I Met An Uncontacted Tribe: They Killed My Friend!

0:00 This Burmese python wants to know what is inside the diary of a seed. Oh my gosh. Beautiful. Now what are you feeling right now? Wondering why I do this for that. Have you ever done a podcast with a ten foot snake across the table before? No, this is my first. Awesome. Bring out the next friend. Just don't move. Cool. What have you spent the last twenty years of your life doing? Living out of a backpack in the Amazon Rainforest barefoot with a machete to help the indigenous people save the Amazon.

0:30 Whatever it takes. Which means a snake eyes. Very rare diseases hunted by the narco traffickers. That's a picture of that guy. That scar is because he was shot in the head by a seven foot arrow. While he was trying to make peaceful contact with the uncontacted tribes. And this is actually a very important story. I think I have a video of this. Yeah, this is world first footage. So tried isolated so deep in the jungle that they've never heard of a spoon or the wheel or Jesus who's coming out to make contact. So we can do a two-day boat journey in one night through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. They were scared, we were scared. Because these traps kill people all the time. And they had one question. How do we tell the bad guys from the good guys? You see, these people are being hunted by traffickers and gold miners and loggers and boxed in by deforestation. But if our oceans of rainforests are vanishing, life on Earth is not possible. Now it's not too late, but we're the last generation that can save it. Young kids are growing up attached to screens and loneliness is at an all time high. Is there anything that you learn in those fifteen years that a Westerner like me would find useful? So let's start with purpose.

1:34 Listen, my my team gave me a script that they asked me to read, but I'm just gonna ask you. um in the nicest way I possibly can. Thank you first and foremost for choosing to subscribe to this channel. It is um it's been one of the most incredible crazy years of my life. I never could have imagined. I had so many dreams in my life, but this was not one of them. And the very fact that these conversations have resonated with you and you've given me so much feedback is something I will always be appreciative of. And I almost carry away a sort of burden of uh responsibility to pay you back.

2:00 And the favor I would like to ask from you today is to subscribe to the channel, if you um would be so obliged. It's completely free to do that. Roughly about forty-seven percent of you that listen to this channel frequently currently don't subscribe to the channel. So if you're one of those people, please come and join us. Hit the subscribe button. It's the single free thing you can do to make this channel better. And every subscriber sort of pays into this show and allows us to do things bigger and better and to push ourselves even more. And I will not let you down if you hit the subscribe button, I promise you. And if I do, please do unsubscribe, but I promise I won't. Thank you. Uh

2:34 Yeah. Live an extraordinary life. A very atypical extraordinary life. What have you spent the last twenty years of your life? Doing?

2:44 Trying to find a way to explore the wildest parts of the Amazon. And Figure out a way to save them. The Amazon. For a lot of people that don't know anything about this

2:54 part of the world they'll they'll think of it as A bunch of trees where lots of wild animals live. What is the sort of central misunderstanding of the true nature of the Amazon? I think it's a it's a problem of scale. People don't understand the importance of the Amazon. This is one of the most crucial things on our planet. It's one of the most physically defining features of our planet. If you look at Earth from space, you see this giant green belt over Most of South America. That's the Amazon rainforest. And that's where one fifth of our fresh water is contained and another fifth of our oxygen is produced. This system is irreplaceably valuable to all life on earth.

3:30 And you Live in the Amazon? For the last twenty years I've lived mostly in the Amazon. I've slept more nights outdoors than I have in in my adult life. because I befriended the indigenous people

3:43 of the upper Amazon rainforest. And that's that's what the book is about. It's I went down there at eighteen years old because I needed Adventure. And then the quest for adventure led for this call to meaning, and then that led to the discovery that we were the only ones who could do anything to stop the bulldozers and the chainsaws from destroying the thing that we loved. A lot of people have clicked on this conversation for whatever reason.

4:07 What are we gonna talk about today that you think might be interesting to them? in their lives? And what is the wide variety of things from the conversations you have every single day? The Compels people. 'Cause I wanna give them a bit of a tail DR before we get into the detail.

4:21 I think that what people are gonna find and this is what I tried to write about was that I didn't know where I was going at first. I just knew what I loved. And so over the last twenty years it's been following a dream in a direction. And that dream was finding a way to relieve the

4:39 the incredible stress that I felt over the the state of the environment. We live in these times where people feel like the world is ending, there's nothing we can do, our oceans are collapsing, the rainforests are vanishing, elephants are being hunted to extinction. And I wanted to know are there solutions to these problems? Is there a way to change the narrative of conservation and come up with an alternative reality? Where everything's okay. And do you think your message is more timely now than ever with everything that's going on with technology and AI and this sort of great transition we're in? I think that this message is timely now because whether we like it or not, we're alive at the most important moment in history. And the reason that that's true is because Never before as a global society have we been

5:18 All faced with the same problem. If our ecosystems collapse, life on earth is not possible. And we are the last generation in history that's going to have a chance to restore those ecosystems and those sacred cycles before it's too late. And as it relates to mental health. Young kids are growing up attached to physical sc to screens and to technology and all these things. You've lived

5:42 Almost the opposite life. It appears for the last twenty years. I'm wondering if there's anything You know,'cause y you said today on your way here that you like didn't know how to get out of the Uber. And

5:52 Yeah, no, it was a m it was a mess getting here. I almost got run over by a guy who recognized me and said and said, Get out of the road, Anaconda guy. And then I'd never opened uh I guess I'd never opened a door with a button before, but I couldn't figure out how to get out of out of the Uber. And then uh I had a had a whole adventure in the bathroom that should have been filmed. Um But no, I mean I have lived uh we used to we could call it the barefoot machete days. You know, a lot of my early uh learning in the Amazon took place under the tutelage of indigenous experts. And these are people that like JJ, who I meet when I first go down to the Amazon.

6:25 He didn't have shoes until he was thirteen years old. Mm. So he lived a life where if you want to fish you have to go to the river. And if you want to eat, you have to go out into the forest, not to the supermarket. And so when you see kids today that are only using Their thumbs.

6:40 It's not too surprising when people are disconnected and disoriented and sort of don't know what's real and what's not real anymore because you go to the mountains. And the rain and the sky and the rocks will teach you what's real real quick, and you all have to agree on it or else you'll die. And the jungle's the same thing. It's sort of when you find yourself with these chemical physical boundaries Life makes a lot more sense. Have you been able to make

7:04 Sense of The life that someone like me lives. More because you've spent time In the Amazon. But you look at us differently. I know that sounds like a crazy thing to say.

7:16 But In the same way that people might look at the way you choose to live your life and say, This is very, very strange. Do you look at People that You know, like me that works seven days a week behind a screen and think That's a very strange.

7:27 Live. I just know that I couldn't do it. I I I depend almost almost I'm so reliant on nature, I have to be around trees. I fall asleep to frogs. I in I mean even even being in a city, I go seek out a place where there's a lot of trees.

7:45 I am like a forest creature. If you take me out of my environment I start to stress and die. And uh there's a part of me that yes, that starts to die. If you keep me in locked in concrete, or if you were to if you were to relegate me to a uh I was just in a hotel. Last week. On the book tour.

8:02 And I realise nothing In the room with me. Was natural. The carpet, the table, the windows.

8:11 The television, everything that was in this room with me. Was composite materials. And I couldn't even open the window to get to the outside air. And I it did occur to me, I said, I wonder if other people feel this type of of of societal claustrophobia where to me it's I have to have my feet in a river at some point. I have to I have to

8:31 Every night before I fall asleep, I have to look up. It's a ritual. I have to look up and s and look at the stars. How else can you pray? And so for me, being in a city has become a very different reality to what I'm used to. I mean, just taking a shower. I mean, trust me, it's not as much fun standing in a cold tile box and spraying water on yourself as it is running through the jungle. diving into the river and swimming and the whole river rushing around you. It's a whole different experience. And so when I come back I get a little bit, you know, I miss my

9:02 I miss the frogs and the birds and and sort of my neighbors of of of the jungle. Do you think there's like a collective delusion uh in terms of the way we live our lives? Do you do you think we're we've gone a bit crazy? Kinda like the frog in the frying pan. It's happened so gradually the sort of technological Creep.

9:18 Of our lives that You know, and we're looking at young kids that are more anxious and depressed than ever before. Loneliness is at an all time high. More people are taking antidepressant medications than ever before. I think that

9:31 Yes, is the simple answer to your question, that that that sort of we're a species perpetu we're a fish perpetually out of water, that is humans, because we've taken ourselves away from forests and away from deserts and away from mountains and the ocean. I mean, we used to be fishermen and we used to be farmers and and now the life that we live is so incredibly different than that. If you ask. Kids where does their meat come from? There are kids that will say the grocery store. you know, they don't know that chickens exist before it's in the package and And so

10:01 You know. for for there was that generation which I think that you and I are both a part of where it was like we were the bicycle generation. We might be the last one. Where it was like you went out in the morning and you were on your bicycle or you were running around with your friends and you would come home for dinner. And I was incredibly lucky to have, you know, on the weekends, I would go to the woods. I would take a steak. And I would take one match and I'd take my golden retriever.

10:23 And we would go get lost. Up the side of a mountain. And uh We just go camping. My rule was no shelter, one match, one steak, dog. So you couldn't mess up the match. At what age? Uh I would say twelve or fourteen I was doing this. I had a little, you know, hello hunting knife on my side. Not typical for a twelve year old.

10:41 But I needed it. Why? I don't know. I needed adventure, I think because being being stuck in a desk. And being told you can't get up and you can't even go to the bathroom, and you you look down, do what we say. Just being controlled was so counterintuitive to my essence. And so I grew up with this need for adventure and then

11:00 Somewhere along the way the fact that I couldn't drink The streams that I was exploring. Or the fact that even when I was deep, deep, deep in the forest, I knew that if I really hike for another four hours, I'll come out the other side. I wanted to experience wilderness. I wanted to experience wilderness where it never ended. I wanted to see the really wild places on the planet, and for some reason that was inside me since I was very young.

11:21 So how'd you go from the From being that thirteen year old to Selling off a What, seventeen years old with your Amazon research in Peru? You didn't go to university, you

11:32 You were actually really, really smart, I I hear. I was smart enough that they had me both suspended and in in detention and in American mensa. I was I was I was really all over the place. But and and the thing is they make you feel stupid when you can't do the assignments. So it'd say why are you failing math and why can't you read this book and you didn't do your homework. But I was like, I know I'm smart. And in the forest, I was good at tracking and I could survive and I could make it through a weekend and I could build shelter. And so I always just gravitated towards that.

12:01 And so I spoke to my parents, I dropped out of high school. You can take your G E D and get out. two years early with a with a with a with a one day test. And I did that. The rule was I did have to go to university. So I had to start taking semesters. But in between semesters.

12:17 I was free to go to the Amazon Rainforest. And so I Booked the most remote. position that I could at a place where it took two days by boat from the nearest city to get to this tiny little research station, and it was run by this Peruvian guy and his partner, and his name was JJ.

12:32 And that's the guy that opened The Amazon for me. He opened the Amazon view. Well J J grew up in the Amazon as an indigenous person, so what he was learning, he I the the first chapter in this book is called The Rarest of Species.

12:46 Because He's the only unicorn in the Amazon rainforest. He's an indigenous person, so he's been learning from his grandfather's Grandfathers, grandfathers, grandfathers all the way back. And indigenous means Indigenous means his family. is from the jungle. Their heritage their lineage going back, or they are jungle people.

13:04 They're from the Sah tribe. And so his father Don Santiago there. They knew the medicinal plants, they knew how to fish for piranha, then he can cut a piece of callus off of his foot and put it on a hook. Using himself as bait to catch a bait fish. He can mash up a Barbasco root and put it in a stream and then all the fish float to the surface. He can track a deer, he could track a jaguar, he could track a person. So these people know everything about the forest, and they're the people that I came in with.

13:34 And because I knew about snakes, he knew everybody he knew everything about the forest, the medicines, the habits of the animals, the systems. The only thing I knew was I said, I know how to handle snakes and he said, I'm scared of snakes. And I said, I could teach you snakes. I said, You teach me everything else. And he goes, You like snakes? He goes, Come with us. He said, We go on a family. hunting trip once a year where we go on this expedition ten days into the jungle where no one's allowed to go, only people with indigenous status. He said, You're our guest, you come with us. And so there I was going up the river into parts of the world that have yet to be named.

14:07 into the wildest places in the Amazon rainforest and learning from these guys through experience. how to catch fish out of the river, how to navigate through difficult parts of the of the stream. when the storms are coming, how to survive them. And then we found anacondas. And so it was like this I had this very, very un in or unorthodox training and introduction into the jungle. How big is The Amazon Rainforest.

14:31 Trying to get my head around the scale of it. I'm bad with numbers. What I do know is that it's larger than the lower forty eight states. It's it's absolutely tremendous. It's the largest contiguous rainforest on earth. And are there parts of it that people have never been to? Hundred percent. There are still parts of the Amazon rainforest that are unexplored. There's parts of the Amazon rainforest that no one's ever been to. And if you really want to blow your own mind, the

14:55 Canopy of the Amazon rainforest is about a hundred fifty, a hundred sixty feet up above our heads, which is far. Mm. And Half of the life in a rainforest exists in the canopy. So you're talking about the most

15:08 mega biodiverse biome that has ever existed. There's never been more terrestrial wildlife. Anywhere on Earth. than in the Amazon rainforest and right now. In the entire fossil record, we we're at the apex, the climax community of the Amazon Rainforest. It's that Brilliant. Where the Andes Rainforest cloud forests meet the lowland tropical Amazon.

15:28 There it is. That's the most life we know of. In the entire universe. And in terms of human life. Mm-hmm.

15:36 I hear There's lots of human life there that we've never contacted. There are various tribes living through the Western Amazon, and you have the Esseha and the Machigenga, and you have the Yinne and And then further out beyond all of these There were always rumors.

15:53 That there were Uncontacted tribes. And and for the first many years that I was there. It was always someone's unclean Someone's brother, someone's cousin would would come back with these

16:06 crazy stories that someone had seen the tribes and That they were that they were tall and naked. And they still hunted with bows and arrows and they would and then every now and then somebody would come back with a seven foot arrow. A spear. Tipped with bamboo, huge bamboo tip this big.

16:22 Razor sharp, like a machete. And that was the only proof we had that they existed. Until the day we met them. When did you meet them for the first time? So in order to explain how we met them, we should probably explain why

16:43 Wha where we got to in How the how the eighteen year old researcher became the director of of of a major organization. Okay. Well some somewhere along the way as we as we As we did these expeditions through the Amazon and I became closer and closer with the indigenous people

17:03 You know, J J as a teacher kept telling me, and that's and that's what the the first chapter of the book is about is You know, him just teaching me the incredible interconnectedness. There's this there's this moment that I write about where he's going Look at this beach. And tell me the news. And I said, What? He said, Yeah, he said, Every day the ground is like last night's newspaper. It tells you what happened.

17:22 So I look at the beach. And there's Jaguar tracks and there's like a mess of Jaguar tracks and some Jaguar scat and I made no sense of it. And he was like, This is where she came yesterday to drink. That's where she pooped. This is where she came today to drink. You can see the newer tracks. And then he's like, And what you didn't notice

17:41 You didn't see the vultures above us. I look up and there's vultures above us and he goes, Notice they're not looking at us. they're looking at the Jaguar. And so they're looking that way. Jaguar had a fresh deer kill. And had continually been eating and then coming to the river to drink. And so he can decipher all of these incredible things. And so as he's taking me through these worlds of butterflies and interconnected species where there's a mist river flowing over the rainforest, this this avatar on earth.

18:08 And then we then they burned it down. You burn it down. The loggers. And so the first time I saw Ancient Forest A place that I love with trees significantly bigger than this room.

18:22 vanished. There's this cacophony of life, this orchestra, this symphon of life that you get in the mor and especially in the morning in the Amazon. And then at night there's the night chorus. And when you hear that silenced. It's one of the most horrific things that you can experience because places that we loved

18:42 trees that have been standing for a thousand years, species that had never been described by science. We're all incinerated. And I said to J J I said, How do we This this this can't be allowed. This can't this can't possibly be something that's permitted. And I said, Isn't there somebody that we can call? We were standing on the side of the river. And he he leaned forward, he looked this way, and he

19:03 Look at that way and he goes, Do you see anybody? Because'cause I don't see anybody. He goes, You have to do something. I said, I have to do something. I said, I'm nineteen, twenty years old. So what am I gonna do? I said I don't have a PhD, I don't have a

19:14 trust fund, I don't have a media presence, I don't have anything. I had a machete and I had bare feet. We both had machetes and bare feet. And so that was the start of the journey where we said the thing we love is being destroyed. We could see the smoke on the horizon, the trees that we had Explored and become to love. We're laying smouldering on the ground in front of us, and we said, Okay, now we have to figure out a way to change the narrative.

19:35 The wildest place on earth is about to be destroyed, bulldozed, and burned. How do we save it? And so that's where when you ask the question of how does life in the jungle sort of translate to what your listeners are going to find interesting, it's taking on a task that's so gigantic that at the start of it we couldn't even come up with a we couldn't even conceptualize how it could be possible even with the right tools. To save the Amazon. To save the Amazon rainforest.

20:02 Let alone for two guys with zero qualifications, bare feet and machetes. And so we started Behind zero. And today We're at the point where we've turned loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. We're protecting 130,000 acres of the river.

20:18 We're on the cusp of creating a national park. Me and JJ are the directors of Jungle Keepers. And we're about to make history because we're gonna save the entire watershed and all the trees and animals and heartbeats that are left. And that's the story that I'm trying to tell. That's the whole reason for my existence. That's why I That's what I wake up and do every day.

20:37 And you've really taken on that responsibility in a very personal way, I can tell. Yeah. Yeah, there's a there's a point where, you know, I remember

20:46 'Cause you grow up. I mean I was born in Brooklyn. And then we you know, I grew up in Jersey for a while and then we moved to the Hudson Valley. But when you start You start going to the Amazon for months and months and months out of the year.

20:58 And you come back with scars. And stories where a Jaguar is breathing on your neck and you you go out on a solo and you come back and then Suddenly standing and making conversation at a Barbecue. Feels different.

21:11 It's it's almost like I imagine I have a lot of veteran friends and sort of you you almost get addicted to the action. And then you also get addicted to the the the the team, you know, uh Sebastian Younger writes about this. about the the addic the the the need for community. The tribe.

21:29 And sort of the the mission. And I think that that's one thing that people are missing today where they they they don't know you know, we've been disassociated from religion and community and and and immediate sort of connection with other humans. And so then well then what else is there? How do you how do you where where to what do you mow your existence? What do you w wha what's your

21:48 What's your purpose? What do you wake up and do every day? And so I think, you know, in the old days it was like, you know, we have to we have to defend ourselves from the outside world, from warring communities, you know, or or even just providing for your family. We have to bring water every day. We have to chop wood every day. We have to figure out how to survive. And like today, I mean When I'm here, I wake up and I go, Well there's There's water in the fridge, so I don't have to do that.

22:12 And I'm like, the air conditioner is on and the I'm like s I I guess I'll check my phone. Like you know? And so I you know, I think we have, like you said, become Somehow we've gone really far away from what we are built for. And one of the beautiful things that happens when you go into the wild, and this can be any wild, is that it starts to change you. And so you go into the wild and you start picking up logs and throwing them. You start splitting firewood, and the first day you're gonna have calluses on your hands. But then after a few weeks, you're gonna have tough hands. You start walking barefoot, same thing. The sun starts to make your skin thicker and taner and more resilient, then the rain will hammer that home and you start to get your eyes start to get sharper and you start to pay more attention to what you're hearing.

22:55 And so you start going through this whole transformation where you start to be almost become a different animal. you become the jungle version of yourself, you become the mountain version of yourself. Your legs start to get strong again. And so so the wild puts you through this gauntlet of transformation and you become Connected to your environment.

23:13 And then that feeling of disassociation tends to Alleviate a little bit. Oye. heard about this particular part of the brain that changes as well. You talked about transformation. Yeah. Um

23:26 They discovered something. not so many years ago called the anterior mid singular cortex. Andrew Huberman and I heard him say that he thinks it was one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience of the last Century. The anterior mid singular cortex is a part of the brain sitting between your emotional brain and your executive control center. that essentially grows when you do hard things.

23:48 Not when you do things that um Specifically when you do things that you don't want to do. But you do them anyway. running a marathon because you enjoy it, things you don't want to do and you do it anyway. And it went through some of the studies I saw said that younger people that have been brought into this sort of doom scrolling generation have smaller ones. If you are um Obese?

24:08 It's smaller. Um athletes have bigger ones and people who live longer have even bigger ones. And it's They kind of call it like the muscle of the brain of doing hard things. And so when you were talking about that physical transformation, I weirdly thought about I think it was Roosevelt. Yep. After losing his mum and his wife on the same day.

24:26 after his baby girl was born, he went out to the Badlands and spent two years doing pretty much what you said. Putting himself in intentional discomfort. Yeah. And he came back and all of his friends described him as being transformed. He went on to become the youngest president in American history. He got shot and carried on doing the speech. He led the charge um uh I think it was the the Spanish Crusades or something like the Spanish War.

24:47 And the Rough Riders. Yeah, the Rough Riders, and they all pointed at the moment when he went out to the Badlands. They said it shaped him into becoming a completely different Man, that that discomfort. Yeah. A hundred percent. And and that's That's why Native American cultures for the initiation of the young men would have vision quests where they would send them out into the wilderness. And there's still different there's all different types. Aberiginal cultures have similar things, and I wanted to put myself through that. And so I went out on that's what I described in my first book is going out on that's where JJ taught me enough to survive in the jungle. And then I started going out on

25:20 ten day solos into place. I'd have people bring me to the last place that had a name. Like I'm talking about poachers. And then I would start hiking. And I would go so deep in the Amazon rainforest that I was just off the map. And I would try and survive out there. And so I had a lot of adventures that I should not have survived, but it was very important to me to put myself through that because I grew up with that discomfort.

25:42 I grew up with the overwhelming crushing stress of being told That We're at the end of days. We are Losing I mean, I saw it at the Bronx Zoo they said, you know, we're losing our rainforests and they had the sound of the chainsaws and you see the trees going over and they said, We're losing elephants. You'd see somebody shoot and the elephant goes over and they just said everything that you

26:04 For me, everything you love is being destroyed, and pretty soon we're not gonna be able to drink. And everything's gonna be polluted and our fisheries are being destroyed. And I said, Wait a so wait a second. I said, I have to know if it's really that bad. So when I got old enough, don't it's not just that I was inspired to go out on a mission, it was that I Wanted to find out for myself because I'm I don't like finding out through a screen. I don't I don't want other people filtering my information. I want to find out for myself.

26:29 Is it really that bad? And so I was going out on a quest. to understand what the reality was. If I sat eighteen year old you at this table, he sat there. Mm. And you know, this version of you are

26:43 What, thirty seven? Thirty eight. Thirty eight, you'll set there's a twenty years difference. What would the notable differences be between these two men? Mm. Um Well, he didn't know how to fish with his feet. Um that's for sure.

26:57 His machete skills would be terrible. But the the noticeable difference would be that that eighteen year old, his greatest dream was to alleviate The environmental stress that he grew up with. Escape the world of rules. Find purpose in life.

27:14 And to just have adventures. My my greatest dream was to see the Amazon rainforest. I looked at people like Teddy Roosevelt and Jane Goodall, and I said, man, they had such incredibly like extraordinary lives. And I said, How come my life can't be like that? I'm over here in detention. You know, I'm over here being told I didn't do my homework. And I'm like, I wanna chop wood and carry water. I want to go to war. I want to be scared. I want to be challenged.

27:43 And so for me it was I I was that would be the difference, is that I would be hungry for all of that. Whereas Person sitting across from you today. My body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars. Crocodile bites, tiger bites, infections, times that I've been almost crushed to death by elephants.

28:01 I've been hunted by the narco terrorists and at this point The responsibility that kid got to see all the things he wanted to see. We found the biggest anacondas. I lived through the amazing adventures and that's great. The person sitting across from you today is responsible for protecting

28:19 millions of animal lives. And my job is to explain to people that we, that everyone reading this message or listening to this message, has the chance to help the indigenous people save the Amazon before we lose it. Forever. And so that's the main difference is that at that age I was just I just wanted some swashbuckling adventure. And now I found uh that adventure became meaning.

28:44 I found it along the way. And then now I'm on a whole other journey. Now it's now it's can we bring it home? Now it's can we achieve something that we thought was impossible and change the narrative of how it's done. And I guess this kind of thing. Brings us back to this question about the uncontacted

29:01 Tribes. You said you and J J were talking about How you might go about saving. The Amazon. Was

29:08 Highlighting the unc uncontacted tribes in the Amazon part of the mission there. No, Very much no. That's a great question because what we started doing was we looked at this river basin and we said, Okay, we We we love this this one really wild river, and now we said why why has this river been so wild? You know, so you think of the Amazon as a a tree of rivers. You have the main Amazon channel and then all these millions of branches.

29:33 And so the upper Amazon, the uppermost branches of the Amazon rainforest, those tip tip tops. People are only just getting to them now. You know, the main Amazon channel is a shipping port and then you have these huge tributaries going off of it and you can get in as far as Iquitos with a steam ship. Like you can go all the way through Brazil thousands of miles and get all the way to Iquitos, Peru. To the almost the back end of the Amazon. I've been there. And and it's beautiful. We are at the southern edge in the tributaries down there. There's one tributary.

30:04 With a tributary. A tributary is is an offshoot from a larger river. So a stream is a tributary of a larger stream which goes into you know then eventually you reach the Hudson River. And so this is a tiny little tributary. And

30:17 There we w what we discovered is that the reason people hadn't Other indigenous communities hadn't formed? Was that for hundreds and hundreds of years this particular river had been protected by

30:33 The violent Mysterious Mashko Piro Nomadic uncontacted tribes. And that had kept it wild. They were the original jungle keepers.

30:43 But by the time I got there they were sort of just a myth. And so they were something that they said they lived really far upriver, past the last indigenous community. And I when I say indigenous community, I mean people that we can talk to, people that we can interface with that I can speak a little Spanish to and they'll understand me. I think that's an important distinction. Yes. Because can you make that distinction between indigenous and these tribes. Yes. So within Peru.

31:08 You have Lima and and you know, Michelin star restaurants and all this amazing food, and then you travel down to Cusco where you have Machu Picchu and you have the Andes and all of that incredible culture. And then you go Down to the jungle, and that's a little bit like going to the back end of Alaska. That's where it's like you are very far away from LA or New York, like but it's the same country. and out there you'll reach these communities where they are indigenous. And so in the reserve that we currently protect as jungle keepers.

31:36 There's two indigenous communities there. And we work with them to sort of support them.'Cause as these loggers and narco traffickers and gold miners come in, they see them as as a mark. They'll go in and say, Oh, there's these helpless indigenous people, how can we exploit them? How can we get their trees, their fish?

31:54 They'll go and take those things from them. Or they'll or they'll sell them something that's not worth what it what they think it is. And so we've been working with these indigenous communities to say, Do you want the lagers to come in and cut down all of your trees? And they go, No. And they go, W but at the same time we need a little bit of gasoline because what if we're having a baby and we have to get our daughter to a hospital in town? And so We've been working with them to provide sustainable jobs.

32:16 as rangers, protecting their own land. It's such a simple solution. Whereas otherwise they would go and be loggers to get that cash. And so we're working with these communities. And now they're rangers and boat drivers and guides and handymen And they called us about a year ago and they said something Incredible is happening. And it's gonna be dangerous, but you are the directors and you're part of this family and you're part of this story, and we need you here for this.

32:44 But the tribes are about to come out of the forest. And we were in town and where what you know, what we do now is you know, we and we can explain this later, but we raise money And we bring it to the Amazon where we the local people have the opportunity to set aside huge acreage of of the Amazon to protect it. We're sh we're changing the narrative of destruction where we just protect it before they get to it. And so we were in town with JJ, who's now the director of this major organization, and we're talking to our lawyers and we're in the office and we get this call that the tribe is out. The tribe is out. The tribe is out. What does that mean?

33:18 uncontacted tribe that when I arrived in Peru, the president Peru had been saying these are a myth. They don't exist. And it's just it's the boogeyman. It's been made up as a story to scare the loggers. So their existence was contested. They were almost on the fringes of imagination. Could we not Flown a plane over there or something. Is that you know, I this sounds like a dumb question, but presumably we have satellites and we can zoom in.

33:43 The BBC did do a piece where they were flying a plane And they were looking at an unc an uncontacted tribe from miles away. And they said we're being very careful not to disturb them. But there is a tribe in the rainforest. That has no contact with the outside world. And you could see these people bending, and they're looking at the plane, but the plane's not close enough to really scare them or to cause them any distress. And so we have done that.

34:07 But then on our river Out in the middle of nowhere where no one's heard of the BBC. You just hear stories from loggers who've come down river from three weeks up river. You can go for three weeks up the river. And hit nothing. There's nothing human. It's like the last endless forest. And so when the community called and they said

34:26 There's arrows on the beach. The tribe is coming out. It's the first time in ten years that the tribe seems to be coming out of the jungle to make contact. And so they got uh they got the directors of Jungle Keepers up there. We had to we had to rush to be there. They begged us to be there so that we could see it because they were worried that we wouldn't believe them. And so we got there and we went all night and When you go up a river at night we just do a two day boat journey.

34:52 In one night. And so the guy right there The picture with the guy who has the scar on his forehead. That's Ignacio. He that scar is because he was shot in the head by a seven foot arrow. While he was trying to make peaceful contact with the uncontacted tribes. He was trying to give them a gift and they got spooked and they scared

35:10 And they shot him in the head and he almost died from that. When we heard that this was happening and he's now one of our best jungle keepers rangers. We said, Can you do a two day boat journey in one night? And he went, Yes, sir. and he put on a headlamp and he got in the back of the boat and we took an open top canoe and we drove from six PM until nine AM the next day through the w the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen.

35:31 I was on the front of the boat with a flashlight. using the crocodile eyes, the Cayman eyes on the side of the river to navigate'cause they shine, the eye shine comes back. The the the storm was so bad that I we couldn't see anything. We couldn't see the side of the river and because of the light. igniting the raindrops, you can't you can't even see what's in front of you. So we're using the the croc eyes to to navigate where the edges of the river was. So I was spotting and telling him which way to go and he drove and we did that

35:57 All night long. got to the indigenous community and said, Okay, so what's going on? And they said, Oh yeah, they left. Tribe's gone. The only thing that they had.

36:08 was that one guy the previous day had been shot by an arrow. And he had been fishing. and he had seen the tribes, so he said. And they had shot an arrow at him. The first thing they had done was shot. One of these seven foot arrows at him.

36:22 And the way it had hit the boat ricocheted and then hit his thick leather belt. and blunted the tip of the arrow. And he had the arrow. And so he says, so there are there are people here. And then a a native anthropologist from another region showed up and he said, I they know me as the grandfather. I can speak to these people. I speak a little bit of their Language.

36:44 And so we stayed another night. Two days deep in the jungle. And the following morning we said, Okay, we're getting out of here. There's obviously nothing here but, you know, stories and footprints and arrows and we have important work to do back in town.

36:57 And did you believe them? I've learned one thing working in the Amazon, always believe the locals. Always. There's there's if they say it's there. They're not wrong.

37:09 And that's part of the reason that I've gotten to go on these adventures. You know, when JJ Tell told me there's places you can go that are so wild that it's like the Galapagos, the animals don't know a human, but you have to go for days on foot to the topmost reach of the rivers to find this. Well, that's why I went on these ac these solos. And so I write that's what I'm that's as a writer, that's what I do is try and take people on these adventures through the Amazon. And so when they said the tribe is coming, Ignacio, the guy who'd been shot in the head, he said, Listen to me, he said you're He said, You're my boss, right? I said, Yeah. He goes, I need to speak to you like a friend. I said speak, speak, speak.

37:43 He said, They're coming. You'd be an idiot to leave. And so we post it up. We waited. How he knew?

37:50 Yeah, I'm wondering how he knew. He just knew, man. They just know. It's like they can they can tell and then, you know, I mean these are guys who know When there's a jaguar close by by the sound of the birds. They know when a storm's coming before the storm is audible. You know, they they have h higher tuned senses than we do. And and so he said, Look, the tribe is coming. There's the arrow they're in the region, he goes and when they come this close, they generally

38:14 They want to talk. I said but this is And sure enough you hear Moshko and everyone starts screaming. And it was just this moment of absolute panic where women were lifting babies and chickens are flying around and dogs, and we're in this tiny little indigenous community on the side of a river with hundreds and hundreds of miles of jungle around. And we run to the edge of this, you know, the edge of the river where this cliff is. And across the river we see them coming towards us.

38:39 and they're walking out of the jungle and they're naked from head to toe. They just have some string tied around their waists. penises tied up to their bellies. They all have seven foot long bows and arrows and they're crouched over and they're looking at us. And we're standing there and you go Y you sort of like you go, I I just I I wanted the I wanted to see this and now I'm not so sure I wanna be here. 'Cause there are warriors coming out of the jungle.

39:03 And they're from a thousand years ago. So I asked the anthropologist, Is it they like stone age people? And he goes They don't have stones. He said they're still in the bamboo age. Said these people are living such a primitive lifestyle. They're hunter gatherers.

39:19 And they've been isolated so deep in the jungle for so many centuries that it's like a time capsule. So there was a thousand years between us. We're standing on either side of the river with a thousand years between us in this aperture into the history of what humankind used to look like. And these people came out holding their bows and arrows that they had made out of the jungle. And they held up their hands and they were talking to us across a river. And it was s sort of shirts versus skins. We were just just two tribes separated by a little bit of water.

39:50 And they wanted to communicate. With what language? with their language. They I mean it's we don't even know really what to call them. For a while they were calling them the Mashko Piro, which means the wild Pyro people.

40:03 And then Um more more recently and partly because of our encounter, they held up their hands and the first thing they said was no mole. We are the brothers. Brothers.

40:15 And so then our side said the same thing the anthropologist said, Namole. brothers. And then this this this exchange began and it's like You know, w I as a Spanish speaker When I've been in Italy. I can use my Spanish to kinda get through.

40:28 In Italian. And it I feel like it's like that. The Yinai people can speak to the Mashko Piro And it there's an approximate translation. And the first thing that they said after coming out of the jungle a thousand years late to civilization was Send us bananas.

40:45 They said send us food. And they demanded that we send them plantains as an offering. And our side said, You put down your weapons. We will talk to you, but we do not want this to end. Violently we want this to be peaceful. If you want to talk to us.

41:00 put down your bow and arrows because a shotgun A shotgun only goes how many meters, you know. It's not even gonna go a hundred meters, fifty meters maybe. Buckshot. An a longbow arrow is gonna go Three hundred meters, it's gonna go far.

41:16 Na Needless to say, they're very good with those arrows. They are very good with those arrows. These things will fly. Um, and so even standing on the other side of the river. We were not safe. And so we were all standing behind trees. We were watching Ignacio, who'd been shot before, was watching with the binoculars, and he's going Whenever you see them walking, he said they let you see them and then they clever girl you in the forest where there's one watching you from the shadows, and he he would grab me by the shoulder and go, look, there's one and you'd just see this you know, red face paint in the shadows of the forest, and he'd have the bow trained on us.

41:48 And so while some of them in the front were putting the bows down, there's others of them in the shadows that were making sure. That they still had support. But we asked the guys in the front to put down their arrows. The anthropologist got in the river. And gave them an offering of bananas.

42:04 I think I have a video here of this. Yeah. This is world first footage. I'll let you um You know how to use an iPad, right?

42:14 Um there we go. Yeah. So this is this was this is just a random moment from the earlier days, but this is that moment where everyone starts screaming, Mash, go, and we're all running. And this is what I was talking about, where they are moving across the beach and you can see the sort of the posture they're using there. I mean he's got

42:35 They have their bow and arrows in hand and then they showed up and see their pointing. They were worried that our cameras were guns and so they were asking to put down the cameras. They were curious about various members of our tribe and they were all talking at the same time. So it was very difficult to understand what they wanted.

42:53 What's he doing with his finger there? He's doing This. I don't know. This is the moment that we gave them the bananas and What's haunting about this is the desperation

43:03 That you see on them Where they're all rushing to get the bananas and they're not necessarily taking them Like they're going to share later. They're taking them Like I get my bananas, you get your bananas. You see this, they're all rushing. To get this.

43:17 Little boatload. And these are people that don't have boats. And as they're doing this, they're all talking at the same time. It was like a flock of parrots. It was just a cacophony of Of sound. And they're all fighting over these plantains and And then once they get them, each person held their own.

43:33 They have rope. And plantains. Interaction went on for several hours and we negotiated with them. And this is just the footage. This is the footage that we're allowed to release right now. And this is them moving back off into the jungle. There's a lot more that happened.

43:49 And again, that's where that's why that's why we're releasing this now, I should say that. That's why we waited a while to release this footage because Footage like this is incredibly sensitive for a number of reasons. A You don't want people to think that we went out and contacted these people that want to be left alone. You also don't want to encourage other people

44:09 Oh, these are the last free people on earth. They live Perfectly in balance with nature. No. people will go looking for them, whereas for hundreds of years these people have asked for one thing and one thing only. To be left alone.

44:25 And they've enforced that kind of like the Comanches. With arrows. And on this day they said please give us food, please give us rope. And they had one other question. They said, How do we tell the bad guys from the good guys? And we said, What do you mean?

44:41 Who are the bad guys? And they said some of you shoot at us with the chichiksu with the fire sticks. The guns. And we're going, Who Who does that? We said we are not the bad guys. And they said, No, you also. They said we know you cut down our trees. They're speaking to all of us. There's nothing there's no like, you know, white guy, brown guy, Peruvian, foreigners, none of that.

45:00 It was just all of you outsiders. Stop cutting down our trees. Our trees are our gods. It was sort of like you don't do that. And then when they left. Just a few weeks ago we learned that

45:13 the narco traffickers view them as a threat. And there was actually a mass grave found. Of a similar clan. And so these people are being boxed in by deforestation and hunted by narco traffickers and gold miners and loggers.

45:28 And so I think that them coming out of the forest was their way of saying, Hey, we're trying to get a read on What's going on in the outside world? Who is it? Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys? They don't know that Jungle Keepers is protecting the land that they live on. They've never heard of a spoon. Or the wheel or Jesus or World War Two.

45:47 Or the country of Peru. And so so they're coming out with so many questions and The only way to care for these people and to give them the the the rights that they deserve is to protect the forest they live in. Do you know w why some of them seem to be Touching their nose. It's funny, I didn't notice that. Yeah, I think this is this is this is gonna be your discovery to anthropology. I did not notice that, but it does you see this, a lot of them are doing this.

46:16 Yeah. And The the outfit Yeah, fit. W what is this outfit? This it looks like there's kinda rope tied around their midrift with their penises out.

46:25 Mm-hmm. Yeah, the the the the head of the penis is covered by rope. Oh they've got the penis up into the rope. No, the head of the penis is up and protected. And and that makes sense given the jungle where there's mosquitoes and botflies and sand flies. That that's a smart move. And then rope seems to be I mean, what is it goes like fire, rope, ladders, like the thing that's like man's second invention. They are obsessed with rope. That's how they make their bowstrings, that's how they make their arrows, that's how they lash things together to make the the the limited structures that they make. And some of what we know about them is You know, we find their camps after they leave, so we know what they eat.

47:01 They eat primarily turtles and monkeys, they don't fish. They don't have fish hooks. They they don't eat humans, do they? They do not eat humans. They're not cannibal tribes. That's a rumour people have talked about before, people have said

47:14 Yeah, there's even a couple of versions of my voice in AI saying that on the internet, but it is not true. And their haircuts? They will seem to be. I have this sort of mullet. It seems like they all grab the front and just

47:27 Find a way to cut it. There might be like one guy with a machete who just does the haircuts. And for a lot of them, this is the first time they've seen a human. So actually this was first contact. The anthropologist who came to the scene. Who managed this interaction.

47:44 He said he had met an uncontacted tribe before in the region. He said none of these were men that he'd met. And the other thing Notice they're all men. Yeah. The women were hidden hidden in the forest, and while the men were making a distraction in front of us,

47:58 The women were raiding the farm behind us. Rading Rading the farm. Your farm. The indigenous people's farm, our community's farm. So the women went to steal while they were distracting you. That's right. And did you catch the women on tape? No.

48:12 No, no, no, no, no. Everyone was we were all huddled up very, very close. I mean, this was an incredible encounter, but let me explain the prevailing Emotion during this entire thing was fear. On both sides. They were scared. We were scared. The indigenous people naturally have shotguns anyway. Everyone had their shotguns out. They all had

48:34 Some of them had put their bows on the beach, but they had other they had archers waiting. And so everyone was sort of, you know, it was like put down your guns and we can talk, but nobody really wanted to put down their guns. And how'd you know the women were Stealing from your farm. Because after this was all over and we went to the farm.

48:53 Everything had been pulled up. All the yucca, all the plantains, all the sugar cane, the entire farm was ruined. How did you know it was the women? The women in the village told me it was the women. They went oh that was the women. Also you see the smaller footprints. These men have wide big men.

49:11 They're from walking barefoot their whole lives, their feet get Ancho, they get really thick. And so and I have jungle feet like that now, but these guys have almost duck feet at this point, like big. Fat.

49:23 You ever see a farmer's hands? Yeah. But they just they just grow. Yeah. Like that. They're all young. As well. Mm.

49:32 Where's where are the older people? We'd love to know. I don't know. There's some tribes in the Amazon where the elderly people have more permanent settlements.

49:43 There's been rumors of some extreme tribes where the elderly people if they can't keep up are just left. To perish? Uh, but we saw people between the ages of probably twelve and forty five. I don't think anybody looks like they're in their fifties. So we left with more questions than answers. They On that day they did get a pot.

50:04 that they s they stole from a c from you know the community, you know, they have their their form and so there there was also a machete. at the farm, somebody just whacked it into a log, and so as they were leaving One of the best things that we caught on video that that we have we're not able to share yet is that One of these guys. And this was at the end, after while everybody was going home.

50:22 the anthropologist held up his hands and he said, You know, no mole, brothers, go in peace. And these guys actually asked about me. I was the only person there with a big beard and they said They said that one. They said, Show us that one. And so I came forward and stood at the edge of the river, which my heart was pounding. And the anthropologist said, he said.

50:39 Hold up your hands. Show them that you don't mean any harm. I held the held up my hands like this. And they held up their hands. And they sang. They said no mole. They knew that I wasn't from the indigenous community. And that was an incredible moment of We couldn't communicate, but it was just sort of that basic I acknowledge you.

50:58 And they said, I acknowledge you. And we just had this thing across the river in about a thousand years and just and then that was it. And as they left. You know, one of the guys had a machete and he was He showed it to us over his shoulder like this, and one of my friends was going, Oh you know, in the local language he was saying, put down the machete, leave the machete, and the guy just smiled and looked at us like Yeah, come and get it.

51:18 And then at just as they left. One of the warriors walked out to the beach. Put an arrow on the string. Smiled at us. And just shot it. I was like ha.

51:29 Up into the air. At us, in general, just to spook us. And then they all turn on the left and left. Yeah, so they have a sense of humor. We saw them smile. You know, we exchanged a little bit of that with them as well.

51:42 They look cold. They are cold. I mean it's it's it's ninety five degrees on that day. The other thing is it was cool as they're coming, if you go to the part where they're coming across the beach, there's Millions of butterflies. That beach was covered in just millions of butterflies and so as these people are walking out the Butterflies are just swarming around them. Go back to the beginning. The that right there. If you just notice you do you don't notice it at first, but

52:07 As they're moving, look at that. The world is swirling with lepid lepidopter in colors just just absolute insanity how how beautiful this scene was. And I mean when you see this You know, if it if a Tyrannosaurus Rex walked out behind them, I wouldn't have been surprised. It was such a strange literally unbelievable thing to see because You know, these these l literally are the last people on earth that are still living in this way. Where society we have planes, trains, automobiles, iPhones, all of this technology. We're talking about going to other planets.

52:40 They don't have metal. Even a knife. unless they get it from someone else. And so it's just it's just an incredible you know, the other thing is they do have medicinal technologies. They're able to stay infection free living in the tropical Wet jungle.

52:57 That's pretty incredible. They're virtually naked. I mean essentially naked. I think that's that's how they carry their rope. I don't think that's so much of clothing as We need rope, and that's how we carry it.

53:10 It's very it's very, very complicated because the logers Shoot at them. The narcos shoot at them. People shouldn't.

53:21 And if you think about in the last few centuries, how many indigenous cultures have been annihilated by the outside world coming in? These there's no shortage of these stories. And in this particular case, in twenty twenty six, when we have the communication and people are able to hear this story, this is why we're releasing this footage. Because the only hope these people have is if we protect them. They can't come on a podcast. They can't address the United Nations. They can't write a pret petition.

53:52 The only hope they have is if we are able to protect the forest and That they live in. That's it. And that's why we've released this footage now,'cause for a long time we said we can't release it. W we said what if what if crazy

54:05 hippie people go down there thinking that these are the last free people and they want to go live with them. that will kill them. The outside pathogens that you and I carry on us every day, the common cold that we have immunity to. Count an entire tribe. And how many tribes like this?

54:20 Do we believe we're in the Amazon Rainforest? Several thousand little tribes, little clans that move nomadically through the Amazon. Were they Tool. Yeah.

54:30 They looked like they were at least you know, five nine, five ten, they were pretty tall, especially because the the the Peruvians and the indigenous communities that we work with tend to be on the smaller side. Mm-hmm. They they they are taller than the average. Uh some of the other tribes.

54:47 There's another tribe. that we ran into down there called the Nawa and those people were were absolutely tiny. They were s like below five feet, all of them. Um These guys were tall.

54:59 Yeah. And is there a leader here? Is someone in charge? Another great question. It seems to be that there's two they look like brothers. There seems to be two guys who do most of the talking. one in particular who seems to be doing the most gesticulating and he was communicating more forcefully. He he had a smile that guy had a smile on his face at certain times. This one. Yeah, I think so. And and he was the one that would walk the furthest out into the river.

55:26 Yeah. And he seems well muscled, healthy. He's the biggest as well in size by the looks of it. Yeah. Okay. These tribes have been known to kill people. These tribes kill people all the time.

55:42 The the day after this happened. We went downriver and one of the people who had been Maintaining the peace during this negotiation across the river was my friend George. George kept saying. Don't worry, it's gonna be okay.

55:57 Don't worry no more there. And he'd say, Let's get them more bananas. And he said, You stay behind the tree, say, Hey, please put down your camera. They don't understand that it's not a gun. He was making sure that everyone was calm. Well, George was driving the day after this in the river, as he does every day. And He rounded one river bend and the tribe was out again.

56:18 They were further up river, and usually when they leave they go deep into the jungle, but on this day they had been walking up the river, which nobody expected. And so when his boat came around the river They hadn't expected it. And they open fired. Everybody else on the boat was able to get down under the The benches, which is made out of heavy, thick

56:37 Would. As he was driving. He caught an arrow over the scapula. Came out by his belly button. So it collapsed his right lung and cut through his whole body.

56:49 And he had to be a little bit more than that. Helicopter evacuated. out of the indigenous community. And somehow he lived. But he's never gonna be the same.

56:59 And there's there's a hundred stories I could tell you of people that have been killed by them. But now in more and more the stories of that they are also being exterminated. So their violence is in response to the fact that the outside world has been cruel to them. And the only way that they can ensure that they survive is by keeping the outside world out. This is a uh might be a bit of a dumb question, but there's no consequence to that is there from the Peruvian government or anything. The g Peruvian government aren't trying to Um

57:29 You know, if they if this uncontacted tribe kills somebody, they're not necessarily gonna go there and Trying to That's actually a great question, because it illustrates. something that I think a lot of people fundamentally don't understand about this is that

57:45 You know. If this banana is the last town. And then you imagine Just our river. is the size of a football field.

57:56 Right. How are you gonna get to the other side of it? In the jungle it takes you about About an hour. To cover half a mile through through dense jungle. If me and you were going with machetes right now through dense, dense jungle,

58:12 About an hour for every half mile. That's with no trail. With trail you can go a little faster, with the boat you can go a little faster. But the police have no jurisdiction outside of the city. The only reason the police have powers because everyone has agreed that there's a government

58:26 And that there's a But it's all made up. And when you get out in the jungle you realize that there is no law in the wild. It's just whatever happens. To has a bigger stick. And so they're still playing by that game. They've never heard of a law.

58:42 And so they they've been known to find something interesting just the way and you know Today if we're interested in a bird, we take a picture of it and then we study it, or we can capture it and we can study it. You know, sometimes people will criticize Teddy Roosevelt for being a hunter. But a lot of the species, if he saw a new species, he would shoot it so that he could study it. That was what they did back then.

59:03 They do this with humans. They'll be like, that's an interesting pair of pants. They seem to think about life and death very differently. And I was

59:15 Watching something um podcast that you did where you said that they also speak the same language some of these uncontacted tribes as the monkeys? Yes. Um so what they do is they will emulate Capuchin call, bird calls, the undrelated tinem tinemu goes. Um the Capuchins, I can't do what they're called, but they these guys have it down perfectly. Capuchins being Capuchin monkeys.

59:43 And they'll use those sounds. And JJ's father, Don Santiago, had told us years and years that we thought he was just trying to scare us. He said, If you're ever in the forest And you hear The animals Sound a little off. If you ever just

59:57 feel like something's not right about the way the animal he said they've surrounded you. And they're all watching with their bows and arrows. The tribes have. Yeah, and so they'll go shh. And you'll go. And who goes? Shh.

1:00:10 And you say You don't hear three Tinemus in a row. That's not how it works. That one Tinemu talks to the other Tinemu and all of a sudden I got five Tinemu's around me. Uh uh. And then you know that you got the tribe around you.

1:00:21 So this is where the local people know how this stuff works. And to anyone from the outside, they go, There's no such thing as uncontacted tribes and they don't communicate with you they do. and one of my friends was in that exact situation. where they were communicating with animal calls in a circle while he was in a stream with his father. And unfortunately they shot his father in the stomach. And his father died.

1:00:44 And he ran for it. And he lived. To tell the tale. And the next day the his community, our friends came back and they found This guy who had just

1:00:55 Bled out through his stomach and why they killed him? We do not know. So they pretend they're animals. Um But well they they use animal sounds to communicate with each other. Yes.

1:01:09 Because then the prey, which in this case might be a human. Yeah. Won't know that it's exactly. Okay. So If I'm going if we go, Okay, let's split up and surround we're we're we're uncontacted tribes now and we go, Okay, there's loggers over there, let's split up, surround them. We'll see how many of them there are.

1:01:25 And use the monkey's language so use the monkey language so they don't think anything of it. They'll just keep doing what they're doing. And then when we give the go ahead to everybody, we just slice them with seven foot arrows and they're all going down. I was I was gonna ask about happiness, but I don't even know the context in which to ask the question about The happiness. No, I think I think that there's some Some Cormac McCarthy.

1:01:50 quotes that would probably do better justice to their reality than I think that they are living in a world where They're more concerned with calories. They're more concerned with how much blood does it cost to walk a mile. They're

1:02:05 More concerned with stealing the women from other tribes. They're not concerned with happiness. It's more apocalypto than uh Downton Abbey. You know, it's it's they're they're they're They were in a state of desperation, you could see it in their face.

1:02:22 And that's where there's a further anthropological question of what happens in the future for these people. But one thing that we know for certain is that Rapid contact. Destroys them. It's happened before. All of this has happened before.

1:02:36 You know, when the outside world reaches an uncontacted tribe, the pathogens kill them. when the outside world reaches even an indigenous community. Alcohol. Outside pathogens, money. can destroy an indigenous culture and take away their language in a single generation.

1:02:52 So so these types of of severely isolated Cultures. If they want to come out and make contact with the indigenous communities that are their neighbors, that has to happen over time. And And they have to have the agency to do it. Which means their forest needs to be protected.

1:03:13 And so that's that's and that's all we know. You know, we don't know what their birth rates are, what their infant mortality rates are, where their old people are, what what what what are their creation myths, what are their beliefs? We have no idea. Do we even know where they live? In terms of do they live in huts, houses, do we know that? No, they don't. In fact, at this very moment, right now.

1:03:32 Uh I would imagine that there's several of them hunched round a campfire in the darkness beneath a hundred and sixty feet of canopy. You know,'cause when you're in the jungle there's there's these these pillars going up, but then it's a it's a four D environment'cause it's just You're walking it's like you're walking along the bottom of the ocean. You're this tiny thing and above you is all of this slithering life and frogs and things moving through the branches and so they're They're huddled down there in the in below the Amazon rainforest.

1:03:59 And somehow they figured out how to make fire. Which if I handed you a lighter And a full cup of gasoline. And said have all the sticks you want in the jungle. You still couldn't make me a fire right now. How do you know they can make fire? Because we see them cook stuff. We find their camps.

1:04:19 But It's also conceivable Because they don't have pots. It's conceivable that the that they some of these people haven't seen water boil. Right. They just drink water and it falls on them from the sky.

1:04:34 They certainly don't know that water freezes. On this point of happiness, you said that you saw desperation in their faces. But does that mean that you think they're not happy? Or do you just think that That isn't even a sort of a paradigm that they even

1:04:50 Consider. It's all about survival. I think that we have we're inbuilt to enjoy moments of joy. I think that humans enjoy moments of interaction, moments of play, and not just humans, I think that animals in general. You look at you know Two puppies chasing each other, they're having fun. You know, even on even on this day with shotguns loaded and bows cocked and

1:05:10 We still found the time to smile a little bit at each other. Give me that machete. Yeah, yeah, yeah, come and get it. And we kinda like you know, it was kinda like you're just as scared of us as we are as you and as it was a it was we were on the same level for that smile. You know? And I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah, none of us want to do that. Um So th there's there is happiness there, but I'm saying, you know

1:05:30 Uh Knowledge comes with Benefits. You know, there's a lot of things that they may believe. I I I remember when I was in college reading about an anthrop anthropologist group that got to

1:05:41 Somewhere in New Guinea and All the people were Hiding in trees'cause they'd they'd gotten to a point in their civilization where the where they believed that everything was that bad that was bad. came from magical spells. You know, if I fall and break my leg, it's'cause you set a magical spell on me and if I get sick it's'cause of a magical spell and everybody was so scared of upsetting each other that they'd all just started living in the trees and hunting and they were living in this constant fear state.

1:06:03 Mm. And so, you know, you you at times like that you need someone to go, Okay, guys, look, here's what, you know Here's what's happening. Let's get let's get let's get on the same page. And they may maybe they would be helped by having a p small plantation of plantaines. And so if they have a bad week of hunting. they can just come in and they can they can take some of their own

1:06:24 M get some of their own food. They don't need to start being agricultural, they can still be nomadic hunter gatherers, but maybe having some supplemental food out there in locations that they know about would help. But these are things for the local people and for anthropologists to figure out over time. I heard you say that children from the tribe who were raised by outside communities claim to remember nothing about their time in the tribe. It's haunting.

1:06:50 W what do you mean by that? I mean that A child washed down river on a log. to one of the very, very remote communities in the Amazon rainforest.

1:06:59 and was adopted by an indigenous community, people that speak an indigenous language as well as Spanish. And When he was old enough. to be asked questions, someone said, Hey, by the way, when you were living with Los Calatos, with the with the naked people, That's what they call them.

1:07:16 Um What was it like? And he just went. I don't remember. Walked away.

1:07:22 But I mean when he came down he was eight years old. You can't tell me you don't remember anything. And but it was a it was a it was a it was a guarded I don't remember. It was a I don't remember. No.

1:07:33 Access denied. Yeah. It doesn't s I mean you got You know, and that's what people get wrong where they go, Oh, these people still live You know, in communion with nature and it's like yeah, and there's a lot of rape and murder and warfare and

1:07:48 probably needless death from infections and disease and And and they're living a very different lifestyle. But it certainly is fascinating that they're out there. And I think that it only goes to illustrate that we What we're protecting here is truly that wild.'Cause a lot of people will say to me, Well, how come you guys are so focused on pro protecting this river? There's thousands of tributaries in the Amazon.

1:08:11 Why protect this Three hundred thousand acres right there. It's like well this is the wildest part. John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a camping trip when he wanted him to protect the Yosemite Valley and the Sequoia trip trees. And he said, You have to see this. And so he took Roosevelt and showed him how amazing it was. I mean sequoia trees like that.

1:08:31 Exists nowhere else on earth. They're the biggest trees on the planet. If he if they hadn't protected them, they'd be gone. And so the them having the foresight to protect those trees then we still have Sequoia trees. And so that's what we're doing on this river. It's like by protecting three hundred thousand acres of forest we insure

1:08:52 that those millennium trees, those skyscrapers of life. continue to have monkeys, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals. that these tribes continue to live out in the far reaches. And then again to use the football field analogy, in this vast expanse of wilderness, we've found a way to use just like a little Pin prick. To actually bring people and let them see.

1:09:13 this amazing place. And so we you know, the whole ninety nine point nine nine percent of the thing is wild. And we that's why we built that treehouse to let, you know, some of our donors, some of our people'cause now people from all over the world are helping us save this river. And the tree house. That was a dream. You know, there's a there's a mist river that flows above the Amazon. that's invisible and it's larger than the Amazon River itself. There's an invisible mist river above the Amazon that's larger than the river. Mist. Mist.

1:09:42 Okay. And so The first time I saw it. I had climbed the tallest tree in the jungle, which took hours. And I was standing on a branch at dawn and I saw the sun illuminate the mist river going across the canopy.

1:09:56 And I went, I have to share this with people. And so we built that tree house on a promontory at the edge of the terra firma looking out over the jungle. so that people can see the reserve, see all the forests that they're protecting. Because at this point, the way we've see this and see that picture below it. That's the wasteland. That's what happens when you don't protect the Amazon.

1:10:18 Are you at all? On some level. Jealous. Uncontacted tribes.

1:10:26 Live. Is there any part of you that wants to Go and experience their world for a day, or Wishes you could spend some time living how they live.

1:10:37 No. Yeah. No. I really enjoy hanging out with my native friends like when spending a day piranha fishing. Um But I also really love my camera role and doing photography and having modern medicine and being able to FaceTime my mom when I'm in the jungle, like

1:10:52 You know, I I don't I don't I don't I don't have no romanticism about their state. That that seems like stress and destiny. I don't I don't need to I don't want I certainly don't want to do that now. Learn to

1:11:04 I know a westerner like me who's spending a lot of time on And new screens and stuff and Way we live our lives might. Find useful.

1:11:14 I don't think that the that we're at the point where they're imparting lessons. I think we're at they're at the point where we're learning which questions we want to ask. That was first contact. And so at this point Our job is to figure out how do we How do we move forward? What do we what do they need? How do we ethically

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1:13:41 So many photos here. I mean In so many of these photos you're holding massive snakes. And when I say massive snakes, I don't mean

1:13:51 The snakes y you guys listening are thinking about. I mean Anaconda size snakes, like Oh yeah. This was

1:13:59 This was me and J J's first First big anaconda that we big anaconda we caught was only about twelve feet. And uh Yeah, that one that one this was a great snake because I had never caught a big snake before. I'd always been, you know, you catch a small snake and I'd learn from Steverwin, you know you catch a catch a snake by the tail and it's and it might try to bite you.

1:14:19 If you don't get it by the tail, snake's gonna run away every time. Snakes are not Never going to attack you. Period. So I learned you catch a snake by the tail and then it's once you get it by the tail, it's gonna come back at you and try and stop you. From grabbing its tail. Great. And if you need to, you can get it by the head and you got control of the snake. But if you have the head, you have the snake. So that first snake. I mean I'm talking about

1:14:40 A twelve foot snake that's you know, that's at least as thick as my leg. And I ran in there and I said, JJ, you come from that side. I'm gonna come from this side. We get the snake, we're gonna measure, just because we thought it was so fascinating. I ran in and I dove and I grabbed the snake by the head. Big mistake. wraps around my arms and the first thing that I realized was I had an anaconda handcuffs now.

1:15:02 I couldn't I couldn't release the snake if I wanted to because it was around my wrists. And then the second coil came around my shoulders. And now I'm feeling that I can actually hear my collarbone start to Flex the way a stick sounds right before it snaps. And J J grabbed the snake by the tail and pulled the tail off, and then his other brother, they got to me right as I was about to mean literally the eyes were gonna come out of my head. It was gonna crush you. That's what happens.

1:15:27 And so he pulled that right off at the last second. So that was about as close as I came. To knowing what it feels like. But that's not even a big one. I think you came a little bit closer. Yeah. Nah.

1:15:41 That's that that's uh explain this to me. So for anyone that can't wa can't see, I would highly recommend you look at the screen now. Um Please look away. Look away don't listen to him. This is a a an absolutely crazy story. What what's going on in this photo and why did you do that? Sure. This is actually a very Important. Story. You know, you hear these people talk about how you if you're gonna succeed at anything, you have to become

1:16:07 Very familiar. With losing. You almost gotta learn to love it. And and so as we set out on this journey to explore the Amazon. And to

1:16:17 Building. relationships with the indigenous people and to study anacondas and to find a way to protect this place. At around twenty four years old. I got approached by Discovery Channel. And they said kid.

1:16:30 We've never seen one like you. Let's do a show where we take people into the Amazon rainforest and show them anaconas. And I said, That'd be amazing. I said, I would love to do that. I could teach people about the forest. Let's let's go. They said, Great. Don't the only thing is they said, you know, it's not a good enough show if we just show them the science that you're gonna do. Cause we wanted to use as the apex predators of the ecosystem, their you know, if there's mercury in the system, they're bioaccumulating. There are any toxins that are in the Amazon, they're going to absorb. It's gonna get into the fish and then into the cain, into the birds, into the anacondas, they're the apex predator.

1:17:02 We were doing groundbreaking research on anacondas. They said that wasn't good enough. They said imagine If they said no one's you know reticulated pythons have eaten people, they said no one's ever had on record an anaconda eating a human. And I said, It happens. It happens. I know a few people whose grandmother or uncle was eaten by an anaconda. It happens, but it doesn't happen where people no one's taking a picture of it. And so they said, Well, if we make you a really expensive suit, will you get eaten by an anaconda? I said, I'll try. I said, It's not gonna eat snakes are sweethearts, it's not gonna try to eat me.

1:17:32 They said, But look We'll call the show Expedition Amazon. Send you out there with a team of scientists, we'll film the whole thing. Long story short, I agreed to it because what I thought at the time was I keep seeing forest getting burned. I keep seeing my millennium trees go down. All of those monkeys and birds and snakes and beautiful animals that are getting incinerated, and they're telling me.

1:17:53 All I gotta do is to get a TV show that'll reach millions of people and let me get that message out there. All you gotta do is at the end do the silly stunt to show people the snakes aren't that bad. And so we filmed this Show for six weeks. You agreed to what?

1:18:08 I agreed to potentially be eaten by an anaconda. Okay. Okay. I mean if it wanted to if it wanted to, I had a breathing tube and I had a Um

1:18:21 It theoretically could have eaten me, but I knew it wouldn't because I know snakes. But the producers We're very you know, these are people that have never left the the the office building and have watched too many movies. And they wanted to see a guy get eaten by a snake.

1:18:35 And you volunteered. Of course I volunteer. I would have cut off my foot to save the forest. I'll do anything to save the forest. And so when somebody gives you a chance like this, and it's funny, I actually spoke to Jane Goodall about this. I said, There's this chance I have. And I think I could use I think I can navigate this in such a way that that at the you know, we take people on an expedition through the Amazon and at the end I'll go I'll get in the pit in a special suit and I'll let the snake wrap around me and I'll show people that anaconas are really these you know the sweethearts.

1:19:03 And she said, I don't think it's gonna go well. For anyone that doesn't know who Jane Goodall is. Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, the earth shattering scientist who redefined humans from Man the Toolmaker to What we are now the one who did more for conservation, wildlife, women's science than just about anybody else.

1:19:23 She's also the Um person that quoted on the front of your book saying, On behalf of the forests. That I love. Thank you, Paul, for writing this book. From reading through your story, she's um she's quite a hero of yours and has been for a long, long time. Yeah, I mean and going from

1:19:40 when my parents were reading us me and my sister, they'd be reading us stories at night. you know, Jane Goodall and Gombe with the chimps. and how she she didn't listen to the rules, she named them, even though her Her colleague said, You never name your study subjects. And she said, they have names. They're they have personalities, they have names. She broke all the rules. And and so I grew up with Jane as sort of this historical

1:20:02 figure, but she was still like a living historical figure. And so then when I When I when I actually met her It was so incredible because I I met her at a talk that she had given. And this this informed

1:20:16 the rest of my life. The the the grace and wisdom that she showed changed me as a person. because I met her at a talk that she was giving in New York City and I had printed out a couple of chapters. I'd printed out one of the chapters that became my first book. Where I'm taking care of a baby giant anteater. And I printed out a chapter where

1:20:34 Me and JJ were looking for our first anaconda, this story. And I put those together with a little covered letter that's just said, Hey, I love wildlife. I've been working on the Amazon for like And you've always been an inspiration to me. If I write a book. Would you endorse it?

1:20:51 And so I gave this to her in the manila envelope while there was a line of five hundred people and you know we You take the picture and she said, Thank you very much. She puts it aside. I said, all right, you know, I tried my best. Her team

1:21:04 Reached out. And said Jane read the material. She read the chapters and she thinks that they're wonderful. And if you find a publisher Let them know. that Jane will endorse your book. And so then I went to the publishers and I said, I have the endorsement of Jane Goodall. And they said, Well, that's basically Mother Earth herself. And they said, So you so that's what got me in the door to become an author with my first book.

1:21:25 was Jane. you know, she's she was this titan of conservation, this legendary figure, and her just First of all, for someone that was on the road three hundred days a year, that's an icon of science. And conservation and hope. for her to have the presence of mind and the patience and the sense of responsibility to actually read something that some kid handed her.

1:21:48 That's incredible. That's magic to me even to this day. And it and it matters to me and it informs how I re act even to this day. But without Jane. sort of waving her wand in my direction, I would have no career. There'd be no Paul, no Jungle Keepers, no book.

1:22:04 We wouldn't be sitting at this desk today. Dang good I'll save my life. She's uh an iconic scientist, as you say, um known for groundbreaking research on chimpanzees and I work. Generally and globally on on conservation.

1:22:18 Um so you You decide that you're going to be eaten by an anaconda. Oh yeah, that was a tangent, yes. So is this a wild anaconda or is this uh And anaconda held in captivity.

1:22:31 How did you get the anaconda to eat you? So Let me see that next one on the picture. This one. Yeah. This is a snake called Eleanor, and we named her this after my dear grandmother, who was an incredible woman. And uh

1:22:44 And uh The matriarch of our family. Now Eleanor is the largest snake Ever measured at the time, verifiably scientifically measured. She was eighteen feet six inches and over over a hundred kilos. And she was skinny. She hadn't eaten in a while. But imagine if she'd eaten a cappy barrel, she would have been, you know.

1:23:01 Two hundred kilos. But um my team caught her while we were filming this show. And again, we were told the show would be called Expedition Amazon. The call sheet said Expedition EA. Then when we were done doing our research in the Amazon, they said, look, fly to I forget if it was like Kentucky or Louisiana, they said, Fly fly to some state, there's a guy with a snake, no one will know the difference, we'll blur it out. And they said, Do this little stunt. And so we'll put it the last five minutes of the show.

1:23:28 Just to show people and then we'll yeah, we'll hype it up in the news. They're like, We got you. A lot of handshakes, right? The day before I was supposed to go on So Good morning America show with uh Mat Lauer,

1:23:41 Who got mad at me for doing push ups on the set. Um The the day before I was supposed to go on the sh I'm again, I'm a kid and I'm going, I th I think I think we got it. I think we did it. We caught the biggest snake. Ever the footage of us catching that snake is insane. We're all jumping in the river and wrestling this kraken and we catch the snake and we learned from her we did we were it sounds crazy, but we were developing field methodology for studying the species. And we learned all kinds of things about Anaconda's because we fed her a transmitter and we learned how she moves through the environment. This is research that had never been done before.

1:24:18 Basically in her throat that she eats, she consumes, and it stays with her till she dies. So you can see what she's doing. It stays with her until she defecates it. Which for snakes that lot thankfully is months. And so we're doing this groundbreaking research. We caught this tremendous snake. We'd survived a six-week expedition in the Amazon. We had all this incredible footage. And the night before I'm supposed to go out. On the morning shows. They showed me the film.

1:24:43 It had none of the science. It had none of the conservation message. That I was promised would be in the show. And instead they focused on the stunt.

1:24:54 at the end, and they changed the name of the show to Eaton. Alive. And then they sent me out the door. To do the shows. And

1:25:02 The public was mad because I didn't actually get eaten and they felt like they were lied to. PETA was mad because they felt like I had put a A snake's life in danger somehow, somehow, somehow, the animal rights people were furious and And then the scientist were mad'cause they said, Okay, you're just a You know, uh uh a shock person. You're just in in this for the thrill and you're not really a conservationist.

1:25:23 So put me out of work for years. Really? Yes, it set me back about ten years. Really? I Tried it took a big swing. Because I thought it would help my forest.

1:25:33 And I hit my head on the ceiling and fell down hard. The next day the news I mean You know. the all of the late night shows are making fun of it. Jimmy Kimmel was like, you should for your next stunt you should try having sex with a hippo. I mean, people, the comments were just

1:25:47 I went to India and lived with a herd of elephants for a while, I mean I had to get out. I couldn't. I literally couldn't. I said my dream of being a conservationist is over. I was told by one prominent conservationist Not even to come to South America. And

1:26:02 And again, the thing you have to remember through all of this is through the barefoot machete days, through going to the Amazon The first Fifteen years of my twenty year journey, I had no support. Yeah. So I was living out of a backpack.

1:26:15 Living out of a boat in the Amazon, barefoot. With no paycheck, no health insurance. No security. No pathway forward. Um

1:26:25 So it it was it was very uncertain times. You know, that you actually I think it may have been on your show. There's this great quote where I think it was Alex Hormose who was saying that confidence comes from giving people irrefutable proof that you are who you say you are. And when I heard that quote, I thought that's great.

1:26:42 And then the next thing I thought was well But you have to start building that proof in a direction. And for a lot of people I think they find themselves standing on a high hill, looking at a set of mountains, and you have to choose which direction you're going in.

1:26:58 And for me I was a high school dropout. Who was never gonna be a conservation biologist. And I was trained by the local people. And sort of adopted by

1:27:09 Their tribe. And so I knew how to survive in the jungle and work with snakes and do all these crazy things. And I tried. I tried.

1:27:19 Two to take that message to television. And I got Hollywood at hard. I got lied to and I got Taken for a ride.

1:27:27 But that failure ended up being the best thing that ever happened because what it did was it sent me right back to the drawing board. Said you're not ready yet. And so sometimes the things that you Want Are not the things that you need.

1:27:39 And it's this beautiful thing where life sort of moves aside. So I I know I know I know you want that, but I'm gonna I'm gonna give you what you need, not what you want. So this was a case where I really I took it hard. I mean, at the time it was a devastating loss. And it was the best thing that ever happened because it it was the slap on the head that sent me back out into the jungle for years and years and years of of more experience. double down. What do you really care about saving the forest? Well if you care about saving the forest, how the hell are you gonna do that? And we had to develop

1:28:08 A system. to do that. We to develop a new technology as a way to save the forest. Well actually happened here. So we didn't I know you don't want to it sounds like you don't even want to talk about it. It's just wasted air time to talk about it,'cause we we rolled around on in the mud with a sixteen foot anaconda and nothing happened.

1:28:27 A lot of people w will probably want to know why nothing happened and I think part of that is because of what you're wearing. No, the reason nothing happened is because they had snake handlers wrapping the snake around me while I was in this ridiculous suit. Um I mean the things I will do the things I will do to protect this forest. That snake If it was left on its own would crawl off. Any snake

1:28:48 Would would if there was a if I had a black mamba in my hands right now and I put it on this table, it would slide off the table and find the darkest spot in the room and it would go hide. If I had a spitting cobra, same thing. No snake wants to deal with you. They just want to go hide. They want to go back to sleep.

1:29:05 Most people are terrified of snakes. Most people are terrified of snakes, and that's why I think you're gonna like what I have for you. What do you mean? I brought a friend today. You brought a friend. I did bring a friend. And I want you to meet him.

1:29:18 Yeah. Now this Is a very Very small. Ball Python.

1:29:27 This is a baby. And one of the first things I try to impress upon people when they meet a baby snake is remembering that Even if you're scared of snakes. You're the large Apex Predator. And this is just a tiny

1:29:40 Little Reptile. That is all alone in the world. They're born. And they have to fend for themselves. And for some reason, ever since I was a little kid, I was fascinated with snakes. I thought they were beautiful. I love the way they moved.

1:29:54 I thought the way they can hold up their bodies and flick their tongues. I find snakes calming and beautiful and fascinating. Is that snake dangerous? You could hand this snake to a baby. This snake is so harmless. I mean the worst thing that this snake could do.

1:30:12 If I was to let's just say Pinch her and hurt her. She could bite me, but even that would barely break my skin. This is a snake that's gonna look for baby mice, little birds, maybe a frog, and try and grow to a larger size. Now.

1:30:29 Have you ever held a snake before? No. You've never held a snake? I don't think so, no. Oh wow. That's wonderful. Well, this is such an easy one to start with, and I'll give you a few pointers.

1:30:38 Hands are sweating a little bit. So a few things is that. Even a baby baby snake. is going to interpret your

1:30:47 interstate a little bit. If you're very nervous and jittery and The snake is gonna pick up on that. But you see how she's sort of just fitting to my hand? Yeah. She's done a few things here. She's got her anchor, she's got her tail around these two fingers. And the next thing is she's flicking her tongue. She's she's looking around, but she's also

1:31:06 She's not excited. She doesn't mind sweat. Doesn't mind sweat. My hands sweat quite a bit as well. And so I'm just gonna Place her in your hand.

1:31:14 Nice and easy. And what you want to do is let her sort of Grab on. No. Now what are you feeling right now? Let's just see what you get.

1:31:24 That's okay. You can feel tense. Now if you feel tense The thing is, she's probably gonna return to me because she probably knows I love her. Mm. I think she's right. Yeah. And that's okay. Why don't we just let her do that and then you can get a sense for how she moves.

1:31:39 And I'm gonna give her a little hole to crawl through like that. And so what they do is they have all these muscles Running along their body and you can feel that, right? Such a beautiful animal, I do have to say. Yeah. They're called ball pythons, they also call them royal pythons for that. That beautiful black and gold. It's

1:31:57 Can I Can I touch it with my thumb? You can. They don't love being pet. It's one thing about snakes. They don't A lot of people when they come around to suddenly loving snakes, they go, Well, I wanna pet it the way I want to pet a dog, and snakes will retract from that.

1:32:11 So if you Yeah. Touch her with your with your thumb. Yeah, she moves away. She moved away. She moves away. She doesn't like that. So usually with snakes my

1:32:20 My my rule is you you sort of have to be the be the tree. Okay. And if she A baby? Absolutely. These are these this is quite small and so In the jungle.

1:32:31 On cold days I'll find snakes like this and literally warm them up in my hands. I'll put them in here and just if you can just Look at that. Just look at how sweet she is. She'll just stay like that. She likes that. She likes that. She likes the warmth there. We are endotherms, they are ectotherms like all reptiles, they depend on their environment. For there.

1:32:49 Body temperature. And so on the cold days, see that see that? Move my hand closer. She got a little spooked. She went back into the Again, this is just a tiny baby. There's another one. Yeah.

1:33:02 Similarly awesome example. This is Relative.

1:33:10 Same species, right? So this is a small Paul Python and this is a Larger. Paul Python. And notice that both of these, there's no risk, right? There's no

1:33:19 There's no danger here. It's not like I can't put these near my face. Again, both of these are sort of the golden retrievers of snakes. These are these are snakes that have been handled By responsible snake owners. So will that small one grow into the big one? Or you saying they're the same Cousins. Yeah.

1:33:36 This is a larger ball python. This is a smaller ball python. So this one will eventually be this size? Absolutely. And this one could could grow to be double that size, really. I've seen ball pythons be double that size. Now this one. Slightly different game for holding. Yeah.

1:33:55 But see like that. Look who's scared here. Me. Well, and And him. And so look at that.

1:34:02 He's beautiful. So look, I'll just give you a sense of look at the power. In a python. You think pull ups are hard. Holding on with no No legs, no claws, just strength.

1:34:16 And she's gonna climb back up onto my arm. So What I'd like you to do is hold out your wrist. Uh Yeah, you got this.

1:34:33 Just straight across the table. Hold that right like that. Now remember, if he does bite I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Just hold him up high enough that he's not touching the table, yeah. And then I'm just gonna coax him properly. He's okay, you're okay, you're okay.

1:34:50 He's just gonna just just feel that power. As he moves. Well she will. Eventually. But see, you can feel the power on this snake. It's a little bit more of a little bit more musculature.

1:35:06 They are Stunning. See that's it. He's like, Okay, cool. You're holding me here.

1:35:17 They're pretty relaxed animals, so he'll go and eat. A small Pray item. Go back into his burning. And then digest.

1:35:25 For a week. Before going back out. And now you which if you now if you want. you can take your other hand and put it under him to support him and then he'll start to move over both of your hands. Why don't you try that? Put your other hand very gently right under his coil, right there. You got scared of that. That's okay.

1:35:44 Or you could put a thumb through the Through the loop. Could do, good night. Yeah, you could do that. You're loving all these suggestions. Now watch, let's see what happens when we put'em on the table,'cause I bet you anything he doesn't enjoy

1:35:58 You feel that power? You feel that little bit of power there? Yeah. Now that's a snake this big, wait till you see like with an anaconda or something. Now a table's sort of unfair. There's nothing for Him too. See this? He's gonna he's gonna flop a little bit. There's

1:36:12 They're not supposed to be on a table, so this is what I'll do. I'll be the I'll be the ground. See like now he's pushing with All those little belly scales, see how he can cruise?

1:36:25 That incredible snake locomotion. If I take away his Look he he's holds on. They don't wanna Now he's got nothing to push off of, so he's gonna he's gonna do the inchworm thing. But you get a sense of how snakes move.

1:36:38 They need the ground. They need pebbles. They need Rocks. Now you now catch'em. Oh come on, Mike, catch him! No no, serious, not by the head. Start by the tail, just right here.

1:36:50 Pick'em up. And then once you pick'em up, you can give them to me and then we can be done. But but Steven, you have to catch the snake. Pi pick him up here. Just pick him up. He's not gonna do anything. Now nice and slowly too,'cause he's a friendly snake. You don't want to offend him. He seems to be tense.

1:37:04 I mean he is side eyeing you right now. That's what I mean. Like I'm side eyeing him, he's side eyeing me. But I'm telling you. That the snake, all you gotta do is just Take'em up. And then when I pem up what I've done, it's like.

1:37:17 That's all you gotta do. Then this is all over. Oh my god, I can't believe this. Oh my gosh. Right up. Up up.

1:37:28 Amazing. Wonderful. No, I'm gonna take him. Alright, and then I have one more snake that I really need you to meet.

1:37:42 This This is a different story. And this is sort of the closest thing that we're gonna get. to an anaconda.

1:37:52 I think the easiest thing I could do here is Just let her get her out there. Shut down. What you don't want snakes to do is to to close that gap, right? You don't want them.

1:38:04 To wrap around your neck. Could she kill you? She could. But don't bring it over here. Well, I thought I thought you wanted to meet her too.

1:38:11 But w w what if she does something to me? No, so this is a different type of snake. This is a Burmese python. Large constrictors. Those are small constrictors. They're The ball pythons.

1:38:24 This is a larger constriction constrictor. And Burmese pythons get to be big. These can go up to eighteen feet long. And now what I think. you're gonna really appreciate

1:38:36 Is the power that these things have. When you feel that power in it, just don't move. Yeah. Now give her your hand. Take her, take her with your hand.

1:38:46 Good. Very good. Now hold this hand out. Good. Just like that. Now be the tree. Just be the tree.

1:38:56 That's great. You wanna come this way. Hotel is hot. Yeah? Why why's the tip hot?

1:39:06 Maybe she likes you. Okay, now she's just gonna move. Behind your head. I just want you to feel the muscles of that snake. What was that? Oh yeah, that's great. Is she hissing?

1:39:17 She's breathing. That's just her breathing,'cause she's holding on. She's a ground snake, she's not really a tree snake. Now Burmese pythons they grow to be eighteen feet long. They can take down deer. And so what you have right now. This is beautiful. Granite Burmese Python.

1:39:34 Crawling on your shoulders and you're doing great, by the way. You look very calm. Breathe don't forget to breathe. And she can kill a deer. No, no, but she'll grow. She's still a baby. She's still small. She'll eventually be able to Do you know I just I don't want her to

1:39:46 Now here's the thing. I think she likes you. So when I try to take strength. The strength, yeah. She could like break my pinky finger off. Yeah. So let's just see what we do.

1:39:59 So we know a few things. We know that she's not gonna hurt us. We know that she's not gonna eat that banana. I know what she'd like to probably. You wanna come up? Go? Yeah. See, I think they come to me.

1:40:12 I think they know. Have you ever done a podcast with a With a ten foot snake across the table before. No, this is my first.

1:40:25 This is amazing. It's such a it's such a joy to be here with a Burmese Python there. So I really this is the closest I can get you to an anaconda. I wouldn't bring an anaconda here. Their personality's a little different. Oh yeah, different snake species just like

1:40:42 Around certain dog species. Than you would others. Certain snakes now notice look. Now I'm I'm I'm pulling a good deal here and she's not budging. So now what you're gonna do is just

1:40:53 Just Massage the tail. What do you mean massage? I would like you to massage the tail. Just just maybe rub back and forth on her tail and there's gonna be an instant reaction. Yep, just keep doing that. She's not gonna love that. Oh, she's hissing.

1:41:09 Because there might be something back here that she can't see. Well exactly she doesn't want something interacting with her tail. She seems to be stuck to my The the diary. The diary itself.

1:41:23 Okay. Okay, cool. She doesn't like that. Well actually why don't you just lift her lift that coil over up onto the table. You got this. Just like you lifted the other snake, you're gonna have to do this to get through this.

1:41:35 J No see the part that's hanging over? Just lift it up onto the table. Oh my god Yeah. How would you describe it? It's like

1:41:47 Really soft, but then like m he feels like pure muscle. Pure muscle, yeah. She's very she's sh this is a very, very strong snake. It's so heavy, I can't even pull it up. I I I need you to try. Yeah, I think she's resisting. Come on. You're not gonna hurt her. Just right around the edge of the table, just up onto the table. I can't I can't go to that. Come on, you got this. You got the believe in yourself. Pretend we're in the Amazon back and this snake is strangling me to death, and the only way to save my life is to take that snake's tail up.

1:42:15 Uh but Stephen She's gripping to the tape. My eyes are popping out of my eyes. Yes, you can. Come on. Pull her out. Bring her around. You got this. Look at your arms. I know, I know I'm scared. You got this. You got this. Believe in yourself. Come on, get her up. Just just do it.

1:42:35 There there is no try. She doesn't want to make it. Don't make don't make me come over to the other side of that snake and get her. Come on, you got Yeah. There we go. There we go. That wasn't so bad. She's wrapped around the diary and inside the diary. Listen, the the diary has to remain intact, girl.

1:42:55 So yeah. Which is This is a beautiful Beautiful snake. But

1:43:01 You sort of see how people have a misconception about snakes. Now what she's trying to do right now Even this snake that knows what what humans are, she's just trying to say All right, get me out of here. You know, she's going, Where can I go rest? And what what does she eat when she grows up? Wha what do these Well, Bermuse Pythons they get big. So she's gonna start with rats and birds and frogs and they start small, they sm start just like the ball python.

1:43:25 But when she gets big, you're talking about I mean, Burmese pythons Deer. Dogs. Uh Burmese pythons, I don't think, are confirmed eating humans reticulated pythons, which is actually the longest interesting fact. Anachondas are the biggest snake on earth.

1:43:40 Articulated pythons are the longest. That are on YouTube. having eaten humans. They're confirmed man eaters. But these berms.

1:43:51 They're just big, powerful snakes and they're They're pretty placid. It's such a beautiful animal. Even though it is a little bit scary, um for some reason. I think maybe because we've all grown up watching films like Anaconda. Yeah, we think of snakes as being Terrifying, but it's such a beautiful majestic. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Alright, maybe you were right. So this is interesting. Anacondas have bigger

1:44:16 Yeah, they don't like being touched on the head and they don't like um they don't like their The way it got touched. The base of their tail. Their vent. Should people be scared of snakes?

1:44:26 I think people should be respectful of snakes, the same way respectful of heights. Go get Steven. Good girl. Good girl. Go get'em. Go get the diary. Would she eat the banana?

1:44:39 Yeah. No, they are what we call obligate carnivores. They can only Eat. Uh Other animals.

1:44:47 But I mean whatever they can fit. Unfortunately Burmese pythons have been introduced to Florida. And There's no predators in Florida that can handle the Burmese python, so they're eating the alligators. The birds, the native wildlife, they become a terrible invasive species. Which is sort of bad P R for Burmese Pythons, but

1:45:06 When they're in their native habitat of South East Asia. They're just wonderful. Big. Apex predator snakes. Can she bite? A hundred percent.

1:45:16 They have big teeth. If she was to bite one of us right now it would draw quite a bit of blood. I mean she has to be able to latch on to her prey, right? So all the more credit goes to her for not doing that. Go get Steven. Good girl. Good good. Maybe you should have the head down that end. I think I think see now what I'm doing is I'm massaging the tail because I know that she's gonna go for you.

1:45:40 Good girl. Yeah, right at him. Right. No, come on, come on, let it go. Yes, good girl. Oh this is so great.

1:45:53 This Burmese python is wants to know what is inside the diary of a CEO. He's trying to hide. Yeah, she is trying to hide. And so you know what, we're gonna let her do that. She's been a very good sport. I'm gonna take her.

1:46:08 That's fantastic. It is a be it's such a majestic animal. Like I Slightly scary, but also. Over the cameras.

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1:46:57 Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests, and also the episodes that we've never ever released. And so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember for now we're only inviting the first ten thousand people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to D O A C Circle.com. Dot com I will speak to you then.

1:47:42 What would you say to a young person who's probably in the pursuit of a completely different dream. W are there anything that you consider to be transferable for anyone in the pursuit of their dreams that you learn in those fifteen years in your Barefoot Machete days? Yeah, I think that the you have to log your time As A beginner.

1:47:59 In order to earn your time as a master. And there's this beautiful saying that I start the book with, which is that the Master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. And that to me is beautiful. And so it was like when I went down there

1:48:16 And began Even trying to catch a fish. You know, I didn't know how to do anything. And and and I would look at these conservation biologists. and and just think, My God, I'm never gonna be one of them because I'm never gonna have the grades to be a conservation biologist.

1:48:33 Now at the point we're at now where we are we have this global movement around conservation, we have this huge conservation organization that's fighting to do something historic. I do get messages from kids all over the world. That say I I I really want your job. Or I wanna get out there and I wanna do I want to follow my dream.

1:48:51 What would you say to them? Well I had a kid recently that he he messaged me and he said, I really want to study great whites. He said, But marine biology is so competitive and and none of the professors will give me you know I said, listen. Forget all that.

1:49:03 I said, Do your school, get it done. I said, but go to the doc. Find out where the preeminent Marine biologists are going. to go do their great white research. Go to that doc. Help them with their bags. Get off your phone, get off the internet, stop asking permission, get

1:49:19 Get on your feet. And go there. To the waves. And Sooner or later they're gonna need help with their bags. Sooner or later they might invite invite you on the boat.

1:49:30 And after you've been helping with their bags and invited on the boat, maybe you take some pictures of a pivotal moment that they use to communicate their work to the world. At some point you can find a way to make yourself useful to them. And if you do that for long enough You might just end up being somebody that's a core member of their team. People that those are. Family barbecues must have asked you if you had a plan B.

1:49:51 Are you a fan of clan bees? I think I actually think that I'm not the example to follow because I went so my I had I burned the boats. I had no plan B. And and and now as I'm sitting across the table from you, it's very easy. I remember being younger and hearing these people and you listen to a successful business person go, you know, if I could do it, then anyone could do it. If it could happen to me, then Shut up. You already made it. Like and it's like if you if you

1:50:17 read the pages of that book and how many times I almost died, had infections. almost fell off of cliffs, got bitten by animals. Also the the internal struggle of Then being thirty two. You know, eighteen is Oh, go follow your dreams. Twenty five. They're like, Yeah, that's cool.

1:50:35 And then something happened when I was around thirty two, thirty three that was sort of the the lower point for me, right before My my dad was dropping me off somewhere one day and And and my dad would always always supporting me, bringing me to the jungle, taking me to the airport, bringing me home. I didn't have the money to get myself there with taxis and Ubers and stuff and But there came this moment where, you know, I'd written my first book.

1:50:59 Harper College. I've gotten a real publisher. The book came out and it went nowhere. So even that, I tried to be You know, on Discovery Channel. I'd tried to write a book.

1:51:10 I wrote a good book. I knew people liked it, it had a high rating. Didn't do anything, that didn't change anything. I'd start an organization. I started jungle keepers. I'd turn loggers into and gold miners into conservation rangers. We protected like fifty thousand acres of rainforest, but still there was some feeling. Like it just wasn't you know, you're striking Flint and I'm like it's just not the fire's not catching. There's something missing. It wasn't happening. He

1:51:33 My dad went You know we love you no matter what. No. Don't do this.

1:51:43 He said, No no no, you know, you know, if you Eventually he goes, If you need to jump ship and start over, he's like, You know, we'll help you with whatever you need and I said, What do you mean start over? And he was like, Well, you know, I mean, what are you gonna do this jungle guy thing forever? And I went Oh God. Oh god.

1:51:59 Like, no. And you know, and then he said, And if and if you do need to do that forever It's okay. And it's like but they they didn't They couldn't conceptualize it, and it was very soon after that that that that on that graph. It was very, very soon after that. It was actually right at the point that I quit.

1:52:15 Right before Covid. And this is this is sort of the the lowest point that I was supposed to never tell anybody. And I wrote about it in the book where before Covid when Covid hit Couldn't get to the jungle. Our whole team had coveted. Peru was the hardest hit country in the world. I mean all of my staff, my friends, my family in Peru, they were all on oxygen tanks. Whose mother, whose sister, whose daughter was dying. We

1:52:37 Bankrupted ourselves, sending money. We the whole we took the whole ecotourism business and sent all the money to Peru to get our friends oxygen tanks and to keep our family alive. And It was also during that time that I realized I have nowhere to go. Like in this world. I was like, I don't make sense in this world anymore. And I I called my best friend, I called Mos and my best friend, I said and I said, Don't I said, Don't tell anybody what I'm about to say, but I said, I'm gonna go get a job.

1:53:05 I've been doing this for so long. I tried really hard. I tried for fifteen years. I said I'm out of gas. I I'm out of I'm out of ideas. I have I have been burning so bright. I've been making making the fire myself. I said, I got nothing. I got no more ideas. And of course he said you shut up. He said you inspired me.

1:53:27 You started jungle keepers, you know, I don't wanna ever hear this from you getting hung up on me. But I said but I told him, I said, I quit. I said, I'm out. I'm done. I'm done. I don't have no hope left. And exactly a week after I made that phone call where I quit. our first big funder reached out. A billionaire named Daxilva had seen my video.

1:53:47 Of saying the Amazon is destroying. We have the people, we have the plan, we have the infrastructure. All we need is the funding, and we can save this river. And the week after I quit. And uh in the alchemy of the universe. That's when he called me and said, You know what?

1:54:02 Green light. Let's do it. How about a five year commitment? Raifun Jungle Keepers. And we turn the local ranger the local loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. We get you and some of your guys a salary and we make this whole thing viable. And by the way, let's protect another hundred thousand acres of forest.

1:54:22 And if we hadn't spent years and years and years chipping at the same piece of granite, just just whether or not you can hammer through granite depends whether or not you continue to whack. The hammer and so For me and JJ For Mosin who was sort of the first iteration, the first person that came and and took the photos that allowed us to communicate all of those photos of burning forest and the wreckage.

1:54:47 He was the first he came in the barefoot machete days and he said, I mean, that was at a time where I didn't even know anything was ever gonna happen. And he said, you know. What you guys are doing here is special. We have to show it to the world. And so On that graph, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then a little blip.

1:55:02 All of a sudden we had a funder. And then once you once you get a funder, when when you're when you're doing it all by yourself, nobody's rooting for you. And then once you once you start Once you start to get a little momentum and a little notoriety, all of a sudden then everybody comes. So then then I quit and that was the lowest point and then all of a sudden he rescued us and we started going up. And then we started sharing it, and then we got to the United Nations, and then we got to and all of a sudden we started gaining this momentum.

1:55:26 And that that that that magic that Jane had given us with her words also served as as sort of a blessing that carried us forward, because people said, Well if Jane Goodall gave you this excalibre sword of her blessing.

1:55:41 Go forth and save the Amazon. And everything changed. How do people know? In the pursuit of their dreams, whether they should throw in the towel or not. Like how y based on your experience there.

1:55:55 If someone came to you and said, Look, I've been tr I've been doing something for a long time and I don't know whether to Keep going or not. Is there a framework or an idea That you might offer them I think that

1:56:10 In my case. If I follow the rational advice I would fail. If I was giving myself advice as a rational person I would say

1:56:22 After the first ten years. Cut your losses and stuff. What are you doing? It doesn't make any sense. Cause then even after fifteen years, what am I gonna do? Go go then enter the workforce with no skills and no resume and no nothing. It just it was getting more and more extreme and I was like, Okay, well I'm just gonna be this Jack Sparrow jungle character. I don't know. For

1:56:43 For for everyone it's gonna be different. But I can tell you this much, if you're not willing to go all in. You're not gonna win. Like you have to take that risk. And so you go, Okay, I've been

1:56:56 I've been I've been doing this thing for ten years and and I just Well you're a hundred percent not gonna get it if you stop. But at the same time, there's this haunting quote in the In the razor's edge.

1:57:08 This book where they say many are called and few are chosen. And I think that goes for whether you're starting a business Or a band. Or trying to be a writer, or whatever it is. It's you have to know when it's When it ceases to be chasing your dreams and becomes sort of a sad suicide, and then and then, you know.

1:57:26 w at what point I was very worried that it was gonna become my identity. that I was the jungle guy, so I just just keep being the jungle guy. Mm. And then there's no getting out of it. I'd have to do it'cause I said I would. And so I think for people maybe having an option B is a good idea. That might be one of the things that I learned.

1:57:42 Is that having some sort of an option B might be good. This is um. as you've highlighted, the great risk of giving people advice when you've reached the top of the mountain. Because it's easy from the top of the r mountain to recite. How you manage to climb.

1:57:57 But you you like even when I think about myself as a podcaster, like if someone came and asked me, Yeah, how do you build a podcast or how do you build a business, whatever I Probably won't Point at the luck and the timing and the fortune. As much. I'll point at the things that I did intentionally.

1:58:12 Um and I'm completely unaware of the fact that actually you know, even with the podcast, like starting a podcast in twenty twenty when we first came to YouTube was like the perfect timing. Yeah. And at the time we didn't know it was the perfect timing. Yeah. We were just out there on the wave and then as it came into shore. And so y but you look at the statistics and go Look, there's a lot of people that wanna be conservationists and there's lots of people that wanna be podcasters or entrepreneurs, whatever.

1:58:36 Most of them. Don't make it. Yeah. So they're not sat here talking. They're not here now.

1:58:43 Yes. Because they you know, something happened, they gave up, they couldn't make it, the business went bust. And there's a really interesting I'm probably gonna butcher this, but it's an interesting story I read about These fighter jets, I think it was in World War One. And um

1:58:56 You might have heard the story, these fighter jets come back with holes in them. So everybody sat there, all these engineers said, Well, if we want to figure out how to make better fighter jets, Let's study where the bullet holes are because then we know where people are shooting. So they took the jets down, they looked at where the bullet holes were, and they said, We'll reinforce those sections. An engineer at the back, and I've forgotten his name but I'll put him up on the screen, shout out Shouldn't we look at where there isn't holes?

1:59:21 Because Where there isn't holes, those ones didn't come back. And this is the whole pro the problem with survivorship bias is actually maybe you should be getting advice from the people in the graveyard, not the people that came back. Maybe you should be looking at where the whole The bullets didn't hit.

1:59:38 Because that's the fatal area, if that makes sense. And I think there's a lot, it's really in the last couple of years, I've got more cautious about giving people advice for the same reasons you said. Yeah, I mean you gotta remember every one of the frozen bodies on Everest were once a highly motivated rich person that thought they could succeed. And now they're an icicle. Mm-hmm. And so

1:59:57 I mean It's surreal to be sitting here, especially today, on the day that I got the news that this book is a New York Times bestseller. And again, now I'm immediately I'm I'm I'm having that reaction to myself where I'm going, Don't give advice. Because they they should not do that. I did very dangerous.

2:00:16 risking my life with anacondas and risking my life with being hunted by narco Traffickers. risking spending my life doing something that would have no benefit. Risking spending my life simply just being an adventurer. Great. Okay.

2:00:35 Well, how am I contributing? The whole thing was that I wanted to have purpose, I wanted to have a meaning and and change things. And so I I This is not a blueprint for people to do what I did. It's a bluepr, oh look what this person did. But people have to I mean, that's the whole game, right?

2:00:51 That's the other thing, we've become very precious about You know. But you know what? one thing that the uncontacted tribes or reading about the Comanches Um, or watching an animal hunt, you know, you watch a tiger hunt and in every single hunt that the tiger goes on

2:01:07 They are they're they're betin all the chips. Like a large deer can kick and split their skull or knock their front teeth out with a hoof, and that might be the last hunt that tiger ever goes on. But sort of betting the house is part of the game. And so that's part of where I got to, where where I was so many years in and Once once we got to a certain point, once we you know, there was that there was that

2:01:29 That dip where I said, maybe I'm not this guy. And you have to choose who you are, right? It's like you know, the oracle told it said the Neo. She goes, You know, you're not the one. You go, Okay. You know, and I I I did that to myself. I went, Well, I'm not it this isn't gone going to work. But then once then then a few years later, if you talked even if you talked to me two years ago, I would have said

2:01:50 I don't care what happens. I'm just gonna keep riding boats through the Amazon. It'll be fine. I didn't know. That it was going to go like this. And that now we're all of a sudden now we are the ones

2:02:02 responsible for carrying on Jane's message. Of hope. of reminding people that you can turn around. A seemingly terminal. situation.

2:02:12 Where the entropy of global modernization is destroying one of the largest ecosystems on earth. What could one person possibly do? Well we found a way. There is something poetic in the idea that You were pushed to your edge of being able to survive. And at the moment when

2:02:32 You got right to the edge of your own survival. Yeah. The torch of Helping the Amazon to survive was then passed to you. When I was a kid you learn these stories, you hear the old stories where You know, the young man goes on an expedition and along the way he meets a a beggar and he helps the beggar cross the bridge. And then you know he's going through this way and he meets some bird that's stuck in a in a net and he helps the bird. And then you know, then later on when he finds the princess and he's trying to fight the dragon and then all of a sudden the beggar helps and then the bird gets him out of the thing and it's like, Oh, these people come in and they help.

2:03:00 Th that was the archetypal story that I got. And I think that that's also the archetypal story that then I ended up living where it's like You know, J J said we should I'm local and we should protect this forest. This place we should protect.

2:03:13 I was like That's amazing. And I was and he and he had the keys to the Amazon. We got to go on adventures. And then it was like Moson showed up and he's like, I got the camera, man, I could show the world what you do. And then we had this guy Stefan showed up and other people showed up. And all of a sudden, you know, you you start to amass this team of Avengers. Where you go, Wait, wait, hold on. These people really talent people that have

2:03:32 And I we didn't realize, you know, J J's the jungle man. Bosan's a photographer. Stefan came in, he was running teams at Apple. Jane Jane's the mentor. Jane's Jane's the wizard. Jane's the Gandalf. Jane was the one saying this is what you got to do. You gotta get the ring to Mount Dune. And uh

2:03:50 And then suddenly it happens, but but you can't You can't. You know, that that whole thing of in in the movies where it's like, you know, there's ten guys with guns and you go, How are they getting out of this one? You know, and it's like w I've been in that situation so many times and I think in order to have the luck of getting bailed out, you either better be a mega black belt and have some real good friends.

2:04:11 And they better show up when it counts. And so it's like you don't wanna give people advice to do that because'cause then you're telling them to to take risks they shouldn't be taking. But Coming from someone who took all the risks who bet my entire life. on becoming a jungle keeper and saving a river.

2:04:29 And who spent my entire life on going on these expeditions and jumping on anaconas and running from elephants when I was in Africa and India. I happen to have made it. In my job as a podcaster I meet lots of People who have climbed to the top of their proverbial mountains, whether it's in comedy or sports or business or as a conservationalist. And I think one of the things they do all have in common. Yeah.

2:04:52 Is At some point in the hero's journey, they took a unusual set of actions for an unusual period of time. Yes.

2:05:01 And so I think about that as a principle maybe That can be transferable is if you do want an unusual outcome, whatever that means. Unusual behavior of some sort is the precursor.

2:05:13 And actually at moments in my life where I hit Fatigue or Things are more challenging, I always remind myself of that these days. I always say This is probably like why most people

2:05:27 Don't get an unusual outcome because this was is the logical moment to like Fucking pack. Throw it in. Pack up the bags and go. And um When I look at some of my great mentors in the different fields that I'm in.

2:05:38 That's exactly what they did. They just persisted for like an unusual amount of time. I think persistence in your story is such a Through line. Yes, I would say relentlessness.

2:05:49 Is The most powerful element. If you're trying to achieve your dreams. Because you're going to get knocked down again. And again.

2:05:59 And you find yourself in the rain, lost in the forest, and you can't even see the trail. I always say That you know We didn't even know where we wanted to go. You know, and it's like we just kept doing. It's like the painter who just goes, I don't even know what I'm painting, but I'm just gonna keep learning how these colors work.

2:06:17 You know, just just keep going because it's an obsession. And you can't really You can't really Facen obsession. Right. If you if you're gonna spend ten thousand hours throwing a basketball through a hoop.

2:06:30 You're doing that because you love it. And there's work and there's discipline and there's times where you're you're gonna feel that dip and that rise. But if you're really doing it, You're even in the game. It's because you love it. Mm-hmm.

2:06:42 So if you can find something that you love. then you can start building that irrefutable proof of who you are because you can go, Okay, well I've logged a certain amount of time doing this thing I love. Mm. What is meaning? To to you in your life.

2:06:55 What is that? Is it responsibility? Is it something else? Well there's that thing of that the y you the the more mean you your your meaning is directly correlated to how much respil responsibility you take on. That that we've all heard a hundred times, but To me it it's I I've I've lived in a world where things are reduced to such Um

2:07:17 an incredibly basic level. It's like I've Lived in the mud. with a machete and if I want to eat I get a fish. And so like the truth of the rain and rocks has become my sort of religion. And the way that I connect with God.

2:07:31 Through the Very simple f chemical, physical elements of the universe. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

2:07:41 Have you always believed in God? Uh I think, you know, everybody goes through that period in their teens and twenties where you sort of go, I I can believe in whatever I want, or I can not believe in whatever I want. And then I think as you as you mature I think a lot of people

2:07:57 come back. It's also societally It became very, very uncool for a while to say that. You almost couldn't say it. You almost had to sneak your ass to church. You know?

2:08:06 Um the if if i the people that wake up and go, all this is very unimpressive to me. I'm a walking miracle and I think there's no God and I'm unimpressed. It's like you you have a lot of delusions, my friend. Um we are floating on a rock through space right now. Not a single person has an explanation of what we're doing here. All these incredible chemical processes are happening in the rivers in our veins. And in the Amazon, When I dip my hands into the river.

2:08:36 I drink from the river. And you hold your arm up in the sun and you watch the vapor come out of your skin, the same moisture that you just drank. And it joins the clouds, rains back on the jungle and becomes the river again, and you are part. of the cycle. You just tend to believe in God.

2:08:58 because you feel like it's flowing the river and the sky are flowing through you. And that's the nature version. I mean, it can also just be hugging your grandma. I wondered if your deeper understanding of science and Evolution. And all these things might have made you more

2:09:15 Atheist or agnostic. No, I think science is the language of God. I don't think that they're opposing forces. Do you do you believe in Evolution. And it's not a matter of believing in evolution. We have we have

2:09:28 We have animals in transitional forms, it's very clear through the fossil record that absolutely evolution is happening. I just think that everyone I don't I'm not sure where this black and white argument even came from. I don't think it makes sense. To me then the wild is the church. And so when I see trees cut down I Feel it. I feel like people

2:09:46 People are If we have a role as humans and you said what's meaning, if we have a role as humans on this planet, it is to care for each other and the other things. It seems like that's the game, right? there's drugs and addiction and and and and cheating and stealing and lying. And there's all these there's all these pitfalls that you can fall into. So easily. The game is rigged so that all these things feel really good.

2:10:09 Right. Real good. While you're doing'em. But you can literally lose the game permanently. You know, you do a little bit of meth'cause it felt good.

2:10:20 All of a sudden you're a meth head and all of a sudden you're dead. It's like you can very quickly get, you know, couple of drinks a day over the course. of a couple of decades and you miss a couple of birthday parties and all of a sudden you know it's like you can you can very quickly in the wild It teaches you the f that fastidiousness.

2:10:38 You know, if you don't check your boat every day. Before it rains, after it rains, make sure it didn't fill with water. It's like the line between survival And Death is so small.

2:10:49 And so I think that the meaning I found is that We are floating on a rock. In space. And there's only so many animals and people here, and life is the antithesis to all of the frigid blackness that is the universe. And this is the only place that we know for certain.

2:11:05 That life exists. Right. And we live at this moment in history when we're losing animals like elephants and polar bears and tigers and the rainforests and the ocean fisheries, the whales And we still have a chance to save them. And if we save them, then our children have

2:11:22 Clean air. Fresh water. beautiful places. The world continues to work as it always has. And so the relationship that we have to the people around us and to the creatures around us and to the environment around us is incredibly meaningful. There is a little meme I saw where it said, Uh if you're being if you're overwhelmed by the events of the world Go outside and look at the birds, you are as meaningless as a sparrow.

2:11:47 And I w man, as an ecologist Each animal plays a crucial role in the ecosystem. You know, hummingbirds are transporting pollen and the snakes are eating the rats and the the the the predators are regulating all of the prey animals and the trees are providing shade and the animals are engineering the the forest and the forest is Engineering the animals.

2:12:06 You are not the the birds are not pointless. Whoever wrote that was stupid. And the people reading it aren't pointless either, is the point. Many humans think that we are a dominant, more important species than The snake that you just wrapped around my neck or the sparrow in the trees.

2:12:28 Do you believe that's the case? Do you believe that humans are more important than If you were to Remove humans from planet earth. Everything would get better. In like days just like in Covid, like the national parks, the bears were frolicing on the trails and everything.

2:12:43 Um if you were to remove ants from planet Earth, nature would collapse. Right. So if you want to talk about ecological importance, we're not that important. That you'd have to think more holistically. We're just one of many different species. But we were able to you know. rule the world because of our intellect. But we are the apex or the human brain is the most complex thing that we know of.

2:13:05 And so in that way we are the stewards. We are the jungle keepers. We are the ones that are supposed to be caring for the rest of this. And so again, whether or not we can I mean there's sort of this this People say that you know the there's times are worse than they've ever been. And it's like I go I'm down in the jungle, right? So I'm down there. I miss out on a lot. I come out, I come up here and people are

2:13:26 People are I rate about some new news thing. Right. What someone said to someone or what someone And I always come up and I'm like, Man, civilizations rise and fall. The health of our oceans, the existence of our rainforests.

2:13:42 We're dealing with a with a a a a one way door in history right now. You think World War Two was big? The ecological collapse of our planet is Pending But it's not too late. Jane was right, there's still hope.

2:13:56 But we're the last generation that's gonna have it. And so it's like first of all, if you feel meaningless Go put your boots on and help. You know, if Churchill the day before D Day was going, Oh, it's probably not gonna work, what would have happened? And it's like we are alive at the most exciting time in history. Not only is there a million things that need to be done, there's people all over the world that's doing it. So one of the things I've started telling to young people, the advice that I can give is go find someone that you admire. Go find a master who's doing the work that you want to emulate and put five years in working for them.

2:14:28 Don't go try to start your own project right away. Don't go try to start saving the world before you know how it works. Go find the guy that's tracking the snow leopards that's up in the mountains. Find him. Follow him, learn from him. If it's a business, go find the person that's doing whatever it is you want to do. lear from them. I've seen peop brilliant people with great business ideas that don't have the people skills. Go learn those people skills. Go work with the people that have those people, that easy common touch where they can just shake your hand and all of a sudden you feel like you're the they're your best friend.

2:14:59 My whole thing, I mean us starting an organization that can protect the jungle Me and JJ could could could whack and machete and catch all the anaconas we want. Most of them was taking pictures of and we had this team that was like doing you know the motor it was going. But it wasn't starting. And then I mentioned the guy Stefan, who was running teams at Apple. Now this guy This man knows how to run a spreadsheet.

2:15:23 This man knows how to run teams of people. He knows how to organize things. So he came in and went, Wait, what are you trying to try to do? You're trying to do this. Why don't you do it this way? You save a bunch of money by doing it this way. And he started running the teams. And so we needed we we realized we we he we needed things that we didn't even know existed. And so again, the relentlessness you the relentlessness you you survive to another day. But For people going out, find those people because we learned things.

2:15:49 from these people that we meet. I mean even from Dax, he came in and provided the funding. But also this is a man that won capitalism. As a billionaire, he's someone that knows how to run a business. He said, Okay, so this is how you're gonna run your Ranger program. Tell me how you're gonna do this. Just as a friend and consultant, You end up learning so much from him. The very antithesis of what

2:16:08 I saw when you played at the moment in California and Texas with humanoid robots and AI. Yeah it's a

2:16:21 The opposite. Yes. We live in opposite worlds. I I wondered if you had any thoughts about this world we're heading into where people might have microchips in their brain and we'll have humanoid robots and they're forecasting there'll be a billion um of these humanoid robots in the future, and AI is now so intelligent that They're saying within a year or two they'll be AIs that are smarter than every human that's ever lived. And even one example of the humanoid robot situation that blew my mind is When one of the robots learns something

2:16:49 All of the robots learn it. And obviously you were just talking up there about having to learn from mentors, well with humanoid robots. and the future that we seem to be huddling towards. Um It seems like they might be the

2:17:01 The Apex. Species. I wondered if you've thought much about the technological acceleration of the earth and The risk of that and 'Cause it's the opposite of everything you're talking about in so many ways.

2:17:14 It is and it isn't. I mean I like I love Living in modern times, I think that like heart surgery. and and your iPad and the cameras. I think like I love so much of modern technology. Um Flight.

2:17:27 My God, how I love flight. We can go anywhere. Would have taken them eight months. Um This new obsession that everybody has It it not a lot of things get me biblical, but it makes me think of the the you know, thou shalt not with the false idols. Everyone is so obsessed about AI, shut up.

2:17:46 Go outside, touch some grass, don't worry about the robots. We don't live in minority report yet. And it's like if it's coming, first of all, we are the engineers of our reality. Right. Jesus. So where are these robots gonna come from unless we make'em?

2:17:59 And if they're so smart, well then get on your knees and pray to them. You know, it's like do whatever, but I th I think that As as as more and more people like rebel against the AI slop they see in their feeds. As more and more people appreciate real human art.

2:18:19 And what it takes a person to stare at a wall with a with some paint and create something that could move you to tears. I think that we're going through a period of delirious adolescence with a new technology, just like at Y2K, everyone was like, everything's gonna shut down and nothing's gonna work. And it's like okay, great. I'll be on a hike. The world's gonna continue to work. And

2:18:41 You know, they've been saying we're gonna have flying cars for how many years? We still don't have'em. Everyone's like we should go colonize Mars like great. Fuck Mars though. Yeah. Let's fix this planet, prove that we're capable. Of managing. It's like the kid going, I wanna take over the company and the father going

2:18:58 Get your room clean. I think what you do might be hugely benefited by everything that's going on with technology and AI, in part because I think people are People's appreciation for community, for nature, for things that are irreplaceably human is only going to increase. I have you know I have a couple of like wild hypotheses and one of them

2:19:18 is that people are gonna wanna in a world where we no longer need to gather in cities for um collective labor, which is basically why cities in large part. They will then want to be out In nature. Yeah. Because our Maslovian need of being out in the trees and the all we get and the mental health benefits are gonna remain the same even if there is robots. And actually if I don't need to be in a city, where would I w rather be? In the beautiful. In the beautiful nature. I was saying to my friends the other day, I think people are gonna start buying up

2:19:45 farmland and natural places because You notice that when everyone sort of makes it and gets rich enough that they can do what they want, they go get a house in the country. Exactly. Where they can raise their kids, breathe some air, not just traffic exhaust. And but what I'm what I'm not Understanding though is why everyone's so worried about it.

2:20:05 I mean, everyone's acting like it's the beginning of Terminator Two. Except no one's catching on. Right. And and but but uh again, if you listen to What's the guy's name who runs NVIDIA?

2:20:16 Um Jen Juan? Yes. His I I listened to him on on Joe Rogan and it was amazing'cause Rogan has the ability like most like like which is why he's so good at it. He asked the questions we all wanna ask. And he was like, When is AI gonna take over? And Jensen was like, listen. Um, AI is going to optimize how effective humans can be at their jobs, right? Like he was like I think he said with radiologists, he goes, We thought we'd not need any more radiologists. He's like Yeah.

2:20:40 it made radiologists better at their jobs. And it's like I think that the hysteria of like robots taking it's like, well that's good, let's use some robots to deliver packages. Like great. But I don't think that this this this This anticipatory doom that everyone's feeling on these fallen times of everything's about to change. Again, real like literally, actually, guys, go touch the grass. Like it's I'm serious. Like it's not I come back from the jungle where I'm fighting to save the trees that make the air that these people are breathing. And

2:21:12 I'm I'm a little bit a little bit shocked by the the amount of hysteria that I'm seeing. And like I'm down there getting hunted by narco traffickers and and and and running from the flames. And these people like you won't believe what I saw on the news today. And I'm like I got it. I'm going back. Do you consume this stuff? Are you on social media? No.

2:21:32 Do you have apps and social media apps on your phone? It's funny. I got into a fight. Somebody I'm sure that we'll get this reaction for this conversation, but people kinda get mad at me about this, where I go, I don't I don't wanna That sort of civilization's rise and fall thing, a lot of people get very offended because they're very invested in the news cycle. And and they're very hysterical and they almost want to hold on to their hysterics, right? And to me it's very important. I was just sitting at a table with people and they said, Yeah, the world's going to shit. It's never been worse. First of all.

2:22:01 Live it the most peaceful time in history. There's better technology. We can save your life. We can almost, you know, cure so many different diseases. We've never we've had this expanding compassion. Версій с лерд. To be more compassionate.

2:22:15 That differences don't make us less, right? And now we're even expanding that to understand, like, oh wait, the other creatures on this planet matter too. We've never been more Dedicated. to compassion. I mean I was just at a conservation conference and I was meeting people who were making period pads for girls in Africa who don't have access to them. I know people who are trying to save cheetahs. I I'm seeing people doing amazing work all over the news. And you know what the news is reporting? It was you know, that there's an assassination in the Philippines. We're tribal. We're supposed to only know what's going on in our village. Not s doom scrolling through a thousand tragedies a day. That's of course it's gonna send your brain on fire.

2:22:53 So I've I have none of that. I go on to Instagram, I've curated it so that it's my feed. I see conservationists rescuing elephants. I see a couple of artists that I really like. I have a couple like just all really cool stuff. I never go to that like that page that just shows you the internet. I never do that. Just don't do it. Just don't do it. It's bad for you. It's really, really bad for you. I watch people doing it scary. Well I did go to the Amazon, I went with my now fiance and she Wanted to do some plant medicine.

2:23:24 Yeah. Um as I said to you before we started recording, I couldn't do it because apparently I hadn't followed the diet regime properly. Yeah. But um I know that you did ayahuasca. And for anyone that doesn't know, ayahuasca is a powerful psychoactive brew from the Amazon used traditionally by indigenous Cultures. How did your experience with ayahuasca change you? What happened and how did it change you? Oh God. Again, I'm I don't know why. I'm I'm very'cause I'm I'm just I'm just in a mood today. Um there's no filter.

2:23:51 I don't I don't know. This is one of the chapters I didn't know if I should put in the book, because I gotta take people through the whole thing because the shaman that we knew. was the old shaman. It was JJ's gr JJ's old father's best friend. And so he old guy who's been mixing ayahuasca in the forest for decades and learned from the the ancient guys. Now the first time I did it. It wasn't such a big deal. I saw some geometric patterns I threw up. I had a conversation with a tree.

2:24:22 It was okay. The problem is The old shaman at eighty something. fell asleep while he was boiling the ayahuasca. And it became

2:24:33 more intense in its potency. And so when we drank the normal dosage, we were receiving a mega dose. And I went on a trip that I would never ever ask to go on. I'm talking about the creation of the universe, the big bang. I mean, I went through worlds. I for a while I was shapeless in outer space between solar systems. I mean it was like It was horrifying.

2:24:59 And when we woke up the shaman was gone. You know, people drink ayahuasca and they go, I'm gonna go on a journey, I'm gonna focus on this, I wanna I have my intentions over here, and I wanna This was this was just wormholes and explosions and and and just just craziness. And in the morning we found the shaman and he was laying in a stream naked, like the way they find E. T. at the end of the movie and uh I said, what the hell happened? And he said, I overboiled the ayahuasca and he said, By the way, I I retire. And he retired as shaman.

2:25:30 For a whole week. But But like that was my experience was that it was so intense that I was just happy to have physical form again. I feel I felt like I died and came back. It is very, very powerful. You said in the book I felt changed.

2:25:45 Felt changed in the sense that I had never You know, I'd come close to dying a bunch of times. I'd come But I mean to to be removed and you know, if you go for surgery they put you out and it's black and then you come back. This was I mean who the hell even knew? It's like

2:26:00 It's like Opening It's like you've lived in a gigantic mansion with three thousand rooms your entire life. But you've only ever lived in like one. And then you take this stuff and all of a sudden you go, Whoa there's so many rooms.

2:26:16 And you have access to them and the doors are all open. And you're being sucked through all of them at once. And so it was like I mean, at one point I was ex I mean, you the jungle vibrat. I took the form of different animals. I mean it was it was insanity. I don't I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. What do the local people think it is? As a compound as a psychoactive, what do they think is happening? Do they think it's a religious experience? Absolutely. That's m most of them believe that this is the Gift of the gods.

2:26:42 Two humans and it is link between the spirit world and our world. And they say that The Amazon was formed when

2:26:52 Anaconda God. slipped out of the murk the Milky Way and carved the rivers. Right. And if you take the forty thousand species of trees in the Amazon and did trial and error to try and figure out which ones would interact with each other. It doesn't really make sense that ancient peoples came to this by accident.

2:27:11 And so The shamans say. that the gods gave this to humans so that we could Interact with the other side. What is Jungle Keepers?

2:27:22 We've we've used the word several times now, and uh you know, it's word on the front of your new book and I see it's written there on your chest. But for anyone that doesn't know what Jungle Keepers is, what the mission of it is, how they might be able to get involved and help, what is it? Jungle Keepers is The method we developed To find a way to save the Amazon.

2:27:42 And what we did was this. We worked with the local people, we spent years understanding what the reality was on the ground. Jungle Keepers is the system with which we actually are saving the Amazon rainforest. It's How we employ

2:27:56 the loggers and gold miners as conservation rangers, but it's the way that we do that. What we've done Usually conservation is done through grant writing and government deals. We've done this using modern technology. Using social media for good. We've used I mean, it was through Instagram that we got our first big funder. It was through Instagram and podcasts that we've reached a lot of our smaller funders, and today

2:28:20 Jungle Keepers is the most direct way for people around the world to help the indigenous people protect the Amazon. And what that means is we have a donor program. People go to junglekeepers.org and whether it's for five, ten, a hundred, some people do a thousand dollars a month, they can directly Protect the land. And provide jobs.

2:28:42 for the local people. And it's saving more animal heartbeats and endangered species and those entire un uncontacted tribes, all because people all over the world care. And they're willing to part with. Price of a Starbucks coffee once a month. So if people have been inspired by this conversation. Yeah.

2:29:01 They can go to junglekeepers.org and on the website I'm on there now. Yeah. that you can give once um in a small donation, or you can give monthly. Anything from, as you said, the price of a coffee up to bigger donations if you're able to And um There's superb information and resources and videos.

2:29:19 on the website that explains more about the work being done. I'm certainly gonna sign up. to a monthly subscription. Thank you. No, it means a lot because it's the shopping cart principle. It's like if none of us do it, it won't work. Yeah. If all of us do it, it will work. We'll make history. Well I'm gonna sign up right now.

2:29:36 Um definitely and I'll uh give my monthly donation. And I implore anyone else that can, has the means to to also do it. Because it's such an you know, it's such a Such an important, beautiful part of the world for all the reasons we've discussed. Um in a way that I think is often unappreciated and not um uh not thought about m mu enough because in part these messages don't get out there. And most people don't realise that the oxygen we breathe comes from this part of the world and

2:30:02 many of the medicines we've discovered and the research that we continue to do originates from this part of the world. I mean, there's so many I wanted to talk to you about this. There's so many medicines and um sort of medical research taking place in in this ecosystem that is incredible. Incredible. And I was I was uh hearing I heard you talk about how one day you got an infection, antibiotics couldn't touch.

2:30:25 And someone took you into the jungle Gave you some sap from a tree bark and it killed the infection. Yeah. You see this where it looks like uh somebody put a cigar out on my arm right there? Little smooth bit. That was a very rare disease. I was living in a mud hut in India trying to track tigers. There's only three thousand tigers left. Um

2:30:44 Although now it's gone up to five. Tigers are coming back. So another success story. But I was living in a mud hut in India trying to track tigers and I got this disease called tularemia. And it's so rare. That when I got it. I brought it back to New York, went to the infectious disease doctor. When he figured out what it was, and I'd been in bed for like a month with this horrible infection in my arm, this deep

2:31:04 Pocket of push. And and I was on antibiotics and he went, This is so rare. He goes, Do you mind if I call in my students, my fellows? He goes, he goes, Guys, you're never gonna see this again. It's a disease that's tick born through rabbits and somehow gets into people and manifests with an infection on the right elbow. He goes, This is one of the rarest ones you're gonna see. He goes, This is rare. They put me on double antibiotics. I had already had a MRSA infection. They were like, look, we gotta really kill this thing. And it was twenty twelve and my parents said, Whatever you do, do not go back to the jungle with an infection,'cause the jungle's just gonna make it worse.

2:31:39 Uh, of course I went to the jungle. We had stuff to do. Or we our station was in danger of dying, so I had to go back with JJ and fix it up. And I showed up and he looked at my arm and goes, Why is your arm taped up? And I said, Well, I have this terrible infection. I said, I've been in bed for two months. I said, I have no energy. I'm on all these antibiotics. And he looked at me and went, This is okay. And he goes, No no, come with me. We walked out, he marches out into the jungle, hits this hits the tree with the machete, collects the white sap. rubs it over this and now this these saps have like a latex quality. And when you heat them

2:32:08 They they they they form almost like a rubber, so it formed a rubber rubber cap over the infection. Now if you had pushed on it before, pus would leak out. He just went like this until it formed a seal. And then he put a little bit into a concoction of leaf juice that he made made me drink that. Either way, next day I woke up. And the infection was

2:32:29 Denature. It was still a wound. But it was no longer infected. Kill the infection in one night. The antibiotics hadn't been able to kill for two months.

2:32:39 So stuff like that. Where he not only knew What to do, he knew where to find it. recently when I was stung by a stingray and I was in agonizing pain. Two of my friends collected bark, which is J J's nephew and brother, and

2:32:52 Good to be part of an indigenous family. Um, they connect col collected two different kinds of bark. They boiled it into a poultice and they sucked the venom out of my out of my foot with plant medicine. It's incredible. And these are technologies we don't have. And by the way, yeah, we're losing physical animals. We don't want to lose species, but we're also losing indigenous cultures. We're losing

2:33:15 Dialect. Anthropologists like Wade Davis will say that you know each language, each each culture is a different manifest. I said he was it he's a beautiful quote where he said, other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. You know, it's it's each of these is a different manifestation of the human Th different blossoms on the same vine.

2:33:36 And uh We're losing languages because what happens is Roads come in to these communities. They'll learn to speak. Spanish, let's say. So there's sp stop speaking Sha.

2:33:48 You know, and the same thing in India where you guys have seen this happening, where like the kids in the village might speak a really local language. And then all of a sudden everybody wants to go to the big city. Everybody has the internet and Instagram and TikTok and wants to make a little more money and they go And these we're losing languages and these each of these languages is a different way of expressing ourselves. And so this there's just this very interesting shift happening in the world right now where there's a lot of beautiful things that can still be saved. And that's why it's like we're at this amazing time where there's

2:34:17 There's still the old amazing things and we still have all this amazing new technology flooding in and more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before. And so the feeling of apathy I don't get. I don't understand how everybody isn't stoked. I see you've got a A wedding ring on. Oh, this? Yes.

2:34:36 I am Yeah, I know you're recently married. Like yes. Two weeks ago. Two weeks ago. One would ask How it's possible for someone that spends so long living in the jungle?

2:34:47 To hold down a successful romantic relationship. Yeah. Um, I think that the same thing happened with this that happened with the career where I said I think right around the time where I gave up.

2:35:01 I said it's never gonna happen'cause what girl I sa what girl could keep up with repeated jo seven months in the jungle and And Um all the bot flies and infections and anacondas and then forget now that we're being hunted by the narco traffickers and all this stuff.

2:35:17 N uh nobody uh nobody fit into the life. And then actually it was on a I was giving a talk. About the Amazon. Uh in California, actually. Over a year ago.

2:35:30 And I met this girl. And instantly We had a connection. And and and it was the same thing. It was like we we we kinda had both reached that same point. We've both gone, Yeah, it's never gonna work because of our different lifestyles. Um

2:35:44 And then and then it just And then it just occurred. You just When you know you know. We got to know each other and then the only way I could know if she was really the one was to take her catching.

2:35:53 Uh we won't Crocodile catching for Cayman catching. First night that she arrived, she came up the river on the boat. And we went out and we Caught a crocodile. held it together. I got to show her the nictating membrane and the the spikes coming out of it. And it was just beautiful smooth fronts that came in.

2:36:08 And then as we were floating down the river up to our necks in the black water with the milky way above us and we're just sort of holding hands and I just looked over and I was like I think this is it. And then I propose to her in the tree house. So on top of the c on top of the jungle canopy with all the mist and all the animals singing.

2:36:25 Um but it that um uh you know, that makes me say, I'm so I'm so glad that I waited. You know, it's like you have to wait until the time where it makes sense on that thing. You know, and I think you probably feel the same where Um probably took you a while to find the right person. And she comes on these expeditions with you now, or

2:36:46 She's sh way more than that, man. I mean look, there's like I said, there's a lot of things I'm not good at. Um the planes, trains, automobiles, the human world, the Ubers, the fact that you have to push a button to the the the the apparently like I learned come on my way to you the the Tesla handles work differently. Um she knows all that. And so she's very good at keeping me organized. And when we go to the jungle She's very good at being like, Hey, don't forget Hey, don't forget.

2:37:12 You think this is normal, it is not normal. Teach people about those those leaf cutter ants. And it's like she's really good at, you know, so she's totally integrated, loves being in the jungle. It it's just incredible. It's the it's the most w it's the most wonderful part of the journey so far. I'd love to actually um you just mentioned leaf cutter ants and I did watch your video on Instagram about the leaf cutter ants. Th I think that was the moment I said to you before we started recording that I w I really wanted to go and do s some sort of survival um expedition in the jungle. I could make this happen for you. I think you I think you might be the guy But uh I did take a moment of pause when I watched this video. One of the worst episodes yet of Why You Think You Want My Job, but definitely don't really

2:37:51 Right now my tent is being dismantled by leafcutter ants. It's about two AM and I've been trying to sleep and there's about ten million leafcutter ants outside of this tent. And all they were doing. is cutting leaf size holes out of my tent. They are carrying away the nylon into the night.

2:38:08 And because the leaf cutter ants are working They're opening up holes big enough for me to put my fist through, which means Everything else in the Amazon is coming into my tent. And because of that I keep turning on the lights. I just woke up because there's a leaf cutter in it.

2:38:23 Using its pincer jaws. Oh and And termites and mosquitoes, some sort of centipede, hoppers, moths, and some insects that I can't even identify. You know it's four more hours until morning. If you get out of the tent you're gonna get destroyed by mosquitoes. It's raining outside, you're gonna get wet. This is what camping in the wild is. Sometimes you put your tent in the wrong place and the leaf cutter ants and the gods of the jungle decide

2:38:52 It's gonna be the worst night ever. All I can do is try and get some sleep and I wake up every few seconds to try and slap something off my face or something flies up my nose. This is one of those nightmare nights, man. I didn't think of ants as being the problem. Uh the thing that might Derail my journey to the jungle, but

2:39:12 There's a lot of scary things in the jungle. That quote you read about life being a moment of stasis among the dead amongst the the churning death march of the Everything you see in the jungle is going to be eaten at some point. Every jaguar, every butterfly, every leaf. If the Amazon didn't have fungal mycelium growing through everything, it would bury itself in leaves and cease to exist. It is a recycling machine. And so yes, every time a baby is born, they try to survive. You look at that baby snake, that baby snake might come out of its egg. No, that's a African ball python, but you say like a baby boa constrictor comes out of its mother.

2:39:48 Starts crawling around the jungle, and it might just get eaten by a bird. Done. And this is sort of back to what you're saying about when should people give up on their dreams. Like, look, some sometimes you get eaten by a bird right out of the hatch. Like But in the jungle. The ants

2:40:03 The mosquitoes? The fungus. The infections. It's all trying to take you down. You are calories. The leaves are But you what you don't realize, the jungle is an energy economy, right? Those trees are stretching up to a hundred and sixty feet because they're trying to reach above the other trees to get to the light.

2:40:22 because they want the sunlight. That tropical sunlight is what gives them the energy to grow those big Trunks. And then all the other epiphytic plants, the orchids and the lichens and the and the and the pitcher plants, those are all growing on the branches. And then down there in the shadows, there's trees waiting. That have no access to light. Less than three percent of the sunlight in the rainforest hits the ground. And they're waiting beneath these titans.

2:40:45 And they're waiting for a little bit of sunlight. And once a day a little bit of sunlight comes by and they grow that much. I could take'em and then when one big tree falls over and all of a sudden you have this rush of sunlight capital, all these trees shoot up. And now those trees shoot up and what's happening? The leaf cutter ants are taken there? Little bits of those leaves. that have heavy chemical compounds to stop the leaf cutter ants from doing this, but they take it and they bring it underground and they farm it. They're one of the only other species that farms. They farm fungus off of the leaves and that they eat.

2:41:14 But the entire thing is this vast interconnected matrix of competition for sunlight energy. You carry so much. Our skin, we are these gods of energy. We're the we're a large animal. walking through the forest and so the mosquitoes and the leeches

2:41:31 And And the Jaguar and the Like all those things are like, Man, if you died, you realize how many animals you'd make happy? Like the jungle the jungle saying, Come here. Come to me, I'll I'll recycle you.

2:41:44 Are you scared of anything? I'm scared the people won't wake up quick enough to save the systems that keep us alive. But I also am an optimist and I believe that we're at this point where people feel very lost and things look really dire. And then it pulls back.

2:42:01 You know, and I I'm a big believer in I mean Tigers went from a hundred thousand tigers in nineteen hundred down to Just like three thousand tigers now. We're c we're coming back up. We're up around five or six thousand tigers. Hunt back whales before before whaling. You think you had like 130,000 humpback whales? They went down as low as a thousand humpback whales. We almost lost humpback whales. Then they ban whales whaling and now humpback whales are back. So almost pre whaling numbers.

2:42:26 Same thing goes for bald eagles. There's been so many conservation success. We had a hole in the ozone layer. Everybody forgets this. We had a hole in the in the only thing that protects us from being incinerated by the sun. And we found a way to fix it. So I'm an optimist. Not I'm not scared. And this is my this is my best confutation to the darkness. This is my best way of saying, look

2:42:48 That that t title when they told me to I didn't come up with the subtitle though, what it takes. What does it say? What it takes to change the world. I didn't come up with that, but I thought it was too hefty. I didn't want it. I felt uncomfortable. Um But I do think that that The idea that that we can change the fate of things is an important thing to remember.

2:43:11 In these times. Jungle Keeper, what it takes to change the world. This book is about the profound power of saying yes, yes to one's calling, yes to sticking with your dream when it comes at a high cost, and yes to taking a stand to save what might otherwise be gone in a generation. It's a story. A vocation, connectedness, and hope.

2:43:31 What a brilliant, beautiful rack. I'm gonna link it below for anyone that wants to continue this conversation and wants to learn more and go deeper. Um you're a brilliant storyteller. Thank you. It's one of your great skills.

2:43:43 I don't know where you learnt it,'cause I I don't think they do classes for storytelling in in the Amazon, but It's certainly one of your great skills. And it's a very important skill to wield when you've got a message you need the world to hear. It's a very important story. I think I learned it from Tolkien and from Arthur Conan Doyle and from Jane Goodall. I mean those are the people my parents read to me growing up.

2:44:03 We have a closing tradition. Where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you. Is if you only had Three years left to live.

2:44:17 What would you regret not doing? And are you working on that now? If no, why not? I had three years left to live. I would very much regret.

2:44:33 Not finishing the mission that I started. And so Whether we like it or not. We're going to we're either gonna win and save it or we're gonna lose. Three years.

2:44:44 Would be like Just barely able to see it. I would regret so much coming so far. And then Not.

2:44:54 Because you mentioned before The idea of a wave and it's like so much has happened and we have come to this place where so much is possible. But we're still in the barrel. And we're not done yet. So if I had three years left to go.

2:45:09 I know that all those heartbeats are depending on me. I know that's that would be my answer. Oh, thank you. It's um incredible work you're doing and I'm so glad that there's people in the world Like you that are doing this. And um

2:45:23 if anyone has been inspired by your conversation, I really do highly recommend you go and m make a donation or pledge support in some way over on the Jungle Keeper website because um not all of us Have the means or the ability to go out and do what you're doing. On the front line. But Um, as you say, it makes a huge amount of difference, even people donat of money because it compounds into something much more bigger and

2:45:47 And those small gestures can save all the heartbeats that you're describing. Thank God for it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay.

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