh. So it was saying what the, what they did with sequoia was because then again, people worry. They say, well, if it's the wildest place on earth, how could you be bringing people there? They say, imagine a football field. I'm talking about, it's so big that we're Talking about maybe 10 pieces of grass are the area that we access to show people. And the rest of it, it's inaccessible wilderness. And so we built the world's tallest tree house that I keep inviting you to. And we do some little tourism using local guides, which helps employ the local people and keeps the rest of that giant football field, the rest of the 300,000 acres, wild. But I think that once we cross the finish line, if we make it, and we're not assassinated by the narco traffickers, and if all these, or the.

[A]

Animals or the insect or the pathogens or the anteaters or the Mercer or the elements.

[B]

Yeah. Or the. Yeah, if we make it. If we make it, then, no, I don't think there's an end. I think that we study it and we celebrate it and then I can consult on other areas and help other people to realize their dreams. I mean, just like Goodall did for me. She, you know, she, she tipped her candle to mine and passed on that light. And I think that that's, that's a, that, that was the lesson, you know, you just got to keep that going and then we can, we can make all the change we need to.

[A]

Dude, you roll rule. You absolutely rule. Well, very, very glad that the world has you.

[B]

I can't wait till you come to the Amazon, man.

[A]

I'm ready, dude. I'M ready. Give me a few months. Maybe later on this year I can come in. I've been looking forward to speaking to you, and it's epic, dude. I'm really, really excited to see what you do next. Please keep yourself alive.

[B]

Yeah. Please keep. Please keep having these amazing conversations. I love listening to them when I'm out on the wild.

[A]

Yeah. Even if I'm not there with you, I'll be there in your ears.

[B]

Yeah. Be there in my ears, Chris.

[A]

Thank you, man.

[B]

Thank you.