The following is a conversation with Paul Rosolie, his second time on the podcast, but this time, we did the conversation deep in the Amazon jungle. I traveled there to hang out with Paul, and it turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime. I will post a video capturing some aspects of that adventure in a week or so. It included everything from getting lost and dense unexplored wilderness with no contact to the outside world to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more.
Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist, explorer, author, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the rainforest. For this mission, he founded Jungle Keepers. You can help him if you go to junglekeepers.org. This trip, for me, was life-changing. It expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world I'm fortunate to exist in with all of you. So, I'm glad I went and I'm glad I made it out alive.
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you got to lexframing.com slash contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle, I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Chip Station. It's a software designed to save you time and money on fulfillment, shipping stuff that you sell on the internet. It integrates with Shopify and wherever else you sell stuff.
It allows businesses, medium, large to just ship stuff. I'm a huge fan of logistics and supply chains. And looking at that incredibly complicated network of how one package gets from point A to point B. Part of that is the theoretical computer scientist in me because when you simplify that problem and formulate it as a graph theory problem, then you can perform all kinds of optimizations on it,
which takes me back to some of my favorite courses on the theory and the practice. So in numerical optimization, when you're talking about nonlinear programming and then the more theoretical stuff with convex programming, a particular kind of formulation of an optimization problem can be easily
to solve or hard to solve. So when I look at this world of logistics and shipping stuff from point A to point B where there's like a million point A's and a million point B's and the combinatorial madness of that, it's really exciting that there is systems that enable that all to work. Anyway, I'm glad ship station exists and I'm glad they're solving this tricky but extremely important problem. Go to shipstation.com slash Lex and use code Lux to sign up for your free 60 day trial
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month. That's betterhelp.com slashlex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. As I was deep in nature, disconnected completely from the world, and the sounds of the urban world, no machinery, no people, nothing, just nature. You can hear water, you can hear the wind, you can hear the animals, the insects, the little and the big, and just that, no people. So as I was in that, I got just to really think about
the productive world, let's say, the world of companies. And it is indeed, out of the many things that make me happy, it is one of the things that makes me really happy, and that is to build, to create stuff in this world that helps people. Whether that is as an individual programmer, or on a larger scale by starting a company, all of that makes me truly happy. And somehow in the jungle full of gratitude to be able to exist on this beautiful earth, I also was full of gratitude
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pod for Ultra. One of the things when I was in the jungle, I mean, there's a few creature comforts that are taken away when you're out in nature, especially when you're deep out in nature. And of course, one of the things you remember is the ability to have a bed to go to that's not full of insects and all that kind of stuff, but a bed that can be cool. Man, it'll be amazing to get the Eight Sleep bed off into the middle of the jungle, because it's it's hot out there. And to be
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reading position as a really, really cool idea on many fronts, including like you have this integrated system that does the sensing of the sleep time and the sleep phase and the HRV and heart rate and all that kind of stuff. It does the cooling of both sides of the bed separately. And now you can control the positioning of the bed. It's crazy. I really love it when products keep rapidly evolving improving. That's really exciting to me. Got a eight sleep dot com slash Lex and use code Lex to
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This is Alex Reuben podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Paul Rosley. Where are we right now, Paul? Lex, we're in the middle of nowhere. It's the Amazon jungle. There's vegetation, there's insects, there's all kinds of creatures, a million hardbeats, a million eyes. So really, where are we right now? We are in Peru in a very remote part of the Western Amazon
basin. And because of the proximity of the ND and cloud forests to the low land tropical rainforests, we are in the most biodiverse part of planet earth. There's more life per square acre, per square mile out here than there is anywhere else on earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record. I can't believe we're actually here. I can't believe you actually came. And I can't believe you forced me to wear a suit. That was the people's choice, trust me. All right. We've been through
quite a lot of the last few days. We've been through a bit. Let me ask you a ridiculous question. What are all the creatures right now if they wanted to? Could cause us harm? The thing is, the Amazon rainforest has been described as the greatest natural battlefield on earth because there's more life here than anywhere else, which means that everything here is fighting for survival. The trees are fighting for sunlight. The animals are fighting for prey.
Everybody's fighting for survival. So everything that you see here, everything around us will be killed, eaten, digested, recycled at some point. The jungle is really just a giant churning machine of death. And life is kind of this moment of stasis where you maintain this collection of cells in a particular DNA sequence. And then it gets digested again and recycled back and renamed into everything. So the things in this forest, while they don't want to hurt us, there are things that are heavily
defended. Because for instance, a giant antiter needs claws to fight off a jaguar. A stingray needs a stinger on its tail, which is basically a serrated knife with venom on it to deter anything that would hunt that stingray. Even the catfish have pectoral fins that have razor, long steak knife sized defense systems. Then you, of course, the jaguar, the heartbeagles, the piranha, the candieru fish that can swim up penis, lodge themselves inside. It's the Amazon rainforest.
The thing is, as you've learned this week, nothing here wants to get us, except for an exception of maybe mosquitoes. Every other animal just wants to eat an existing piece. That's it. But there is each of those animals that could describe have a kind of radius of defense. So if you accidentally step into its home, into that radius, it can cause harm or make them feel threatened. Make them feel threatened. There is a defense mechanism that is activated.
Some incredible defense mechanism. You're talking about 17 foot black cameon crocodiles that with significant size that could rip you in half. Anaconda is the largest snake on earth. Bushmasters that can grow up to be nine to, I think, even 11 feet long. I've caught bushmasters that are thicker than my arms. So for people who don't know, bushmasters snakes, what are these things? These are vipers. I believe it's the largest viper on earth.
Venomous, extremely venomous with hinged teeth, tissue destroying venom. If you get bitten by a bushmaster, they say you don't rush and try and save your own life. You try to save her what's around you. Look around at the world. Smoke your last cigarette. Call your mom. That's it. So that moment of stasis that is life is going to end abruptly when you interact
with one of those. Yeah. I even have even this seemingly. Can I just pause it how incredibly beautiful it is that you could just reach to your right and grab a piece of the chuckle? It's like it's like even this seemingly beautiful little fern. If you go this way on the fern, you're fine. As soon as you go this way, there's invisible little spikes on there. If you want to
oh, I see. I feel like that. So like everything is defended. If you're driving on the road and you have your arm out the side or if you're on a motorcycle going through the jungle and you get one of these, it'll just tear all the skin right off your body. It's kind of doing that to me now. So what would you do? We're going through the dense jungle yesterday. And you slide down the hill, your foot slips, you slide down and then you find yourself
staring a couple feet away from a bushmaster snake. What are you doing? You're for people who somehow don't know or somebody who loves admire snakes, who has met thousands of snakes, has worked with them, respects them, celebrates them. What would you do with a bushmaster snake? Face to face. Face to face. This has happened. This has happened. It's nice. I've come face to face
with a bushmaster and there's two things, there's two reactions that you might get. One is if the bushmaster decides that it's vacation time, if it's sleeping, if you just had a meal, they'll come to the edges of trails or beneath the tree and they'll just circle up. Little spiral, big spiral, big pile of snake on the trail and they'll just sit there. And one time there was a snake sitting on the side of a trail beneath the tree for two weeks. This snake was just sitting there resting,
digesting its food out in the open in the rain, in the sun, in the night. It didn't matter. You go near it, barely even crack a tongue. Now the other option is that you get a bushmaster that's alert and hunting and out looking for something to eat and they're ready to defend themselves. And so I once came across a bushmaster in the jungle at night and this bushmaster turned its head towards me, looked at me and made it very clear. I'm going to go this way. And so I did
the natural thing that any snake enthusiast would do and I grabbed its tail. Now 11 feet later by the head, the snake turned around and just said, if you want to meet God, I can arrange the meeting. I will oblige and I decided to let the bushmaster go. And so it's like that with most animals. Jaguar will turn and look at you and just remind you of how small you are. Like what did you see in the snake size? How did you sense that this is not the right, this is not, this is going to be your end if
you proceed? Is readiness. I wanted to get him by the tail and show them to the people that were there and maybe work with the snake a little bit. As an 11 foot snake, the snake turned around and then made it very clear like not today pal. It's not going to happen. Is it in the eyes and the movement and the tension of the body? It was the movement and the s of the neck. It was, it was, it was as if you pushed me and I went, let's go make my day. Yeah. Like he just looked a
little bit too. Yeah. Too ready. He's a colorless. Okay. All right. So you know, you just know, you just know where is like the snake you met last night? Yeah. Beautiful snake. Such a calm little thing. You just focuses on eating baby lizards and little snails and things and that snake has no concept of defending itself. It has no way to defend itself. So even a, even something the size of a blue jake could just come and just pick that thing and they had in swallow it. It's a
helpless little snake. So it's, it's really, it kind of depends on the animal, it depends on the moujou catcher. Men each one has a different temperament. The grace of its movement was mesmerizing. Curious almost. Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing projecting onto it. But it was, the tongue flicking was a sign of curiosity. He's trying to figure out what was going on. He's like, why am I on this treadmill of human skin? You know, they're just trying to get to the next thing, trying to get
hidden, trying to get away from the light. Also the texture of the scales is really fascinating. I mean, it's my first, my first snake I've ever touched is so interesting. It was just such an incredible system of muscles that are all interacting together to make that kind of movement work and all the texture of its skin of its scales. What do you love about snakes? From my first experience of the snake to all the thousands of experiences you had those snakes, what do you love
about these creatures? I think it's when you just spoke about it, it was, that's the first snake you've met. It was a tiny little snake in the jungle. You spoke about it with so much light in your eyes. I think that because we've been programmed to be scared of snakes, there's something, there's something wondrous that happens in our brain. Maybe it's just this joy of discovery that there's
nothing to be scared of. Whether it's a rattlesnake that is dangerous and that you need to give distance to, but you look at it from a distance and you go, whoa, or it's a harmless little grass snake that you can pick up and enjoy and give to a child. They're just these strange, legless animals that just exist. They don't even have eyelids. They're so different than us. They have a tongue that senses the air and they, to me, are so beautiful. I have my whole life
been defending snakes from humans and they seem misunderstood. I think they're incredibly beautiful. There's every color and variety of snakes. There's venomous snakes, there's tree snakes, there's huge crushing anacondas. It's just of the 2,600 species of snakes that exist on earth. There's just such beauty, such complexity and such simplicity. They're just, to me, to me, I feel like I'm, I'm friend with snake and they rely on me to protect them from my people.
Friend with snake. Me, friend snake. Me, friend snake. You said some of them are sometimes aggressive. Some of them are peaceful. Is this a mood thing, a personality thing, a species thing? What is it? So, as far as I know, there's only really two snakes on earth that could be aggressive, because aggression indicates offense. And so, a reticulated python has been documented as eating
humans. Anacondas, although while it hasn't been publicized, they have eaten humans. Every single other snake from boa constrictor to bushmasters, to spitting cobra, to grass snake, to garter snake, to everything else, every single other snake does not want to interact with you. They have no interest. So, there's no such thing as an aggressive snake. Once you get outside of anaconda and reticulated
python aggression could be trying to eat you. That's predation. But for every other snake, a rattlesnake, if it was there, would either go escape and hide itself, or it would rattle its tail and tell us, don't come closer. A cobra will hood up and begin to hiss and say, don't approach me. I'm asking you nicely, not to mess with me. And most other snakes are fast, or they stay in the trees, or they're extremely camouflage, but their whole MO is just don't bother me. I don't want to be seen,
I don't want to be messed with. In fact, all I want to be do is be left alone. And once in a while, I just want to eat. And by the way, when you see a snake drink, your heart will break. It's like seeing, it's the only thing that's cuter than a puppy. Like watching a snake touch its mouth to water, and just you just see that little mouth going as they suck water in. And it's like, it's just so adorable watching the scale of the animal just be like, I need water. In a state of vulnerability.
Yeah. But bro, there's nothing cuter than a little puppy with a tongue like a baby ball python. All right. Baby can cover them. Baby elephant. So what are they? They're like at a puddle, and they just take it in. They can be at a puddle, and they just take it in. Or one time in India, I was with a snake rescuer, and we found this nine foot king cobra, this god of a snake. They're Ophiophagus Hannah is their Latin name, and they're there's snake eaters. They're the king of the
snakes, the largest venomous snake. And the people that call, called the snake rescuer, because it's a profession in India. You know, it had gotten into their kitchen or their backyard. And so we showed up and we got the snake and the snake rescuer. He knew he looked at the snake and he went to me. He said, you know, why do you think the snake would go in a house and he was quizzing me? And I actually went, you know, I don't know. Is it warm? Is it cold? You know, like sometimes cats like
to go into the warm, warm cars in the winter. And he was like, he's thirsty. He goes, watch this. He took a water bottle poured it over the, now the snake is standing up. Snake stands up three feet tall. This is a huge king cobra with a hood terrifying snake to be around. He leans over to the snake and the snake is standing there trusting him. And he takes a water bottle and pours it onto the snake's nose and the snake turns up its nose and just starts drinking from the water bottle.
Human giving water to snake, big, scary snake, but this human understood snake gets water snake gets released in jungle. Everybody's okay. So sometimes the needs are simple. They just don't have the words to communicate them to us humans. Yeah. And is it the centrist or is it fear? Almost like they don't notice us or is it where source, the unknown aspect of it, the uncertainty is a, is a source
of danger? Well, animals live in a constant state of danger. Like if you look at that deer that we saw last night, it's stalking through the jungle, wondering what's going to eat it, wondering if this is the last moment it's going to be alive. It's like the animals are constantly terrified of that this is their last moment. Yeah, just for the listener, we're walking through the jungle late at night.
So it's darkness, accept our headlamps on and then all of a sudden ball stops, ziksh, and he looks in the distance and sees two eyes is I think you thought is that a jaguar or is it a deer? And it was moving inside like this, like, scared or maybe trying to figure it, trying to localize itself, trying to figure out and see around you're doing the same to it. The two of you like moving your head and like deep into the jungle, like, I don't know, it's pretty far away through
the tree, you can still see it. There's 30 feet or so. Yeah. That's the thing to actually mention, I mean, the with head and lamp, you see the reflection, their eyes. It's kind of incredible. Just to see a creature, to try to identify a creature by just the reflection from its eyes. Yeah. And so the cats, sometimes you'll get like a greenish or a bluish glow from the cats. The deer are usually white to orange, cameon, orange, night jars, orange snakes can usually be like
orange moths, spiders, sparkle. And so you have all these different as you walk through the jungle, you can see all these different eyes. And when something large looks at you, like that deer did, your first thing is what animal is this that I am staring back at? Because through the light, you kind of get, you see the reflection off the bright light off the leaves. And I couldn't tell at first because that actually, those big bright eyes, it could have been an oslo, it could have been
jaguar, it could have been a deer. And then when it did this movement, that's what the cats do. They try to see around your light. I thought maybe Lex Friedman's here, we're going to get lucky. It's going to be a jag right off trail. Your definition of lucky is a complicated one. As a fascinating process when you see those two eyes, try to figure out what it is. And it is trying to figure out what you are that process. Let's talk about Cayman. We've seen a lot of
different kinds of sides. We've seen a baby one, a bigger one. Tell me about these 16-foot plus apex predators of the Amazon rainforest. The big, bad black Cayman, which is the largest reptilian predator in the Amazon, except for the Anaconda, they kind of both share that notch of apex predator. They were actually hunted to endangered species level in the 70s because they're leather, black, scale leather. But they're coming back. They're coming back and they're huge and they're beautiful.
And I was walking near a lake and I never understood how big they could get, except for I was walking near a lake last year and I was following this stream. You know what it's like when you found a little stream and there's just a little trickle of water and all of a sudden this river otter had been running the other direction on the stream. River otter comes up to me and I swear to god this animal looks at me and went, hey, and I went, hey, he's like, didn't expect to see me there.
And he turned around, he like did a little spin, started running down the stream, then he turned around and you could tell he was like, let's go. And I, you know, I'm not anthropomorphizing here, the animal was asking me to come with him. So I followed the river otter down the stream, we started running down the stream. The river otter looks at me one more time. It was like, yo,
jumps into the lake. And I'm like, what does he want me to see? Now in the lake, this river otter's doing dives and freaking out and going up and down and up and down and they're very excited. They're screaming, they're screeching. All of a sudden, and I've never seen anything like this is referring like Game of Thrones. This crock head comes flying out of the water. All of the river
otters were attacking this huge black came in 16 feet, head half the size of this table. And she was thrashing her tail around creating these huge waves in the water trying to catch an otter. And they're so fast that they were zipping around or biting her and then going around. And this otter swear to god interspecies looked at me and went watch this. We're fucking with this can. It was amazing. And I for the first time I got to stand there watching this incredible interspecies
fight happening. They weren't trying to kill the cameon. They were just trying to mess with it. And the cameon was doing his best to try and kill these otters. And they were just having a good time in that six sort of hyper intelligent animal like wolf sort of way where they were just going,
you can't catch us. Yeah, like intelligence and agility versus raw power and dominance. I mean, I got to handle some smaller cameon and just the power they had, you know, you scale that up to imagine a 16 foot even a 10 foot, any kind of black cameon, the kind of power they deliver. Maybe you can talk to that like the power they can generate with their tail with their neck with their jaw alligators and cameon and crocodiles have some of the strongest bite forces on
earth. Think of saltwater crocodile wins as the strongest bite force on earth. And you got to hold about a foot or is it a four foot spectacle cameon. And you got to feel, I mean, you're a black belt in your jitsu. How do you how do you compare the explosive force you felt from that animal compared to what a human can generate. It's, it's difficult to describe it more as there's a lot of power. And we're talking about the power of the neck like the what is it? I mean, there's a lot, it can
generate power all up and down the body. So probably the tail is a monster. But just the neck and you know, not to mention the power of the bite that and the speed too because the thing I saw and got the experience is how still and calm at least from my amateur perspective, it seems calm still. And then from that sort of zero to 60, you could just just go wild. Just thrash. And then there's also a decision it makes in that split second whether as it thrashes,
is it going to kind of bite you on the way or not. And that's where that's where of the four species of came in that we have here. You see differences in their personalities as a species. And so you can like just like you know, like generally golden retrievers are viewed as a as a friendly dog, generally, not every single one of them, but as a rule. Spectacle came in puppies. You released one in the river and it did nothing. Didn't bite one of your fingers. It just swam away.
We dropped one in the river and what did it do? It chose peace. Now I had a smooth fronted came in a few weeks ago. And this is probably about a three and a half footer, not big enough to kill you, but very much big enough to grab one of your fingers and just shake it off your body. Just death roll it right off. And as I was being careful, totally different came in than the one that you got to see. This one has spikes coming off. They're like like like left over dinosaurs.
It's like they evolved during the dinosaur times and never changed. They have spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growths that you don't see on the other smoother came in. And I tried to release this one without getting bitten and I threw it into the stream gently into the water. Just went, wow, and tried to pull my hands back. And as I pulled my hand back, this came in in the air, turned around and just tried to give me one parting blow and just got one
tooth whack right to the bone of my finger. And bone injury feels different than a skin injury. So instantly, and it just reminds you of that's a came in with a head this big and it hurt. And I know that it could have taken off my finger now if you scale that up to a black came in. It's rib crushing. It's zebra head removing size, you know, just meat destroying. It's it's incredible. It's nature is metal sort of, you know, just raw power. So what's the biggest crop you've been able to handle?
We were doing came in surveys for years and we would go out at night and you want to figure out what are the populations of black came in, spectacle came in, smooth front to came in, dwarf came in. And the only way to see which came in your dealing with is to catch it. Because a lot of times you get up close with the light and you can see the eyes at night, but you can't quite see what species it is. For instance, this past few months, we found two baby black came in on the river,
which is unprecedented here. We haven't seen that in decades. So it's important that we monitor our crop population. So I started catching small ones in Mother God. I write about the first one that me and JJ caught together, which was probably a little bigger than this table. And probably mid-20s, bravado and competition with other young males of my species led to me trying to go as big as I could. And I jumped on a spectacle came in that was slightly longer than I am.
And I'm five-nine. So I jumped on this probably six-foot-crack and quickly realized that my hands couldn't get around that's neck and my legs were wrapped around the base of its tail. And the thrash was so intense that as it took me one side, I barely had enough time to realize what was happening before it beat me against the ground. My headlamp came off. So now I'm blind in the dark, laying in a river in the Amazon rainforest, hugging a six-foot crocodile. And I went,
JJ! As I always do. But I in that moment, before I even let go, I knew I couldn't let go of the crock because if I let go of the crock, I thought she was going to destroy my face. So I said, okay, now I'm stuck here. If I just stay here, I can't release her. I need help. But I was like, I'm never, ever, ever, ever going to try and solo catch a crock this big again. I was like, this is, this is, I knew in that moment I was like, this is good enough. So anything longer than you,
you don't control the tail. You don't have, you have barely control of anything. Yeah, and that's a spectacle, came in. A black came in is a is a whole other order of magnitude there. It's like saying, like, oh, you know, I was play fighting with my golden retriever versus I was play fighting with like, you know, what's the biggest, scariest dog you could think of? The dog from Sandlot, a giant gorilla dog thing, like a, like a malimuse, something, something huge. What do they call
mastiffs? Yeah, mastiffs. I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs. What do you admire about black camein? What they've been here for a very, very long time. There's something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way of being about their presence in this jungle. With crocodiles, you're looking at this, this mega survivor. They're in a class with sharks where it's like, they've been here so long. When you talk about multiple extinctions, you talk about the sixth
extinction, earth's going through all this stuff. The crocodiles and the cockroaches have seen it all before. They're like, man, we remember what that comet looked like. And they're not impressed. Yeah, they have this, they carry this wisdom. Yeah. And their power, yeah. In the simplicity of their power, they carry the wisdom. Yeah. And they're just sitting there in the streams and they
don't care. And even if there's a nuclear holocaust, you know that there would just be some crocs sitting there dead eyed in that stagnant water waiting for the life to regenerate so they could eat again. It's going to be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches and the cockroaches are just background noise. Yeah, they'll always be there. Suns of bitches. You know, we're talking about
individual black camein and camein and different species of camein. But when ever they're together and you see multiple eyes, which I got into experience, it's quite a feeling. There's just multiple eyes looking back at you. Of course, for you, that's immediate excitement. You immediately go towards that. You want to see it. You want to explore it. Maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. What's, can you just describe that feeling when they're
together and they're looking at you? So head above water, eyes reflecting the light. Yeah. So the other night, Lex and I were in the river with JJ surviving a thunderstorm. We're in the rain and we had covered our, covered our equipment with our boats. And the only thing that we could do was get in the, in the river to keep ourselves dry. And so we were in the river at night in the dark, no stars, just a little bit of canopy silhouetted with all this rain coming down. It was such a din. You
could hardly hear anything and all the way down river. I just see this came in eye in my head lamp light. And I started walking towards it because I was like, this is even better. We can catch a came in a while. We're in this thunderstorm in the Amazon river. And when JJ went, Paul, it's too far. JJ very rarely, very rarely like he'll, he'll make a suggestion like he'll usually go like, maybe it's far. But in that situation, deep in the wilderness, unknown came in size. He went, Paul,
it's too far. Don't leave the three of us right now. There were too far out to take risks. We're too far out to be walking along the river bed at night because then, you know, right here at the research station, if you step on a stingray, you get evact out where we went. Nothing. So, for me, seeing those eyes, I think I've become so comfortable with so many of these animals that I may have crossed into the territory where I feel, I feel so comfortable with with many of these
animals that they just don't worry me anymore. I mean, you were, I looked at you in a raft while you had a sizeable, probably about 12 foot black came in right next to your raft. I watched its head go under, the bubbles, it was all coming up right next to your raft as he was just moving along the bottom of the river because he looked at me, went under, and then my raft passed and yours came over him. So now I'm looking back and your raft is going over this black came in and I'm going, I'm not
worried at all. I was not worried. I was not worried that the came in would freak out. I was not worried that he would try to attack you. I knew 100% that came and just wanted us to go. So, you could go back to eating fish. Yeah, that's it. Man, it's humbling, it's humbling these giant creatures. And especially at night, like you were talking about, and for me, it's both scary and just beautiful when the head goes under. Because like underwater, it's their domain, so anything can happen. So,
what is it doing that it's head is going under? It could be bored, it could be hungry looking for some fish, it could be maybe wanting to come closer to you to investigate. Maybe you have some food around you. Maybe it's an old friend of yours and just wants to say hi. I don't know. I have a few on the river over. Okay. No, when we see their heads go under, it's just, they're just getting out of the way. We're shining a light at them and they're going, why is there a light
at night? I'm uncomfortable. Head under. So, these came in, again, you think of it as this big aggressive animal, but I don't know anybody that's been eaten by a black came in. And the smaller species, smooth fronted came in, dwarf came in, spectacle came in, they're not going to eat me, but again, at the worst, if you were doing something inappropriate with a came in, you jumped on it and we're trying to do research and it bit your hand, it could take your hand off, but that's the only time.
I've been walking down the river and stepped on a came in and the came in just swims away. And so in my mind came in, or just these, they're peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the river. And so to me, they are my friends. And I worry about them because two months ago, we were coming up river and on one of the beaches was a beautiful about five foot black came in with a big machete cut right through the head. The whole came in was wasted, nothing was eaten, but the came in was dead.
What do you think that was? Curious humans? Just committing violence. Yeah, just loggers, people who aren't from this part of the Amazon because a local person would either eat the animal or not mess with it. Like, Pico would never kill a came in for no reason because it doesn't make any sense. So these are clearly people who aren't from the region,
which usually means loggers because they've come from somewhere else. They're doing a job here and they're just cleaning their pots in the river at night and they see eyes come near them because the came in probably smells fish. And then they just whack because they want to see it. And they're just curious monkeys on a beach. And again, me friend of came in, I protect from my type. That said, you know, you protect your friends and you analyze and study your friends,
but sometimes friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding. If you have a bit of a misunderstanding with a black came in, I feel like just a bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a bone-crushing situation. But not for a little five foot came in. And I think that's incredibly speciesist, of you. A ball of humans or a ball of came in. No, like all my friends do the same thing. They go, you swim in the Amazon rainforest, you know, you swim in that river and I go, yes,
every day. We, you know, backflips into the river. We've been swimming in the river how many times with the piranha and the stingray and the kandiru and the came in and the anaconda's all of it in the river with us. And we just do it. And what's that for you? So what allows you to do that, to do that? Knowing and having researched all the different things that can kill you, which I feel like most of them are in the river. What allows you to just get in there with us?
Well, I think it's something about you, where you become like the portal through which it's possible to see nature as not threatening, but beautiful. And so in that, you kind of, naturally, by hanging out with you, I get to see the beauty of it. There is danger out there, but the danger is part of it. Just like there's a lot of danger in the city, there's danger in life, there's a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally physically. There's a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of
ways. We went on an expedition to the forest, just twisting your ankle, breaking your foot, getting a bite from a thing that gets infected. There's a lot of ways to die and get hurt in the stupidest of ways. In a non-dramatic, came and eating you alive kind of way. Yeah. It strikes me as unfair because humans are, we're still in our minds. So, so programs to worry about that predator, that predator, that predator, what predator we've killed everything. Black
camins are coming off the endangered species list. We exterminated wolves from North America. I actually heard a suburban lady one time tell her son, watch out. Foxes will get you. Foxes. They baby rabbits and mice. Well, in the case of apex predators, I think when people say dangerous animals, they really are talking about just the power of the animal. And the black cam would have a lot of power. A lot of power. And it's almost just a way to celebrate the power of them. Sure.
And if it's in celebration, then I'm all for it because my god is that power. Like the waves of fury that you saw. Like when that tail, I mean, you saw, you saw the tail of the specks with that perfect amazing thing with all those interlocking scales that works. So it's like a perfect creation of engineering. And then when you have one that's this thick and all of a sudden, that thing is moving with all the acceleration of that power. Wow. The volume of water, the sound
that comes out of their throat. They're such their dragons. We talked about the scales of the snake with like the camin just the way it felt. Yeah. Was incredible. Just the armor, the texture was so cool. Yeah. I don't know like the bottom one came and have a certain kind of texture. And it just all feels like power, but also all feels like designed really well. It's like it's like exploring through touch like a World War II tank or something like that. Just the engineering that went
into this thing. Yeah. That like the mechanism of evolution that created a thing that could survive for such a long time. It's just like incredible. This is a work of art. The you know, the defense mechanism is the power of it. The damage you can do. How effective it is as a hunter, all of that. All you can feel that in just by touching it. Do you ever see the the mashup where they put side by side the image of I think it's a falcon in flight next to a stealth bomber. And
they're almost the exact same design. It's incredible. Like that was the equivalent for for crock. Like maybe a tank. Maybe a tank. Maybe a more like Armadillo turtle. Yeah. Like hapals. Yeah. There may not be a machine a war machine equivalent of a crocodile. We'd have to have like a big jaw element to it. Yeah. And the water. I mean, we talked also about hippos. Those are interesting creatures from all the way across the world. Just monsters. Yeah. Hippos and rhinos.
Hippos are bigger. Usually a rhinos are bigger rhinos. Rhinos is after elephants is the largest white rhinos. They can be terrifying too. Again, when you step into the defense. Absolutely. But I have to tell you after being around so many rhinos. You have friends. You have friends. I have rhino friends. Black and white rhinos. Yeah. And they're all sweet hearts. And I mean, I mean sweet hearts. And I mean when you look at a rhino,
it's like a living dinosaur. I know it's a mammal, but somehow it screams dinosaur because it seems like plasticinic and from another age with the giant horn. And they're so much bigger than you think. Like they're many van sized animals. Like you're we're not taller than they are at the shoulder. And they have the strange shaped head and the huge horn. And they sit there eating grass all day. So if a rhino is dangerous to a human, it's because the rhino is going, don't hurt
me. Don't hurt me. Don't hurt my baby. And then they're like, you know what? I'll just kill you. It would be easier because you're scared. Yeah. Now you're too close to that rhino. Yeah. And so like there again, I just think it's funny because humans were so quickly to go, which snakes are aggressive? There are no aggressive snakes. You know, rhinos can be dangerous. If provoked, otherwise they're
peaceful fat grass unicorns. You know, like they're they're really pretty calm. The way of these incredible giant animals and the largest animals on our planet, the black came in the rhinos, the elephants, all the big beautiful stuff is becoming less and less. And it almost reminds me like in Game of Thrones, they're like, yeah, they're in the beginning, they're like, yeah, they're used to be dragons. And it was like this memory. And it's like, yeah, we used to have
mammoths. And we used to have stellar sea cows that were 16 feet long manatees. And it's, there were things we used to have, the Caspian tiger that only went extinct in the 90s, our lifetimes. And it's that that's mind blowing to me. That's that that has haunted me since I'm a child. I remember learning about extinction. And I went, wait, you're telling me that I remember being a kid and going by the time I grew up, you're saying that gorillas could be gone,
elephants could be gone. And because we're doing it. And then I just that I remember, I remember looking at the the night light being blurry because I was crying. I was so upset and oh, and it was lonesome George that turtle. The glauph goes towards where there was one left. And they said, if we just if we just had a female, he could live. And I as a six, seven, eight year old, that destroyed me. We're all just starting to get laid and colluding that turtle. Including that
turtle for a few hundred years. So for young people out there, you think you're having trouble, think about that turtle. Think about that turtle. Yeah. You know, there's a turtle that Darwin and Steve are when both own. Yeah, yeah, heard about that turtle. And they live a long time. Yeah. They've seen things. They've seen things that there's a there's a great like internet joke where they're like they're like accusing him of like being in Congress with modern
times until like he did nothing to stop slavery. He didn't fight World War II. Like, he canceled the turtle. He canceled the turtle. Oh, shit. What a world living. So it's interesting. You mentioned black came in and and Anacondas are both apex predators. So it seems like the reason they can exist in similar environments is because they feed on slightly different things. How is it possible for them to coexist? I read that Anacondas can eat came up but not black came in.
How often do they come in conflict? So Anacondas and came and occupy the exact same niche. And they're born at almost the exact same size. And unlike most species, they don't have sort of a size range that they're confined to. They start at this big baby came in or this big. Baby Anacondas are a little longer but they're thinner and they don't have legs. So it's the same thing in in terms of mass. And they're all in the streams or at the edges of lakes or swamps.
And so the baby Anacondas eat the baby came in. Baby came and can't really take down an Anaconda. They're going for little insects and fish. They have a quite a small mouth. So they again, it's in their interest to hide from everything. A bird, a heron can eat a baby came and pop it back. And so they have to survive but the Anacondas and the came and kind of jost as they grow.
Can you actually explain how the Anaconda would take down a camein? Like would it first use constriction then eat it or what's the methodology? Yes. So Anacondas have kind of a three point constriction system where their first thing is anchor. So the first thing is latch on to you. I'll come writing this down like. This is Jiu Jitsu like a master class here. This is for when you're wrestling an Anaconda just in case. You'd be like the coach and the sideline scum. You got to relax.
Don't let him take the back. Yeah. All right. So one time me and Jiu were following her from Colleague Peckery and Jiu J's teaching me tracking. So we're following the, you know, the hoof prints through the mud and we're doing this and I'm talking about no backpacks, just machetes, bare feet running through the jungle. And we come to this stream and Jiu Jitsu is like, I think we missed him. You know, I think they
went and I'm like, no, no, no, they went here. Look and not because I'm a great tracker because I can see hunt, you know, a few dozen footprints, hundreds of individual footprints right there. And I'm going, no, no, they just crossed here and Jiu Jitsu is like, you know what? We're not going to get eyes on him today. He was like, it's okay. He's like, we did good. We followed him for a long time and I was like, cool. And then I was trying to gauge like, can I drink
this stream? And I see a culpa and a culpa is a salt deposit where animals come to feed. Cosodium is a deficiency that most herbivores have here. And all of a sudden I just hear like the sound of a wet stick snapping just that bone crunch. And I look down and there's about a 16 foot anaconda wrapped around a freshly killed peckery wild boar. And what this anaconda had done was as the, all the pigs were going across the stream, the anaconda had grabbed it by the jaw,
swiped the legs, wrapped around it, bent it in half, and then crushed its ribs. And that's what the anaconda do, whether it's to mammals, to came in, it's all the same thing. It's grab on. They have six rows of backwards facing teeth. So once they hit you, they're never going to come off.
You actually have to go deeper in and then open before you can come out. All those backward facing teeth, so they have an incredible anchor system and then they use their weight to pull you down to hell, to pull you down into that water, wrap around you, and then start breaking you. And every breath you take you, and you, you're up against a barrier. And then when you, when you exhale, they go a little tighter and you're never going to get that space back. Your lungs are
never going to expand again. And I know this because I've been in that crush before JJ pulled me out of it. And so this pig, the anaconda had gotten it. And as the pig was thrashing the anaconda was wrapping around. I had bent it in half. And I just heard those vertebrae going. And so for a came, it's the same thing. They just grab and they wrap around it and then they have to crush it until there's no response. They'll wait an hour. They'll wait a long time until there's no
response from the animal. They'll overpower it. Then they'll, then they'll reposition, probably yawn a little bit, open their jaw, and then start forcing that entire, now here's the crazy thing. Is that an anaconda has stomach acid capable of digesting an entire crocodile when nothing comes out the other side. And when you see how thick the bony plate of a crocodile skull is, that that
can go in the mouth and nothing comes out the other side. That's insane. And so it always made me wonder on a chemistry level how you can have such incredible acid in the stomach that doesn't harm the anaconda itself. And someone said that he's able to digest, oh it's some kind of meucus. Oh, the mucus. There's a lot. Oh, interesting. There's levels of protection from the anaconda itself. But it seems like the anaconda is such a simple system as an organism.
That simplicity taken a scale could just do the, can swallow a came and digest this slowly. I know, but my question was how on earth is it physically possible to have this hellish bile that can digest anything? Even something as horrendous as a came and scales and bones and all the hardest shit in nature. And then not hurt the snake itself. And I had a chemist explained to me that it's probably some sort of mucus system that that lines the stomach and
neutralizes the acid and keeps it floating in there. But my god, that must be powerful stuff. What does it feel like being crushed choked by anaconda? When an anaconda is wrapped around you and you find yourself in the shocking realization that these could be your last moments breathing, you are confronted with the vast disparity in power, that there is so much power in these animals, so much crushing, deliberate, reptilian, ancient power
that doesn't care. They're just trying to get you to stop. They just want you to stop ticking. And there's nothing you can do. And I find it very awe inspiring when I encounter that kind of power. Even if it's that you see a dog run, you know, you're ever trying to outrun a dog and they just zip by you and you go, wow, you know, or you see a horse kick and you go, oh my god,
if that hoof hit anyone's head, it knock them three states over. And it's like, it's like, there, there is muscular power that is so far, like you said, that explosive that we dream of doing it. Imagine if a moitite kickboxer could harness that sort of came in power, then smash. And so it's just awe inspiring. I think it's really, really impressive what animals can do. And we're all, you know, we're all the same sort of makeup for the most part, all the mammals.
You know, we all have, our skeletons look so similar. We all have, you know, if you look at like a kangaroo's biceps and chest, it looks so much like a, like a, like a, a man's. And if same thing goes for a bear or you ever see a naked chimp, there's like chimp's with alopecia. And so it's shredded. It looks like a bodybuilder. Like it's got cuts and huge, huge, everything. Like it's got pecs and they got that face that's just like, just let me in.
Wouldn't know. Wish a wallet and do something. But yeah, but there's a, the specialization of a life time of doing damage to the world and using those muscles and just makes you, makes you just that much more powerful than most humans because humans, I guess, have more brain so they get lazy. They start puzzle solving versus, you know, using the biceps directly. Well, yes and no, and I have this question. Okay. So I, you know, the whole, you are what you eat thing. Now,
we one time here had two chickens. Now one of them was a wild chicken, like from the farm, had walked around its whole life, finding insects. And the other chicken was like factory raised. And so we cut the heads off of both of them, started getting ready to cook them. Now the factory raised chicken was like a much higher percentage of fat, had less muscle on its body, was softer tissue, a lighter color. The farm raised chicken had darker, more sinewy
muscles, less fat, was clearly a better made machine. And so my question is, is that what's happening with us? You know, like if you go see a Sherpa who's been walking his whole life and pulling, you know, and walking behind musk oxes and lifting things up mountains and breathing clean air and not being in the city versus someone that's just been chowing down at iHOP for 40 years and never getting off the couch. Like I imagine it's the same thing that you become what you
eat. Yeah, I mean like you and I were like have dead running up a mountain. Meanwhile, there's a grandma just like walking and she's been walking that road and she's just built different. With her alpaca on her shoulder. With a baby. She's just, they're just built different. When you when you apply your body in the physical way, your whole life. Yeah. Like you can't replicate that. Like, like just like that chimp has those from constantly moving through the canopy constantly
using those arms. Just like if you're, you know, if you see an Olympic athlete or you hug Rogan, exactly. You just go, why is there so much muscle? That's exactly what I what I feel like when you give them a hug. This is definitely a chimp. That's some sort. How does that just just that the constriction of the anaconda, just the the feeling of that? Was. Are they doing that based on instant instinct? Or is there some brain stuff going on? Like is this just like a basic procedure
that they're doing and they just really don't give a damn? They're not like thinking, oh, Paul, this is this kind of species who takes good or is it just a mechanism to just start activating and you can't stop it? With an anaconda, I really think it's the second one. I do think that they're impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane. I think they're a very simple system, a very ancient system. And I think that once you once you hit predation mode, it's going down no matter what.
The stupid mosquito, I'm going like this and every time he just flies around my hand, like I'm a big slow giant, and he just goes around my hand and then he goes back to the same spot. Like, and I'm like, no, and then he comes right back to the same spot. It's like, it's like he's just going, fuck you. No, here's the question. If the mosquito is stupid and you can't catch it, what does that make you? Fucking stupid. Dude, I flipped a wasp off me the other day. It flew back
like 12 feet in the air corrected and then flew back at my face. It made so many correct, like calculations and corrections and decided to come back and let me know about it. It was like, shoot. And the wasp probably went back to the nest, said, guess what happened today? Bitch asked kid from Brooklyn, tried to flick me and I showed him with some Adam running. They had a good juggle on that one. Yeah, you actually mentioned to me just on the topic of
Anaconda is that you've been participating in a lot of scientific work on the topic. So like, really, in everything you've been doing here, you are celebrating the animals, you're respecting the animals, you're protecting the animals, but you're also excited about studying the animals in their environment. So you're actually a co-author on a paper, on a couple of papers, one of them is Anaconda's and studying green Anaconda hunting patterns.
What's that about? So the lead authors of that paper, Pat Shampain and Carter Pain, friends of mine. And what we started noticing, for me began at that story, I told you where we were coming across the stream and we saw the Anaconda had had been positioned just below a cul-pa. And then other people began noticing that Anacondas seem to always be beneath these cul-pas, where mammals were going to be coming. And that contrasted with what we knew about Anacondas.
Because what we understood about Anacondas, they're purely ambush predators and they don't pursue their prey. But what we began finding out here, and Pat led the process of amazing scientists, he worked with the Katie University for a long time, worked with us for a long time. And he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an Anaconda right around here, and we were able to see their movements. And that's what these papers are showing,
is that they actually do pursue their prey. They do move up and down using the streams as corridors through the forest. They actually do pursue their prey. They actually do seek out food. So, I mean, think about it. It's a giant Anaconda. Obviously, it's not, you can't just sit in one spot. It has to put some work into it. So they're using scent and they're using communication to use the streams. You could be walking in the forest in a very shallow stream and see a
sizable Anaconda looking for a meal. So in the shallow stream, it moves not just in the water, but in the sand. Yeah. So it also likes to borrow a little bit. They borrow quite a bit. And so, these large snakes operate subterranean more than we think. Like there's times that you'll go with a tracker, you go with a telemetry set, and they'll say, like it will be over the snake. The snake's underground. Snake has found either a recess
under the sides of the stream. You saw it last night, where all the fish have their holes under the side of the stream. There was a six foot dwarf came in right in the stream, right where we were standing. He had his cave. He goes under there. They know. They have their system. Yeah, we walked by it. We walked by it. And he stuck his head out because he thought we'd gone. And then we turned around. And I just got a glimpse of him because I was in the front of
the line. And he just went right back into his cave. You guys are not going to touch me. And so, yeah, with the Anaconda, it's been really exciting. And in 2014, JJ and me and Mose and Empath and Lee, we all, we ended up catching what at the time was the record for Eunecte's marina scientifically measured. It was 18 feet six inches, 220 pounds, one of the
largest female Anaconda's on record. And since that time, these guys have been continuing to study the species, continuing to just again, just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge we have of the species and studying green Anacondas in lowland tropical rainforests. You've seen how hard it is
to move to operate, to navigate in this environment. And so, when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about this species, you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them. And then finding out a way to keep tabs on them, because even if you get lucky enough to see an Anaconda by the edge of a stream, to be able to observe it over time, to learn its habits, or to put a radio transmitter on it, or to take any sort of valuable information from the experience,
is almost impossible. And so, a lot of the stuff that I wrote about in Mother of God, us jumping on Anacondas and trying to catch them. And at first, it just seemed like something we were doing to learn to just try and see them, but it ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would have scientific implications later on, because now it's allowing us to try and find the largest Anacondas. And people used to say there's no way there's 25 foot, 27 foot, well,
there's just that video of the guy swimming with the 20 foot Anaconda. And so now, as we keep going, I'm going, well, maybe through drone identification, we could find where the largest Anacondas are sitting on top of floating vegetation, and even then, how do we restrain them so that we could measure them and prove this to the world? It's sort of a side quest, but...
So, by doing these kinds of studies, you figure out how they move about the world, what motivates them in terms of when they hunt, where they hide in the world, as the size of the Anaconda change? So, all of that, those are scientific studies. Yeah, I mean, look, there's so much that we don't
know about this forest. We don't know what medicines are in this forest. We don't know, with a lot of the 1500, there's something like 4,000 species of butterflies in the Amazon rainforest, and of the 1500 species that are here in this region, all of them have a larval stage, caterpillars, right? And each of the caterpillars has a specific host plant that they need to need to eat in order to become a successful butterfly to enter the next life-sake cycle. And for most of the species that
fill the butterfly book, we don't know what those interactions are. I recently got to see the white witch, which is a huge moth. It's one of the two largest moths in the world. It's the largest moth by wing span. Wow. Huge. It looks like a bird. Big white moth. We still... I believe, I believe, that we still don't know what the caterpillar looks like. It's in 2024. We have iPhones and penis-shaped rocket ships. Like, we don't know where that moth starts its life. We still haven't
figured that out. By the way, the rocket ships have shaped that way for efficiency purposes, not because they want it to make it look like a penis. Speaking of which, I have ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring... Have you. And make me... I know it's not just a figment of my imagination. I'm pretty sure they're real. In fact, you explained it to me and they make me very uncomfortable. Because there's just a lot of penises hanging off of a tree. Yes. I don't know what
the purposes... Who they're supposed to attract. But certainly Paul really enjoys them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's clearly you've done some research. You've noticed a lot of them. I haven't even seen them. There was... There was a time when I almost fell and to catch my balance, I had to grab one of the penises of the penis tree and... Unforgettable. Anaconda. The biggest baddest anaconda in the Amazon versus the biggest baddest black cameon. Because you mentioned there like there's race.
If there's a fight to see UFC and cage who wins underwater. This is the biggest in the baddest. The biggest in the baddest. Do you have... Can imagine given all the studies you've done of the two animals species in the baddest? You're talking about an 18-foot, several hundred pound black came in versus a 26-foot, 350 pound anaconda. Yeah. I think it's a death stalemate. I think the cameon slams the anaconda. Bites onto it. The anaconda wraps the cameon and they both
thrash around until they both kill each other. Because I think the cameon will tear him up so bad. And the cameon is not going to let go. He's going to let go. He's never going to let go. But then he's going to realize that he's also being constricted. So then he's going to stop. He's going to keep slamming down on that anaconda. And the anaconda is just going to keep constricting. But if the cameon can do enough damage before the anaconda, it's almost like a striker versus a jujitsu. Yeah.
If you can get enough elbows in before they lock you. How fast is the construction? So it's pretty slow. It's, no, it's incredibly quick. So it's you take the back and get me in chokehold. It's that. It's, I have maybe 30 seconds, maybe on the upward side if you haven't cinched it under my throat. But if you've gotten good position, it's over. Is there any way to unwrap a choke on do the choke defending some unless you have outside help unless you have another human or another
10 humans coming to unwrap the tail. Helping you. But for an animal, like if a deer gets hit by an anaconda, no way. They don't stand a chance. So the black cameon would bite somewhere, somewhere close to the head. And then and just try to hold on a thrash. Yeah. I don't, I don't think a large black cameon. Here's the thing. Every fisherman knows this. It's like the biggest fish. They're smart. Yeah. And more importantly, they're shrewd. They're careful. A huge black cameon
that 16 feet long isn't going to be messing with the big anaconda. Like they, they, they'll, they won't, they won't cross paths because while they technically occupy the same type of environment, that black cameon is going to have this deep spot in the lake. And that anaconda is going to have found this floating forest like sort of black stream back water where it's going to be. And they'll have made that their home for decades and they'll already have cleaned out the competition. So maybe
if there was a flood and they got pushed together, they, they could have some sort of a showdown. But almost more certainly is that when they get to that size, that cameon at any sign of danger, bloom right under the water. Just, yeah, it's almost like, it's like even if you, what do you learn when you're a black belt? You know, what do you, what do you do with a street fight? You still run away. There's no reason for a street fight. And I think the animals really understand that. There's
no reason for this. So like a giant anaconda and a giant black cameon, they could probably even call exist in the same environment, just knowing, using the wisdom to avoid the fight. Like why? Or they would have a big showdown and one of them would either die or have to leave. They would have a territorial dispute. Yeah, yeah, without killing either of them. Yeah. On it, dude, nature. Anything
could happen. One of the things that me and Pat wrote up was that I saw a yellow-tailed Cribo, which is like a six-foot rat snake eating an oxyropus millennio genus, which is the red snake that we found last night. And just no one had ever, in scientific literature, we'd never seen a Cribo eating an oxyropus before. And so I had the observation in the field. I sent it to Pat Champagne, Pat writes it up paper. And so it's like, it's this really cool, that's a really cool system because we're just
out here all the time. You end up seeing things. JJ's dad saw an anaconda eating a taper. Taper is the size of a cow. Yeah. And it's that guy didn't lie. You know, like some people, you trust your sources on that. He saw enough stuff. He didn't need to make up stories. You know how you, you know what I love now is when you go to, so when you ask people, when we were going up the mountain with Jimmy. Yeah.
JJ said to him, he goes, have you ever seen a puma up here in the mountains? And Jimmy goes, they're up here. And JJ, JJ went, no, no, no, have you seen it? And Jimmy went, no, never seen one. And you know how most people will go, yeah, I've seen that makes me trust a person when they admit, nah, I haven't seen it. They're up here. I haven't seen it. And Jimmy has been living there his whole life. His whole life. This puma's in the mountains. You know mountain lions, puma's whatever, you know,
there's all different names for them. They're distributed from, I think from Alaska down through Argentina, it's there everywhere. It's this extremely successful species from deserts to high mountains, everything. I think you're saying puma's have a curiosity, have a way about them where they like explore, like follow people, like just to kind of figure out, like just that curiosity, versus like as opposed to causing harm or hunting and that kind of stuff, like what is this about?
I think it's based in predatory instincts, but I also think there is a playfulness to higher intelligence animals that you don't see in lower intelligence animals. And so something like a rabbit, for instance, you're never going to see a rabbit come in to check you out. You just, you just, you can't even think of it like that. Like a rabbit's just going to either eat or run away. There's really two settings. When you think of something like a river giant river otter,
or a tyra, which is a they call it munko here. It's a it's a huge arboreal weasel. And they'll come check you out. I woke up at my house the other day and there was a tyra climbing up the side of the house and he was looking down at me sleeping. And it's like he came to check me out. Like it's like they're smart enough and they're brave enough. Here's the important thing. They know that they can fend for themselves. They can fight. They can climb. They can run. And so they're like, let me
I'm curious. I got time. Let me check this out. Yeah, they're gathering information. I wonder how complex and sophisticated their world model is. Like how they're integrating all the information about the environment. Like where all the different trees are, where all the different nests of the different insects are, what the different creatures are, by size, all that kind of stuff. I'm sure they don't have enough, you know, storage up there to like keep all that, but they
probably keep the important stuff. Basically, you know, so to sort of integrate the experiences they have into like what is dangerous, what is tasty, all that kind of stuff. I think it's more complex than we realize you go back to that friends to wall book. Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? There's so many incredible examples of controlled studies where the researchers weren't understanding how to shed being so insurmountably human and understand that there are other types
of intelligence. And whether that's elephants or cats, so big cats for instance, we just saw a camera trap video from last night, where you see one of our workers walk down the trail and then five minutes later a cat behind them. By the way, we're walking just exactly the same area, also exact same time. Yeah. So we're out there and there's deer and there's cats and there's a jaguar
and there's a puma and there's all these animals out there. And we're out in the night in the Inky Black night in this ocean of darkness beneath the trees and we're just exploring and getting to see everything and there's all these little eyes and heartbeats. I love the jungle at night, man. It's the most exciting thing. You want things you do when you turn off the headlamp, complete darkness all around you. And just the sounds, everything you hear, the cicadas,
the birds, they're all screaming about sex all the time. So they're just trying to get laid. So all of them are making mating calls. Now the trick is to make your mating call without attracting a predator. Yeah. But at night, what what what amazes me is that for us, it's so from the from the caveman logic of it's hard to make fire here. It's hard to even light a fire here to having this this this incredible beam of of it, you know, all of a sudden we can look at
the jungle and walk through that darkness. Then we're seeing the frogs on those leaves and the snakes moving through the undergrowth and the deer sneaking through the shadows. It's like it's almost as supernatural as skydiving. It's a strange thing to be able to do that technology allows us to do. We're doing something really complex and we're walking on trails that have been cleared for us that we've planned out. And so walking through the jungle at night, you just get this freak show
of biodiversity and I'm addicted to it. I truly love it. Except for the times over the last few days when we walked on through jungle without a trail. And that's just a different experience. Well, how would you categorize if somebody said, Lex, I think I'm going to go for a hike through the jungle, not on the trail. Yeah. What would you tell them? Every step is really hard work. Every step is a puzzle. Every step is a full of possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude of ways.
There's just a wasp nest under a leaf, a hole under a leaf on the ground where if you step in and you're going to break a knee, ankle, leg and going to not be able to move for a long time, there's all kinds of ants that can hurt you a little or can hurt you a lot. Bullet ants, there's snakes and spiders and oh, my favorite that I've gotten to know intimately is different plants with different defensive mechanisms, one of which is just spikes. So sharp. I don't know if you
brought it, but there's a club. There's an epic club with spikes, but there's so many trees that have spikes on them. Sometimes they're obvious spikes, sometimes less than obvious spikes. It could be just that innocent as you take a step through a dense jungle, there could be an innocent placing of a hand on that tree that could just completely transform your experience, your life by penetrating your hand with like 20, 30, 40, 50 spikes and just
changing everything. That's just a completely different experience than going on a trail where you where you're observer of the jungle versus the participant of it. And it truly is extreme hard work to take every single step. Now just think about this. I think scientifically, because people like to summarize, people like to get really, really sort of cavalier with our scientific progress and they go,
you know, we've already explored the Amazon. It's like, well, have we? Because in between each tributary is, you know, let's just between some of them, let's just say 100 miles of unbroken forest. Who's explored that? Yeah. Maybe some of the tribes have been there, maybe some areas they haven't been. Now, when you're talking about scientists, whether they're indigenous scientists, western science, whatever, so many of the areas in this jungle that is the size of the continent
until US still have not been accessed. And the places where people are doing research, so you have been down here long enough. I see all the PhDs come down here and they all go to the same few research stations. They're safe. They have a bed. If you get hella dropped into the middle of the jungle in the deepest, most remote parts, you're going to find micro ecosystems. You're going to see little species variations. You're going to see a type of flower that JJ has
never seen before, like what happened the other day. As you start walking through new patches of forest, you start finding new species and everything here changes. You just go a little bit up river and the animals you see differ. You go on this side of the river versus on the north side of the river, there's two other species of primates there that don't exist here. That's in the mammal paper that we did with the emperor Tamarins and the pygmy marmosets that the rangers found.
Yeah, the mammal paper is looking at the diversity of life in this one region of the Amazon. What kind of can you talk more about that paper? Mammal diversity along the let's be address forever. Once again, the mammal paper patched in pain the prodigy. He was sort of leading on this with a bunch of other scientists who have worked in the region, including Haleodonol out of Oxford.
Myself, I really just made a few observations. The jungle keepers rangers got featured because they're the ones that spotted a pygmy marmoset that had previously been unrecorded on the river. I got to contribute because I had the only photograph that I believe anyone has of an emperor Tamarins on this river. It's the first proof of emperor Tamarins on this river. That's exciting. It's exciting because you can post a picture or share a scientific observation or write about something.
Then what happens is you get these like couch experts, these armchair experts who will come and say, no, no, you don't get blue and yellow because they're, I can tell from my bird book, it says they're not there and they'll tell you you're wrong. No, you don't get woolly monkeys there or emperor Tamarins is like, but we have proof. We're coming together to try and add to that knowledge. My general amateur experience of the species of encountered here is like, this should not exist.
Whatever this is, the scenario. This is CGI. Just the colors, the weirdness. I think I called it the the paraseldon caterpillar because it looks like a... It's a paraseldon dog. Yeah, yeah, it's like really furry and it's transparent and sort of it's transparent. All you see is this white beautiful fur and it's just like this caterpillar. It doesn't look real. Do you think there's species like how many species have we not discovered?
And is there species that are like extremely badass that we haven't discovered yet? If you look up how many trees are in the Amazon rainforest, it's something in the order of 400 billion trees. There's something like 70 to 80,000 species of plants, individual types of plants here. 1500 species of trees. It's so vast that it's comparable like the scale is like only comparable to the universe in terms of stars and galaxies and for the sheer immensity of it.
So we're describing new species every year and just walking on the trail at night, you and I have seen, you see a tiny little spider hidden in a crevice and has the scientific eye ever seen that spider before? Has it been documented? Do we know anything about its life cycle? There's still so much that's here that is completely unknown. We have pictures of all these butterflies. Somebody went out with a butterfly net and caught these butterflies. Took a picture of it,
gave it a name, put it in a butterfly book. What do we know? What host plant do they use for their caterpillars? What's their geographical range? What do we actually know? Not that much. So are their creatures out here that haven't been described? Absolutely. And some of them could be extremely effective predators in a niche environment. Yeah, absolutely. Certainly in the canopy, 50% of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy and we've had very limited access to the canopy
for all of history. If you wanted to get up into the rainforest canopy, you basically have to climb a vine or what scientists, when I was a kid, I always used to see them with the slingshots or the bow and arrows. They would shoot a piece of paracord over a branch, pull the rope up and then do the ascension thing. And then you're up in this tree, getting swarmed by sweat bees, getting stung by a wasps. You're trying to do science up there in that environment. It's
incredibly hostile. And so having canopy platforms, I actually met a guy at a French film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over the canopy of the Amazon and then lay these big nets over the broccoli of the trees. And the nets were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets and then reach through and pull cactuses and lizards and snakes and whatever. Just take specimens from the canopy. That's how difficult it is that scientists have resorted to using hot air balloons.
And so having a tree house, having canopy platforms, it's starting to get, it's starting to be more and more access to the rainforest canopy. And so we're beginning to log more data. We've even observed in our tree house, which is supposed to be the tallest in the world. We're seeing lizards that we don't see on the ground. Lizards that have never been documented on this on this river. Like we're seeing snakes where they're saying we saw the snake
inside a crevice on that tree in the strangly fig. And we don't know what it is. It's just people haven't been up there. And that's where a lot of the monkeys are. That's where there's just a lot of dynamic life up there. Yeah. I mean, when you wake up in the canopy in the morning and the Amazon rainforest, as soon as that, the darkness lifts, as soon as that purple comes in the east in the morning, the howler monkeys start up. Yeah. And then the parrots start up. And then the
tinnumus start going in. The macaques start going in pretty soon. Everybody's going in the spider monkey groups are all calling to each other. And it's just the whole donkora starts and it's so exciting. So you're saying when they're screaming is usually about sex. Sex or territory. Usually. Sex and violence or implied violence or the threat of violence. Yeah. I mean howler monkeys in the morning. They're letting other groups know this is where we're at. We're going to be farging
over here. You better stay away. And so it's a little bit respectful as well. There is order in the chaos. So just speaking of screaming macaques are like these beautiful creatures. They're lifelong partners. They stick together. So there's y'all. They just they're monogamous. So you see two of them together. But when they communicate their love language seems to be very loud screaming. Yeah. What do you learn about relationships from a cause that that it can be loud and rough
and still be loving and still be loving. But is that interesting to you that there's like monogamy in some species that they they're lifelong partners. And then there's like total lack of monogamy in other species. It's all interesting. I mean there's the anti monogamy crew who's like, you know, we were never meant to be monogamous. We're supposed to just be animals. And then there's the other side of the crew that's like, we were meant to be monogamous. We are monogamous creatures.
That's what God wanted between a man and a woman. And then other people like, yeah, but I know about these two gay penguins. And so that's natural too. And so then everyone tries to draw their their identity. They're trying to justify their identity off of the laws of nature. So the fact that macaques are monogamous really doesn't have anything to do with anybody except for that. It's beneficial for them to work together to raise chicks. It's difficult. They rely on iron
wood trees or agua-hay palms. And it's difficult to find the right hole in a tree. There's only so much macaque real estate. And so they need to use those holes. And each one of those ancient trees, it's usually 500 years or more is a is a valuable macaque generating site in the forest. And so if those trees go down, you lose exponential amounts of macaques. And that's how you get endangered species. And so that's why we're trying to protect the ironwood trees.
There's another ridiculous question. If every jungle creature was the same size. No, boy. Who would be the new apex predator, the new alpha at the top of the food chain? Dude, that's like super smash brothers of the jungle. That's incredible. Yeah. Like, bullet ants. If you had a bullet ant that was the size. Yeah. Can it be like a tournament?
So everyone is pound for pound ratioed. Yeah. For efficiency. So you have basically like a six-foot bullet ant versus a huge black camein versus an anaconda versus oslots of the size of jaguars versus. Yeah. Well, let's let's go bullet ant versus black camein. But they're size. They're comparable size. I don't know, man. I never thought about it. I mean, bullet ant has these giant giant, giant mandibles. It could probably grab the black camein and then at that amount of venom, you're talking
about a bucket of venom going into that black camein. Black camein is going to get paralyzed immediately. Well, insects have just a just a tremendous amount of like strength. I don't know how they generate what the geometry that is. The natural world can't create that same kind of power and the bigger thing. It seems like it seems like it seems like ants and like just these tiny creatures are the ones they're able to have that much strength. I don't know how that works with
the physics of this. Yeah. So like an ant leaf cutter ant lifting that leaf. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. The biggest sense. I don't know. I don't know if that's a limit of physics. I think it's just the limit of evolution of how that works. One of the most interesting limits that I heard somebody talking about recently was the reason that dinosaurs didn't get bigger. Even bigger because
that's the conditions on earth were favorable towards it. Was that at some point their eggs reached this physical limits that their eggs reached the size of the eggs were so big that eggs need to breathe for the embryo to survive and their eggs reached a limit where in order to have a shell that could hold the mass of the liquid and the young dinosaur if they got bigger it wouldn't be
permeable anymore. And I thought that was so interesting because the entire size of physical creatures was determined by how thick shell can be before it breaks or before it can't pass air through it. Yeah. There might be a lot of the like biophysics limits that's you know fascinating stuff. Just like the the interplay between biology chemistry and physics of like a life form. It was like this thing there's a lot involved in creating a single living organism
that could survive in this world. And bigger you know being big is not always good. Being a big creature it's for many reasons like you were saying the big creature seemed to be going extinct yeah for many reasons but in the human world it's because there seem to be a higher value. Yeah. Given the current size of the jungle I think that the MVP the pound for pound goat is
oslots. You're talking about like a mid size 40 40 50 pound cat that can climb that does unlike a jaguar jaguar every time it hunts it's going after a deer it catches a deer the deer could hit it with its with its antlers it can tear it with its hooves it's risking its life for that meal.
And oslots. Oslots walk around at night and they climb a tree eat a whole bunch of eggs eat the mother bird too kill a snake maybe mess around and eat a baby came and they can have whatever they like and they're they're sleek enough and smart enough to get away from predators
they don't really have predators and so they sort of occupy this perfect niche where they they can hunt small prey in high quantity without taking on big risks and so if you had to choose an animal to be it would probably be like an oslot or I would say giant river otters which are so damn
cool because they're the locals call them logos de rio river wolves because they're so tough and they're so social and they're so like us because they're intensely familial groups they live in holes by the sides of lakes and they swim through the water and they catch fish all day
long piranhas they eat them just like the the scales go flying as they eat these piranhas and they're so joyous in the way they swim and they have friends and they have family and they I think it would be I think we could relate to being a river otter really because I can't picture
being a cat and being so solitary and just marching along a 15 mile route and making sure there's no other cats and coming in on your territory and marking that territory it seems it seems very solo and very cat like so lonely existence lonely existence and we humans are social
being so social so to me river otters is like having a big Italian family like constantly eating you're freaking out you know just like causing problems with the black camon take down a black camon star street fight yeah it's a family thing you mentioned piranhas yeah what what do you think
you know they're there a source of a lot of fear from people what do you find beautiful and fascinating by these creatures they're also kind of social or at least they hunt and operate in groups yeah not in the mammalian way though piranhas are in large schools but I fisher is so
different like if you I can talk to you all day about how how much I'd love to be an otter also yeah going back to the fighting thing otters and weasels mussela day tend to be very loose in their skin so if you grab an otter it can still rotate around to bite you so it's like if I grab you
by the back you're stuck you know like we can't you grab them by the skin yeah they can rotate around and just shred you apart so they're they're really cool fighters um piranha fish fish I don't I don't you know I don't identify with fish in in terms like that I think living out here has made me think of fish as a kind of rapid food that can or can't be gotten like you know so to me a piranha is just is when I see a piranha I think about how I want how I want it to taste yeah so like fish
is a is a food source of so many creatures in the jungle so they're primarily food source but piranhas are I mean they're predators they're serious predators they are serious predators I found a baby black
came and not that long gone who's missing all of his toes because the piranhas it eaten them off it was really sad he just had these stumps and he was swimming around the water and I was like you are not going to make it he was like eight inches and he was such a cute little puppy you know those big
guys and I was just like man you already are missing all your toes it's like just a matter of time okay now he can't get away so some big agami herons gonna come and just nail and pop them down his throat and that's the end of that for the camon I mean nature is metal nature sure shit is
metal bite off a little bit and then makes you vulnerable and then that vulnerability is exploited by some other species and then that's it that's the end yeah but humans are brutal too like like that story we heard about that guy the other day who caught a stingray on a fishing hook
chopped its tail off to make it safe for humans caught a piece of the stingray off so he could use it for bait and then through the live fish back in the river like to me that is incomprehensible amounts of cruelty with with with flawed logic in every direction like if you're gonna use the
thing as bait use it as bait if you're gonna remove its tail well then just kill it all together yeah yeah or if you want to save the animal and not kill it then don't name it before you return it to its it was so still weird so if you kill an animal you want to use it to as full as by using
it as a food source by cooking it by you know eating every part of it all that kind of stuff yeah so we have we've been eating paco yeah and your time here fried paco is great fried amazing it's delicious full of newt you could tell it makes you healthy I feel like we better work out
sweat we can go harder in the jungle and so a few months ago in August when the river was down it was there was a day that the river was clear and a friend of mine Victor who's who's married to a native girl he said it's time to go paco fishing and at the time we were stuck out here and we had no resupply everybody was busy and so everyone was demoralized the staff was hungry we were hungry and it really became this thing of like hey go catch us some paco they were working on the trails
they were installing the solar we were working hard and we didn't have food and so we went out to the river and what we did was we went up river we camped on the beach and in the morning Victor's wife was was canoeing with the with the paddle dead quiet don't let the paddle touch the wooden boat
Nikita was balanced in the middle of the thing Victor's on the front with this huge fishing rod and i'm sitting there and he goes i'll catch the first one you catch the second one and he's got this huge fishing rod and a piece of half rotten meat from the day before and he's smacking it
against the was six am he's just letting it smack against the water and i'm going and we're floating down the river and i'm going this is not going to work and we're floating and we're floating in a half hour passes and i'm going it's dawn i want to go back to sleep i'm such a i'm just not a
morning person and all of a sudden a fish hits that line almost pulls this man off of his feet and he swings the thing in the fish comes on the boat and then i realize he's got a big metal mallet on the boat so you could try to shut that fish off and it's this huge or shaped
thick muscular paco and as soon as i saw that fish i just thought wow the strongest of this species from millions of years have been swimming in this river and suddenly we've through this incredible combination of the boat and the and the
the cord and the hook none of which we made and the skill that he had from knowing how to fish apaco because otherwise no chance that you're getting that fish they hide they're very very suspicious of what you're doing we had gotten this fish onto the boat and plume you hammer it like
caveman boom doesn't die boom you have to crush its skull and now you have this fish and you're holding this genetic material this sustenance for your life that has been developing since the dinosaur times it's so beautiful the act the sacred act of eating that of of the fish of the
competition with the fish and we spent the morning fishing we got three paco's three huge giant vegetarian piranha and i i just remember touching them with so much reverence thinking about the incredible history and how that before these rivers existed those paco's were
were swimming through the water and and and and trying to survive through through through history through history through history until this until we we took just a few and we did it respectfully and we did it when we needed it most not at a time when it was just for fun and it was it was really
really special well humans using them for sustenance there's a collaboration there that's that's something also they've seen in a jungle that there's creatures using each other and it's like a dance of either mutually using each other it's parasitic or symbiotic it's interesting like there's a
a medicinal plant you grabbed that was full of ants yeah that were like trying to murder you by biting by they were defending the plant that they were using for whatever purpose there's a clear dance there of the ants using the plant and the plant existing therefore all their applications
and all they use for humans and there's that kind of circle of life happening but the answer or defense so that the plant didn't have its own defense mechanism the ants the army of ants was there to protect the plant and did you actually when you remember we put our backpacks down
at that one spot and it was like the ants got on your backpack and I said oh shit this is that tree did you actually get bitten by one of those because they're incredibly painful yeah and they're on a one they're like yeah yeah surprisingly painful because they're small that he's
nothing like I'm luckily I've not been bitten by a bullet ant yeah but it's just it's amazing because they live inside the tree the tree comes standard with holes in it that allow the ants to move and to exist safe and it protects their eggs and they protect the tree and they so we saw
that spot where there's a perfect circle around the trees because the ants had excavated the other vegetation so that those trees could have no competition to grow the incredible calculation of how ants know to guard come programs to garden that tree and the tree somehow has been genetically
informed to have ant habitat within itself it's mind blowing and it actually is the foundation of a lot of existential confusion for me because how the hell is this possible yeah well one of the things you mentioned that's also a source of a lot of existential confusion for me is ants
and the intelligence of different creatures in the forest there's these giant colonies there's just giant systems but even just looking at a single colony of ants them collaborating leaf cutter ants is an incredible system so individually the ants seem kind of dumb and simplistic but taken
together there is a vast intelligence operating that's able to be robust and resilient and you kind of conditions is able to figure out a new environment is able to be resilient to any kinds of attacks and all that kind of stuff what do you find beautiful about them like as you said
just leaf cutter ants in this jungle that's forgetting all the other hundreds of species of ants that are in this jungle but just the leaf cutters apparently digest roughly 17% of the total biomass of the forest everything all these giant trees all that leaf litter 17%
of that almost a fifth of this forest cycles through leaf cutter ant colonies so they're constantly regenerating the forest they're a huge source of the of the driver of this ecosystem and so to me when you see them working it's again like I said you see your friends as you go through the jungle
you see all the k-pop trees you see kinea tree so there's leaf cutter and doing what they're supposed to do and it's it's just so beautiful I find them very beautiful army ants they're so tough they're so ready to fight they have the huge mandibles they're just ready to they're just they're
transporting their eggs they're moving from here to there anything that's in the way is getting eaten they're just savage and they're kind of cute for that unless you tie to a tree the savagery is cute I find that yes it's kind of reassuring you know you want certain things to be tough that's
their part oh that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the nature mechanism yeah powerful play yeah but the army ants are so savage you know like if you if you step on army ants they will all come a cause you just attack onto your feet and they'll just they'll
just sacrifice their own life for the good of the thing and they'll be trying to kill your your shoes and there's something funny about that to me there's something like kind of reassuring again unless unless imagine if you're going through the jungle and you slip and you fall
and you twist your knee yeah and you fall in just the right way but you you can't get up yeah you can't you're stuck there and then army ants find you yeah they will take you apart there are records of horses that have been tied up and army ants come
and they'll take out the whole horse imagine the pain of that it might be raining on us very hard very soon you want to pause nope I think we'll stay here until the ship goes down we we should mention that there's this one source of light and we're shrouded in darkness and and now the
night shift is going to take over soon and we are in the Amazon rainforest what is the rainforest represent to you when you zoom out look at the entirety of it Carl Sagan's pale blue dot resonated with a lot of people that everything you've ever heard of all the heroes all the villains
all of your ancestors every achievement tragedy triumph everything has happened on that one spot this one tiny tiny little rock that has life on it and to me the rainforests represent the crown jewel of that as far as we know into the best of our knowledge and with our shrewd scientific
brains at their fullest capacity this is still the only place that we know that has life and given that the fact that there are still these tropical towering complex ecosystems that we are barely understand crawling and full of the most incredible life it's just to me it's it's it's
so wonderful it's so incredible those with the waterfalls and the birds and the macaques and the jaguars it's barely believable like if you were to theoretically tell a hypothetical alien I live on this planet and there there's just these places where everything is interconnected
everything means something to something else and the whole thing is this system that keeps us alive and each tree is pumping air into the river and there's an invisible river above the actual river and the whole thing goes into stabilizing our global climate and each little tiny leaf cutter
ant somehow contributes to this giant biotic orchestra that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible that is beautiful I love that and so the the rainforest to me are the greatest celebration of life and probably the greatest challenge for us as a global society because if we can't protect
the crown jewel the best thing you know the most beautiful part then then we're really really missing the point yeah the diversity of organisms here is the biggest celebration of life that is at the core of what makes earth a really special thing that said you and I have been
arguing about aliens for pretty much the day I showed up all right you brought him a shout you to this fight luckily the table is long enough to you earth is truly special yeah you don't think there's other earths out there millions of other earths in our galaxy when
you look up you know we're sitting in the Amazon River okay dark the storm rolled over yeah and you started counting the stars yeah one two and that was once you can count the stars I was assigned at the storm will actually pass eventually pass and that's what you're doing three four five and
it's going to pass you're not gonna have to sit in that river for like all night so just a couple hours to keep yourself warm okay each of those stars this earth like planets around them okay what why do you think there's not alien civilizations there you can write down a calculation on a napkin
you can cite different Hollywood movies you can point up to the pieces of light in the stars but if you if I talk about show me a single cell that's not from this planet it's still not possible and so I agree with you that the likelihood is there all indications point to it it would be fascinating
especially if it was done and especially you know imagine finding a planet of alternative life forms not necessarily even intelligent imagine just a put a planet a butterflies whatever you know something else that would be amazing but but I'm concerned with the reality that we have in front
of us is that this is the spaceship this is life yeah and so right now given that reality maybe that's maybe that's the case maybe maybe there are other planets or or maybe we are the first maybe life originated here maybe God the universe whatever maybe maybe this is it this is the
this is the the testing ground for something bigger and and and and this complexity and this diversity of life and this life that we have is that important and I think that part of what we do when we go oh yeah but there's other planets where first of all we're we're we're taking an
assumption into reality without I mean you know aliens are right now we're about as real a Santa Claus we think they're out there but we're not sure maybe a little more real because you know it could make sense we know it has an alien no one's seen an alien no one's even seen cellular life
and so I'm not again if they showed up tomorrow great let's study them but right now we have this very simple threat going on where we can't stop killing each other and our living environment and so while some people can specialize in looking to the stars and to other planets and talk
about being an interplanetary species I'm very much concerned with the fact that here in our home turf our living environment where the air is good and the rivers are clean and the trees are big and there's macaques flying through the sky and salmon in the rivers not only do we have a
responsibility to each other and to our children to protect this incredible gift that is our entire reality seems kind of weird too at some point conservation seems kind of ridiculous like you're begging people to not pollute the things that keep them alive it's it's it's almost kind of
silly at a point but but we have this incredible thing where there are fish in the ocean and in the rivers they come standard with life on earth and and we're we're we're harming the ability of earth's ecosystems to provide for that life and we are the generation that's going to decide
if those systems continue to provide life to all the people on earth and all the generations and by the way all the other animals that exist for their own reasons other consciousnesses that were just beginning to understand elephants humpback whales whatever families of giant river
otters you not everything can be seen from a human perspective these are other species that have their own stories and so I'm I'm more biocentric than anthropocentric and that I I think that that nature is important but I also believe that we are we are special we are the most intelligent
animal so one I I agree with you there's some degree to which when you imagine aliens you forget if by for a moment how special important life is here on earth yes but it's also a way to reach out through curiosity and trying to understand what is intelligence what is consciousness
what is exactly the thing that makes life on earth special another way of doing that and I see the jungle in that same way is basically treating the animals all around us the life forms all around us as kinds of aliens as that's a humbling way that's an intellectual humility with which to
approach the study of like what the hell is going on here this is truly incredible like are the animals we've met over the last few days conscious what is the nature of their intelligence what is the nature of their consciousness what motivates them are they individual creatures are they
actually part of the large system and how large is the system is earth one big system and humans are just little fingertips of that system or are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything else is in the emerging complexity of the system so I think thinking about aliens
is a necessary I like my Tom with a little drop of poison from Tom was is a necessary perturbation of the system of our thinking just sort of say hey we don't know what the folks going on around here sure and aliens is a nice way to say okay the mystery all around us is immense because to me
likely aliens are living among us not in a trivial sense little green men but the force that created life I think permeates the entirety of the universe that there's a force that's creative now the force that created life is a is a big one and then the other thing is what do you mean by
that there's aliens living among us you mean extraterrestrials yes living among us yes you believe that not like a hundred percent but there's a good percentage I don't understand how it's possible for them not to be a very large number of alien civilization throughout just our galaxy but that's
different than saying that they're living among us if you tell me that there's aliens living five galaxies over and that they're just out there somewhere I'm kind of I'm kind of more on your side than that they're here because just like bigfoot like we have camera traps we have DNA
sequencing through through water now like we can you're telling me no one found one wing nut of a of a ship in all like the Egyptians up until right now no one in Russia saw like a crash ship took a picture tweeted that shit real quick and you know I think there's no bigfoot there's no
trivial manifestations of aliens I think if they're here they're here in ways that are not comprehensible by humans because they're far more advanced than humans they're far more advanced than any life forms on earth so they're even if it's just their probes we would cannot just even
comprehend it I think it's possible that they operate in the space of ideas for example that ideas could be aliens feelings could be aliens consciousness itself could be aliens so we can't restrict our understanding what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that
operates via natural selection on this particular planet it could be much much much more sophisticated it could be in a space of computation for example as we in the 21st century are developing increasingly sophisticated computational systems with artificial intelligence it could be
operating on some other level that we can't even imagine it could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand we we barely understand quantum mechanics we use it quantum mechanics is a way we use to make very accurate predictions but to understand why
it's operating that way we don't and there's so many gigantic powerful cosmic entities out there that we detect sometimes can't detect dark matter dark energy but it's out there we know it exists but we can't explain why and what the fuck it is we give it names black holes and dark energy
and dark matter but those are all names for things that mathematical equations predict but we don't understand and so all of that is just to say that aliens could be here in ways that are for now and maybe for a long time going to be impossible for humans to understand so aliens in the
strict biological sense like like like like horseshoe crabs we agree that they're they're not we haven't found physical aliens the only way I can imagine finding physical aliens is if aliens species are trying to communicate with us humans or with other life forms and are trying to
figure out a way to communicate with us such that we dumb humans would understand like let's create a thing yo there's a moth the size of a small eagle the size of a small eagle it just might it just my fan of the podcast okay Lex I love you all right so so what yours wouldn't it be interesting
it would be really fascinating to me if we found out that there were aliens living among us and we couldn't see them and what some of the people were calling aliens the scientists the the religious people were calling angels and then everybody had this realization that whether you
call them aliens or angels there are these other there is more way more to the universe than we're realizing I just for me the fact that there's there's a skull in the table yeah there's a skull let me tell you a hand there's now a skull in my hand of a monkey with a bulletinets head
that I found on the floor of an indigenous community where they eat monkeys I didn't kill the monkey so save your comments but you know in terms of of the animals I think I think that when I see space it my feeling and I'm not requiring anybody else to have this feeling but because we know
because this is the only place that we know that there's life and we have no idea how it started I just think it's so important to protect it and and and for me it's just as much about our children as it is about the little spider monkeys and the little baby came and that are in the river
right now because life is so beautiful and I think that there's a huge amount of intellectual responsibility that we can transfer off of ourselves if we go yeah the rivers are filled with trash and yeah extinction is happening but we have to be an interplanetary species anyway because at any
moment this could all end from an asteroid and like everything's going to shit anyway and so it's like we're fucking up this planet and it's like that's that's we're just being angry teenagers who are you know going goth for a while and it's like what if you just rolled up your sleeves and
said holy shit wait a second you know we can pretty much do whatever we want we can fly all over the world we have we can do heart transplants we can watch Netflix in the Amazon if we want it to like we could do all this amazing stuff we can capture on video or adventures and go back and
watch them again and again and again there's so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to do and we're the we're the richest in history I mean we can do everything we could cross the whole planet in a second and it's like that's an amazing time to be alive and if we just
don't fuck up the ecosystems and kill all the other animals we got it made yeah so it is true that we can destroy ourselves in nuclear weapons but it also is true that that snake that I got to handle yesterday is like one of the most beautiful things earth has ever created in that little
organism is it is it encapsulated the entire history of earth and it's it's beautiful so both things are true yeah we should we should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through the weapons we create and we should become multi planetary species as a backup for that
purpose but also remember that this place is is really really special and probably if not difficult probably impossible to recreate elsewhere and by the way there's something incredibly powerful about a skull yeah well you've ever hold a human skull it it'll give you it'll it'll
it'll it'll weigh on you first because you look into this the hollow eyes of this face and suddenly you go you feel your own cheat you go you feel your own skull and you go holy shit you go what is going on it's like taking acid you just go oh boy and I forgot that I'm a ghost
inhabiting a meat vehicle on a floating rock but even even a monkey yeah it's like looking at a ancestor you know the not a direct ancestor but there's a it's like a you know like you look in an apodola to reflection a little blurry but it's all blurry but it's still there
yeah it's still there and like the roots of who we are is still there and it's all kind of incredible do you ever think of the tree of life just kind of like where we came from yeah the jungle is ephemeral it just keeps it's a system that just keeps forgetting because it's just churning and
churning and churning and churning has in some ways no history but to create the jungle to create life on earth there's a deep history of lots of death sex and death a festival of sex and death life on earth that's what I see in the skull yeah there's something it's there's something kind of
terrifying about that image to me like when I hold that every now and then at night you hold that skull and you it just reminds you that you're temporary yeah both you and I will one day have one of those yeah mine will be bigger the male competition continues the silver back slaps
the lesser male once again uh devil lighter yeah bro you want to light this blunt yeah what are your favorite animals to interact with I mean my favorite absolute favorite animals interact with is 100% elephants which there's no elephants here but I've been incredibly privileged
to spend some time with elephants both in India and in Africa and I think that they're so smart and so complex that we do a really bad job of understanding what an elephant really is I think that most children probably think of elephants as like something kind of cuddly most adults probably
think of have a similar misconception of them when you see an elephant when you see a 12-foot tall bull elephant with bone coming out of its face with huge tusks and those giant it's a it's an octopus faced butterfly eared behemoth that's a survival machine and it'll look at you and just go
do I have to kill you to keep safe and it's just they're so tough and they have they've dirt on their back and they flower petals in their little hair you realize they have hair all over their body and the power to throw a car over to flip it just one of the most impressive animals on earth
and I think that I've gotten really good at interacting with wild elephants in a way that's respectful to them and I think that that when an elephant allows you to be in its space it's because you're you're showing submissiveness and and respect for the elephant space and they're so intelligent
that they're communicating with seismic vibrations through the earth that they have hot you know a matriarchal society that they can remember the the maps of their ancestors and you know how to find water that they can solve problems there they're such beautiful animals and they're so talk
about aliens they're so alien looking these big weird heads and the trunks with all those muscles and they're so different than us but but yet I actually think that we we grew up together you know they they kind of raised us sibling species that we've been we've inhabited the same
epoch in history and and we've relied on the ecosystems that they've created and I think that they have a deep understanding of humans elephants and I think I see them more like aliens more like non-human beings that we share the earth with so I don't see it as we're humans and their animals
I actually see human elephants as as sort of a separate society along with humans as one of the dominant species on the planet so almost every species especially the intelligent ones especially the big ones are their own societies that overlap and sometimes co-develop yeah I think whales
I think elephants I think there's there's those higher you know no one suggesting that sardines are you know somehow need human rights or something but I think the elephants need representation in governments because they're they occupy they they influence their landscape they engineer their
environment they have emotions they have families they have burial rituals they're so like us and yet we treat them like they're just just oversized cows that we have to be scared of it's they're not they're not the same as as domesticated livestock there one of the treasures of earth I mean
look let's just say little green men showed up and you said they said well what's earth it's like well there's mountains there's rivers it's like well how how do I do this you know there's mountains rivers there's there's elephants like it's like one of the first things a baby learns is elephant
is even if he's never seen one it's just so iconic on earth like you said um um Darren Aronowski Darren Aronowski um the the elephant walking over the camera I haven't seen it you said it's incredible yeah so at the sphere the postcard from earth I mean it's a celebration
of earth yeah in all forms and one of the critical big creatures in that film is an elephant and steps over the audience and the whole like the whole steer reverberates that power any some of it is size yeah some of it is like how did earth create this it is a weird looking
creature but we take it for granted because we've accepted that this earth can't create this kind of thing but it is weird beautifully weird it's beautifully weird I mean I mean elephants there's something really impressive and and why is about them there's also beautiful weird that isn't so
with that doesn't come with so much grandeur like to me a giraffe is beautifully weird yeah but they're just you know they're 18 foot tall camel deer things with you know giant necks and they're strange and they're they're absolutely serenely beautiful but they don't they don't have
that deep intelligence that that elephants have there's something that elephants have you see in their eyes where is it how does the intelligence manifest itself well this is the thing a lot of people a lot of the when I was reading friends to wall's book a lot of what he was saying was that
you know people give elephants human problems to solve in controlled environments and call it you know a study on elephant intelligence whereas if you're watching wild elephants and you're in the wild you're gonna be watching them in a way that they're they're looking you've pulled up in a
safari vehicle or you've pulled over to the side of the road and the elephants are wary of you so they're not acting natural but as soon as you start watching wild elephants truly in the wild and comfort comfortable with your presence you see how they start caring for their babies or or how
they can get annoyed I once watched elephants around a water hole and there's this warthog and I don't know why but this warthog decided he needed to get in and and there's this young male elephant and he kept turning around to this warthog and just being like don't make me do it now this elephant
did not need to hurt the warthog and the warthog was just like I need to drink I need to drink I need to drink much simpler bring the elephant was like you could just tell he was like watch this and he just went and crushed the warthog like it was a big beetle and crushed his pelvis and the
warthog dragged itself away on his front legs and probably went off to die but this young elephant put out his ears and he like paraded around with his tail off and he was like look what I did destruction and it's like that's a very relatable type of he was annoyed with the warthog yeah
and and and so you see them do these things I mean the most magical thing and I've spoken about this many times was that I was walking with a herd of semi wild elephants that were crossing through a village in India because elephants have lost a lot of their territory because there's
so much so so much population in India and so we're crossing through a village which is very delicate because the matriarchs are leading the babies and there's villagers who have no idea what an elephant is and they're watching the elephants cross and the matriarchs back this girl up against a wall
and she was terrified standing there with her back against the wall and the elephant just put a trunk out and touched the girl's stomach and then the other elephants came and they all started touching her stomach and the the the the the ranger there explained to me just went she's pregnant
they know she's pregnant they can smell they can tell and they're curious and they all the all the female elephants came to investigate the pregnant girl and she had no idea what was going on and so it's like that stuff that stuff it's cool to hear that you know with the crushing and the pride
of the young elephant that there's a complexity of behavior it's just like with humans I mean you know yes not always pretty that's the thing man humans are capable of good and evil and sometimes we attach these words uh I love that there's just it's an orchestra of different sounds yeah and that's
that one is sex which that's a bamboo rat calling out for a mate I mean all right good luck to you buddy good hunter you know humans are capable of evil things and beautiful things and I wonder if animals are the same you think there's just different personalities and different life trajectories
for animals like as they develop and their understanding of social interaction of survival of maybe even primitive concepts of right and wrong within the social system do you think there is a lot of diversity in personalities and and behavior just like different people is a different
elephants of course and and what I really like is that you said is there a perception of what's right and wrong because elephants have a code of ethics and so as the for the simplest example is that as young males begin to grow they start developing these tusks and those tusks are a tool
and they use them so for Indian elephants the females don't have tusks and the males do the females kick the males out of the herd the females keep all the sisters and the ants and the and the and the cousins together but the males are their own thing and so here's the thing if you have
so what you get is these these crews of male elephants and the older males will you know this play fighting that goes on around you know two young males can play fight but the older males they'll kick some ass they'll show them how to behave they'll explain who gets to talk to the
females who gets to interact who gets to mate who gets the best vegetation to eat and so there's an order established and so young male elephants have to be taught how to act just like a teenage human has to be taught you know you can't just haul off and break another kid's nose you got to
there's going to be consequence maybe you get suspended or maybe that kid will get his friends and beat the living shit out of you whatever it is society regulates your behavior and elephants have a very strict very predictable sort of like the males teach the males how to run things and the
females which which really have the final say their matriarchal they're the ones leading the herd where to go the males follow where the where the wise females tell them where to go so that regulation mechanisms from that emerges a kind of moral system under which they operate let's write them wrong for an elephant yeah for an elephant right and wrong for an elephant is not the same as what's right and wrong for grizzly bear grizzly bear if you're a male grizzly bear and you see
a female with cubs you just kill those cubs and then you can mate with that you can meet with her and put your own cubs in there and it's like that it's a whole different type of ethics yeah the value of child life is different from species to species some of them hold a
sacred some of them not at all and that's why I think I resonate so much with elephants because they're I think they're made I think that we're we are kind of matriarchal at least I grew up matriarchal like women were the force in my life my family and most of my friends as families
as women kind of have the final say and I feel like that's the way it is with with with with elephants like you might be bigger and stronger but it doesn't really account for much if you're not smarter and and more emotionally intelligent and you know how to take care of the group
just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions as we were talking about aliens there's a lot of people trying to understand trying to study the origin of life oh I love this first of all what do you think is life versus non-life like when you look at like ants or even like the simplest
simplest of organisms we saw a frog in a stream yesterday that was like a leaf frog there's like as flat as a sheet of paper and it does a lot of weird things and it found a way to exist in this world but that's a single living organisms with a bunch of components to it but like there's a
life form that exists in this world what is the difference between that and a rock what what is like what is the essence of that life this might be an unanswerable question there's probably a chemistry physics biology way of answering that like what what to you is that I think to
me life is something that grows and responds to stimuli like in basic biology 101 I think and I'm fine with that I don't need it to be more romantic than that but I think it's actually comical how how do you get from a rock to an orangutan you know and our answer for that is
primordial soup maybe there was just stuff on earth and then the the stuff just got up and started walking maybe there just there was nothing happening and then there was all of a sudden there was a cell and the cell had function and then it complexified and then it started reproducing
and found male and female parts and and what like we are so un under equipped to understand how the hell we got here let alone answer or or even bacteria I see the summy in very simple mathematical models like something called game of life their cellular automata you could see from simple rules
and simple objects when they're interacting together as you grow that system complex objects arise like that emergence of complexity is not understood by science but mathematics at all and it seems like from primordial soups you can get a lot of cool shit and the force of getting from soup
to like two humans on microphones yeah not understood and it seems to be a thing that happens on earth I tend to think that it's a thing that happens everywhere in the universe and there's some deep force that's pushing this along in some way that there's something we I don't want to
sort of simplify it but there is something that creates complexity out of simplicity that we don't quite understand and that's the thing that created the first organism living organism on earth that like leap from no life to life on earth as a weird one that's a weird one because you
can imagine I think that what the earth is 4 4.5 billion years old and you can imagine just this this rock of a planet with like rain and storms and elements and iron and granite and like just random stuff it's pretty easy to imagine that but then I remember that book there we think we
all have the same book when we were kids and then like they show this like fish like animal crawling out of a out of the primordial soup and it's like bro you just missed the most important part author of that book bro and and I think the first bacteria came in around 3 3 3.7 billion years ago
so there's like at least like you know a bunch of billion years where there's just nothing or just a planet and then we start seeing fossils of the first bacteria and the bacteria stuck around for long for a long time a billion two billion years it's just very very long just bacteria just
bacteria but a lot of them a lot of them there's probably a lot of innovation a lot of murder a lot of interaction yeah yeah and then I mean there's there's a big a few big leaps along the history of life on earth you know the predator prey dynamic that was a really cool innovation it's almost like
innovations like features on iPhone it's like it's nice like predator prey eukaryotes so complex multi-cellular organisms emerging from the water to land that was weird that was a little interesting innovation this how whatever led to humans that there's a lot of interesting
stuff there I see I can't even get that far I can't get from rock and sand to cells yeah that's that's a huge I mean I mean to everything around us that has cells it's just it's it's wild even again and I could imagine being on another planet and how incredibly valuable this thing would be
this this it's impossible to replicate it I'm looking at it through the candlelight right now and I can see all of the structures in the sleeve the incredible structures in the sleeve that look exactly like the veins in my arm which look exactly like the rivers that are flowing across this
landscape and it's like life has this this overwhelming pattern that it uses and it's so beautiful I just I just think it's yeah when you imagine the the the days of the lightning and the volcanoes and the primordial soup it's it's there's it there's a big gap there and it's it's fascinating to
think about and it's fascinating to see how different people's belief systems uh lead them to different answers there not to give any spoilers but postcard from Earth so Darren Araski's film the idea there is there's probes that are sent out from Earth
oh that's to all these other planets and each probe contains two humans a man and a woman uh-huh and those two humans are in love so think of a couple in love they're sent there with all the information basically a leaf that holds the information what it takes to create life on other
planets to recreate on earth and other planets and the two humans hold all the information for the things that make life on earth special especially in human civilization is love consciousness the the social connection so all that information is sent in the probe and the postcard from Earth is
those humans waking up remembering all the information that is Earth that well like a celebration of all the things that make Earth's magical throughout its history all the diversity of organisms all of that you're loading all that in to create life on that new planet which is something I think
alien civilizations are doing this and you probes all throughout the galaxy and they just haven't arrived yet but anyway that's another uh that's so beautiful and one of the things that I think I all I want to see that so much and one of the things that I love about Aranofsky's work is
is the fountain and what I find so beautiful about that is that now here he's saying okay we're sending probes out to other worlds alien civilizations and in the fountain it was sort of what I thought he did so beautifully was braid together those three stories where in one I don't remember
if he's in a spaceship or if that's supposed to be like his soul the other one he's a scientist and sort of like comparable times to hours and then he's the the the Spanish explorer but either way there's the tree of life and it sort of braids together all of the major religions and it made me
think of that quote that you hear where it says you know oh god what was it um Christ wasn't a Christian and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and Muhammad wasn't a Muslim they were all just teachers who were teaching love and it's like the fountain the fountain sort of says nature is that that
driving force and it's our job to understand that the game is love and that's what that's what the main character in the fountain needs to learn is that it's that it's nature that's going to just that's going to carry your soul through this this this thing and that there's so much you don't understand in the epiphany at the end god I love that movie god I love that among many things you're also an artist is trying to convert the thing that is nature into a thing that we humans can understand
the complexity the beauty of it that's what Darren Arnowski tried to do with those couple of films that's something that I hope you do actually an immediate film to that would be very interesting and you do that in the medium of books currently how much do you think we understand about the history
of life on earth I think we got it all wrong no I don't know it seems like they change it all the time you know they say they say that Easter Island you know when I was in college they were big on telling you that Easter Island they ruined their environment and they had environmental collapse and
that's why there was nobody on Easter Island it was a cautionary tale we could ruin our environment and now it seems like they've changed their mind on that and then when humans entered North America seems to be hugely up to speculation and you know the Africa spreading that we all spread out of
Africa and then the place has seen overkill extinction theory and it's like it seems like every few years they update it and they change it and they say oh the guy is no no no the guy is from 10 years ago actually my new theory is the best theory let's write some books and get me on
Letterman and it seems like there's a new prevailing theory that's really always exciting and edgy about how how we got here and where we came from and how we dispersed and maybe even has some political implications like how we should use the Amazon moving forward like the Amazon was engineered
by people so fuck it let's just cut it down yeah it's attempt to believe that we mostly don't understand anything but there's an optimism and continuously figuring out the puzzle there and we offline talked about the the Graham Hancock Flynn Dibble debate on on Rogan I like debates
personally so Flynn Dibble represents mainstream archaeology and I actually like the whole science the whole field of archaeology you're trying to figure out history was so little information you're trying to put together this this this puzzle when you have so little and you're desperately
cling onto little clues and from those clues using the simple possible explanation to understand and now with modern technology as Flynn was trying to express that you can use large amounts of data that's like imperfect but just the scale and using that to reconstruct civilizations
there are different practices from the little details of what kind of things they eat how they interact with each other what kind of art they create to when they exist to what are the time frames all that kind of stuff and that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding but still
the air bars are large in terms of what really happened and that leaves room for things like Graham Hancock talks about like lost civilizations which I like also because it gives you have a kind of humility about maybe there's giant things we don't know about or we got completely wrong
and that's always good to like remember it's confusing to me to imagine like what I don't even know what like what ended the why where the Egyptians go like what happened to see what they were doing so good they had so much cool shit but I mean I was reading anthropological stuff in the
Amazon about about tribes that you know just through through their societal structures and through their hunting practices that that didn't really develop practices that worked and kind of bands of people that went extinct before they could turn into larger societies and and there's there's a lot
of people that got it wrong you know for every explorer that that that that leaves Borneo and arrives in South America there's probably hundreds more than just diet see get eaten by sharks you know avalanche and it's just it's so fascinating to me that we all of us really passed our grandparents
don't really even know where we came from like do you know who you're great great great grandparents I like no I mean there's methods to try to figure that out but really again the air bars are so large it's almost like we're trying to create a narrative that makes sense for us
you know that I'm 10% Neanderthal therefore I can bench press this much and therefore my aggressive tendencies have a explanation on reality there's so much diversity of personalities that they they far overshadow any possible histories we might have your aggressive tendencies don't
have any explanation you're not you need to you listen to me right now sorry yeah man one of things you and I talk a lot about is different explorers yeah um who do you think is I'm just throwing ridiculous question one after the other who do you think is the greatest
explorer all time oh god I love shackles in but I hate the cold so I can't I don't really I can't even read about it I hate the cold so much I can't even go there for fun um I think Percy Fawcett in the Amazon was was was was the goat in terms of just sheer the last of the Victorian era you know
march forward go deeper just stop it nothing and then eventually take such big risks that you never come back it's it's hard for me to relate to that kind of exploration because to me I'm such a softie I wouldn't want to like leave my family behind I wouldn't want to like even if you told me
that I could leave earth and go exploring and I could go touch the moon I'd be like nope absolutely not like the highways dangerous enough like I would never risk dying in space this guy left his home went out into the jungle out there with horrendous gear compared to the camping gear we have
today no headlamp and just explored for years on end well let me actually push back you have that explorer there's definitely a thing in you just me having observed you behave in the jungle and in the world you're pulled towards exploration towards adventure towards the possibility of
discovering something beautiful including like a small little creature or like a whole new part of the rainforest a part of the world that like is that holy shit this is beautiful I think that's the same kind of imperative so maybe not going out to the stars but yeah like I could see
you doing exactly the same thing so he disappeared in 1925 during during an expedition to find an ancient law city which he and other people believe it existed in the Amazon rainforest so there's that pull like I'm going to go into there with shitty equipment with the possibility of finding
something and they said he ran into uncontacted tribes and started goofing off I think he started I think he started dancing and singing like the tribes were ready to kill him and he started goofing and like doing a song and a dance and just being ridiculous and the tribes are like what now
they're like wait wait wait wait don't shoot him yet that's a funny one yeah and they they actually kind of like on a human level used used humor to save his own life on multiple occasions to the point where he de-escalated the situation was like look we're not here to fight we're here to we have a
a pile of maps you know all my guys have berry berry den game malaria like we're dying out here if you guys just go on your merry way we'll go on our merry way and like incredible he was so tough and then that guy from shackle to this expedition ended up on one of faucets expeditions and you go
yeah he's a he's a proven explorer he's been through the Antarctic and the guy was like fuck the jungle who absolutely fuck the jungle he was like and there's a great quote where he says without a machete and something you know I don't remember exactly the words he used but he said without a
machete in this environment you don't last yeah and you know that now like you you in that tangle to just take three steps that way would I would immediately be taking on I mean I'm not wearing shoes right now yeah bullet ants venomous snakes spikes through my feet tripping over
myself I don't have a headlamp unbelievable risk right there we're sitting on the edge of tragedy can you explain what the purpose of the machete in this situation is like what is a machete hot as a work how does it allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense and dense environment
so this is the tool that I spend most of my life carrying this is in my hand for 90% of my time and in the jungle you really need a machete there's so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through and like a jaguar and oslo a lot of these other animals that are more
horizontally based and low to the ground they can make it like when we got stuck in those bamboo patches and we were just hacking through them and it's dangerous and there's as you hit the bamboo at ricochets and have spikes and then one piece falls and it pulls a a trait of vine that has spikes
on it and that hits you in the neck and it's just the jungler's savage to humans but if you are and a gooty a little rodent or a jaguar or deer you can kind of slip through this stuff and the deer have developed really small antlers they can just kind of weave through low to the ground and so
and so for us being these vertical beings walking through the jungle it really helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonally opposing your movement at all time so machete is just a very very useful tool it could help you pull thorns out of your body as you saw last night we can use
it to find food you want machete fishing you cut a fish head off with a machete by like it was swimming and then you basically you know machete the water and the other fascinating thing about that fish without its head he kept moving so he was just using I guess it's nervous system to swim
beautifully I mean I did there's so many courses there about how nature works you can well let's explain it because the the way the machete hit this fish it kind of kind of took his just his eyes off of and his lower jaw was still there so it's really just like the brain and the top draw that came
off and this fish as the the dust cleared in the stream this fish was I found it very haunting in a very like interstellar way like it was just the programming was still there but the brain was gone and the fish was just still moving and it was going to die but it was still swimming and it
looks like like a like a live fish it was it was you're still trying to catch it which is it's like to catch it because every time I caught it it would it would freak out and then it would jump back in the water and I'm programmed here from years and years of living in the Amazon that
everything can hurt you so you actually become quite you know if a moth lands on you you flick it because it could be a bulletin and so even the fish here a lot of the fish here have spikes coming out of them and so even though I know that fish I know its name I've eaten them many times
as I was holding it when it would twitch with that explosive power just like the came and I would I would get that fear response and release it and so that happened three or four times before I finally said this is stupid even though he's slippery he hasn't got ahead I can hold on to him I
put him on my pocket yeah put him on my pocket now we fried him up and we and he was delicious so and I'm grateful for his existence of her his role and for my existence on this planet this brief existence that I was able to enjoy that delicious delicious fish so the machete is used to cut
through this extremely dense jungle this is binds by the way this rope like things yeah they're extremely strong and they go all kinds of directions go horizontal and all this I don't even how treat we have a tree right above us that makes no sense
there's like a tree that kind of failed and then a new tree was created on top of it that makes it just makes no sense it feels like sometimes trees come from the from the sky sometimes they come from the ground I don't I don't really quite understand the how that works because there's new trees that grow on old trees and the old trees right away and the new trees come up yeah that's what mechanism strangler figs and so strangler figs as you go across the world's ecosystems that whole belt of
you know whether you're in rainforests in the Amazon the Congo Indonesia all across the tropics you have strangler figs and the amazing thing that this that this species does it's become a keystone species across the planet with a hyper influence on its ecosystem wherever it is because
they produce fruit in the dry season when the rest of the forest is making it hard for animals to find fruit to find food and so the bats the birds the monkeys they all go to the strangler fig they eat the fruit and the fruit of course is just tricking the animals the plants are tricking
the animals into carrying their seeds to another tree and so they're getting free transportation monkey takes a poop on another tree after eating strangler figs and then that strangler fig sends out its vines gets to the ground and then as soon as it begins sucking up nutrients out
competes that tree for a light grows hyper drive around the trunk of that tree and then eventually that tree will die and the strangler fig will win because it got it got a boost up to the top whereas these little trees down here they're going to have to wait their turn they have to wait
until a tree falls until there's a light gap and then they have enough food to grow quick and so this whole thing is an energy economy everything is just trying to get sunlight and so strangler figs yeah top down tree is growing or parasitic top down octopus trees growing over other giant
trees and you've seen the size of some of the trees here so you know back to Percy Fawson exploration what eating goes like for him back then a hundred years ago not damn go into the jungle see the thing is those guys didn't go with the locals they came down
here with like mules and they tried to do it their way yeah and so he's one of the people that wrote about the green hell the jungle as the oppressive war zone where there's nothing to eat and everything is killing you and it's I think I think that that image is so wrong because as you
saw last night we could go if we went out with JJ right now we would Meshady fish some fish we could start a little fire we do it all in shorts like to to JJ it's green paradise and it's intense but but if you know what you're doing which the local people surely do well then just beneath the
sand there's turtle eggs that you can eat and inside the nuts on the ground there's grubs that you can eat and if you really needed to you could just jump on a came in and eat that because the tails are pretty full of meat and it's like there's actually unending amount amounts of food here
and so it's it's they were pretty you know they were strange but if you're able to tune into the that frequency I feel like you're you and JJ are able to tune to the to the frequency of the jungle that is a provider not a destroyer human life right yeah like I think to be
collaborated with not fought against yes but we're coming at that with it with our modern lens because we're coming down here with I've survived how many infections in the jungle where those probably would have killed me before so my dead ass opinion of the jungle would have been
overwhelming and collective murder as Herzog says and so Percy Fawcett was coming down here with this view of it's trying to kill us at all time for we are flying down here and coming out here with our superior medicines and our ability to survive infections and and so it's it is
different for us it is different we're we're we're coming at this very very different but Fawcett to me was like the last of like the real swashbucklers like the really batshit crazy explorers that just went out into the into the dark spaces on the map
mm-hmm and it's very hard for me to identify with him but with for instance Richard Evans Shulties from Harvard that's someone where you go okay now we're getting to the point where I can start to understand do I mean just like the conquistadors and they tell you the conquistadors showed
up you know they killed the the Spanish killed 2000 Inka on the first day and then they they marched to this city and they're like when I hear about that the can you imagine yourself just like slaughtering a bunch of women and children and and soldiers and then just like drinking some wine
and doing it again tomorrow I can't actually wrap my head around that yeah it just seems like an entire different world no like different world different value system a different value system the different relations with violence and life and death I think we value life more we value
we resist violence more yeah like I just I can't like if we saw a car accident like you know or if you see a little bit of war some violence like it affects you these people were so comfortable with those things yeah it was so normal part of their the Spartans the the commandeers like they
became so comfortable with war to the point that it became what they did and they celebrated it to celebrated it and direct violence to like taking that machete and murdering me or if I got to the machete first me murdering you not a chance bitch I
and then I would put on Instagram is on show and the number of DMs I would get from murdering you with a machete meanwhile half the world right now is messaging me saying my DMs are filled with take care of likes don't lose likes make sure Lex comes back safe Lex is a national treasure we love
Lex make sure he holds a snake the amount of love that is out there meanwhile I emerge from the jungle of blood around me with a machete and I take over your Instagram account he's very humble he doesn't want to hear about the love all right so what do you think makes a great explorer whether
it's Percy Fawcett Richard Evans Shulties by the way say who Richard Evans Shulties is he's a biologist that's another lens through which to be an explorer yes to study the the biology the the immense diversity of biological life all around us Richard Evans Shulties I know about him from
reading way davis's book one river which is this big hefty you know five or six hundred page home about the amazon and it covers two stories it's Richard Evans Shulties and I think it's in the forties I think it's like pre-World War II era where he's in the amazon looking for the blue orchid
and the cure for this and that and he's pressing plants and he's going to these indigenous communities where they still live completely with the forest and they and they drink ayahuasca and they they talk to the gods and they he learns about how they believed that the anaconda came down from the
Milky Way and swam across the land and created the rivers and sort of he came down and and even though he was a western scientist from Harvard he embraced the indigenous perspective on the world on creation on spirituality and and he he sort of resigned himself and gave himself fully to
that and spent years and years traveling around parts of the amazon that had hardly been explored and certainly never been explored in the way he was doing it in the ethnobotanical spiritual way of of what medicinal compounds are contained in these plants and how do the local indigenous people
use and understand them for example you know of 80,000 species of plants in the amazon rainforest and 400 billion trees in the amazon rainforest the statistics of likelihood that through trial and error that humans could discover ayahuasca it's it's astronomical that one of these trees and a
root when put together allow you to go access the spirit realm and see hallucinogenic shapes and talk to the gods that's that's that's that's almost almost enough to inspire spiritual thought itself the fact that trial and error it would take like millions of years or something it's it's
I forget what the figure is it's incredible but Richard Evans shalties was one of the first people that came down and saw that and then one river is where way davis comes back I believe in the 70s and the heartbreak of the book is that all of these incredibly wild places with with naked
native tribes and these these intact belief systems way davis comes back and a lot of the same places that shalties went now there's missionary schools and they're wearing discarded nightgies and you know whatever I don't know if there's nightgies in the 70s but like western
stuff has made it in they've been contacted domesticated forced into western society and you know a lot of them then forget the thousands and thousands of years the that have gone into creating the medicinal botanical knowledge that the indigenous possesses about how to cure ear
infections and how to treat illnesses from the medicinal compounds flowing through these trees is lost in a single generation with with the modernization yeah he wrote the plants of the gods they're sacred healing and a hallucinogenic powers that is interesting you mentioned like how to
discover that like how do you find those incredible plants those incredible things that can warp your mind in all kinds of ways of course physically heal but also like take you on a mental journey that's interesting so you don't think trial and error is possible I was reading about
ayahuasca in their state say or say statistically if if you know if a bunch if you put a thousand humans in the amazon and gave them villages to live in because humans are communists species it would take tens and tens of thousands of years or perhaps even centuries before even the
possibility it's like that thing you know a bunch of chips on a keyboard how do they write hamlet it's like astronomical odds to get to oh wait this and this dosed together and so what the local people believe is that the gods revealed this secret through the jungle to us as a link to the
spirit world and that that's how we know this because if they didn't remember it from their ancestors we would have no idea how to get this information from the wild so I would likely do ayahuasca what do you think exists in the spirit world that could be found by taking that journey
I think that ayahuasca is I can only speak from personal experience and for me it was as if your brain is a house you've lived in your entire life and it's a big house to mention and there's many many rooms that you didn't even know exist hidden rooms behind the bookshelves
under the floorboards rooms that you had no idea were there and some of them are fantastic and some of them are terrifying basements and ayahuasca takes you on a journey through that at its at its at its most effective you sit in front of the shaman with the candle light with the
sounds of the jungle and you drink the substance and after that what happens is the journey is all inside and and that the shaman supposed to be able to guide you through that but in my experience you're you're so deep inside like falling through nebulous out in space no physical
form or crawling through the jungle like it's like it's really really powerful like it's not like a it's not like the recreational drugs that that everyone does like where you go I did mushrooms and I could see so I could see music like and I was talking to my friends but no no like you're
face down on the floor usually vomiting sometimes shitting um you know having dialogues with with the creator and that that that can be that can be traumatizing as well as amazing it's a really good way of looking at it's a big house and you get to open doors see you've never have before
and discover what room is there inside you you ever think about that like that there's parts of yourself you haven't discovered yet or maybe you've been suppressing how much uh are you exploring the shadow oh boy so say you meet Carl Jung and Jordan Peterson are in a deserted island together
fuck I didn't even make my bed today there's no bed in an island great uh I want to see you and Jordan Peterson do I waska together um I think I think that's that's the thing I waska to me you know I've kind of told you about like I've experienced some things that really made me believe
that that there's that there's a benevolent force around us but to me I waska was like a was a ride through the scariest parts of the universe to sort of be like here's here's what it could be like you know the that's where I came up with my idea that you know like deep space or just
space outer space it's just the outside of the video game and this is it because when I was on I waska I was I was one of the jungle creatures and I wasn't Paul and I didn't have a name and for long time I saw many things and I was I arrived at this spot in the jungle where there was a big
tree and all the animals were there and they were all not in words not in not in any language that we can understand but they were all discussing what to do about the threat and the and it was all it was all leaving it was all flying up and it was fire and the jungle was being destroyed and it was
like I went and then after that it was just space and stars and silence like crushing vacuum silence for years and that was terrifying that was fucking terrifying when I came back and I had hands man I can remember my own name you grounded things are simpler you're back inside
the video game what are the chances you think we're actually living in a video game when you say a video game it implies that there's a player who's the player is God no there's a main player usually that's not gonna be God God is the thing that creates the video game oh so then we're just
and there's somebody's our NPCs like I'm an NPC you yeah you created me see is this like halo where you can kind of kill the NPCs because I see I put the machete behind you okay I think I'm just gonna take a stand here I think that because people I'm just sick of fucking playing it
halfway I think that because people live indoors in climate controlled boxes in cities far away from nature they've completely lost track of everything that's real and they've started to think that we're living side of assimilation notice that nobody carrying an alpaca up a mountain thinks
that we're living inside of a video game no they all know that it's real because they've had babies on the floor of a cold hut yeah they understand the consequences of life they understand the fish and how hard it is to get them and the basic rules of the wind and the rain and the river
and that we all have to play by those and that it's and and you talk to a talk to a grieving mother and ask her if she's living inside a video game and it's like the people to me this this whole thing of are we living in a simulation to me that's a that's that's the that's the infirmary of
of society starting to that to starting to to to to to to to parody itself it's just people going I have no meaning in my life anymore so is this even real and again go ask the Sherpa go ask the Eskimo they're not they're not you forget what fundamentally matters in life what is the source of
meaning in a human life if you talk about such subjects nevertheless you could for a time stroll in the big philosophical questions and if you do it for sure enough of time you won't forget about the things that matter that there is human suffering that there is real human joy
that is real that that that that our time in the jungle was very hard did you suffer enough to know that it's real yeah man I was hoping more in a video game that whole time so that's actually that's actually a really good way to there was this moment that I
watched where you were washing a shirt in this pathetic puddle because we had no water and because we had walked all day and tripped all day and gotten thorns in our hands and our feet in our legs and we were lost in the jungle and it was nighttime and we didn't know if a big tree was going to
just fall on us and mouse trap kill us and there's a lot of uncertainty but I watched something very special happened to you and that was I saw you crouching by the side of this puddle wasn't even a flowing stream so we couldn't drink it and you were just trying to wash the sweat off of your
shirt and you you looked at me and you just said the only thing that I care about right now is water and I feel like in that moment we were united in the in the simple reality of the fact that we were so thirsty that it hurt and that it was a little scary yeah it was scary but also there's like
a joy in the interaction with the water because it cools your body temperature down and there's like a faith in that interaction that eventually we'll find clean water because water is plentiful on earth it's kind of like a delusional faith that eventually we'll find it was just like a little
celebration I think the cooling aspect of the water because the body temperature is really high from traversing the really dense jungle and just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing else really is now it was a little celebration of life of life on earth of earth
of the jungle of everything it was nice it was a nice moment I think about that I had a couple of those is one in the puddle and one in the river one was full of delusion and fear and the other one was full of relief and celebration yeah I've you know there's this thing that they they say with
the all the pleasure in life is derived from the transitions when your cold warm feels good when your hot cold feels good when your hungry food feels good and when you're that thirsty water becomes God and it's all you want and also and also the other thing is that when you're when we're out there
it felt so good to be so lost and so tired and so like we're doing level to like like how would you how would you describe the physicality of what we were doing the level of physical like exertion well it's something that I've haven't trained I don't even know how you would train for that kind
of thing but it's extremely down the jungle so every single step is like completely unpredictable terms of the terrain your foot interacts with so the different variety of slippery that is on the jungle floor is fascinating because some things I mean the slope matters but some roots of trees
are slippery some are not some trees in the ground already right at the roots if you step through you're going to potentially fall through so it could be a shallow hole it could be a very deep hole with some leaves and vegetation covering up a hole where if you fall through you could break a leg
and completely lose your footing or fall rolling down hill and if you roll down hill I'm pretty sure there's a 99% probability that you'll hit a thing with spikes on it so there's so many layers of avoiding dangers of the small dangers and big dangers all around you with every single step
so there's like a mental exhaustion that sets in like the just the perception and you're just observing you you're extremely good at perceiving having situational awareness of taking the information in that's really important and filtering out the stuff that's not important but even
for you that's exhausting and for me it was completely exhausting just paying attention paying attention to everything around you so that exhaustion was surprising because it's like there's moments where you're like I don't give a damn anymore I'm just gonna step I'm just going to like
and so that's it you go I don't care anymore and you reach out and you know I'm just gonna lean against this tree and then what happened every time yeah and then you have to care yeah and then there's just bad luck because there is wasp nest there there's there's just like a million
things and that is physically mentally psychologically exhausting because there's the uncertainty when is this gonna end it's up in our particular situation up and down hills up and down hills very steep downward very steep upward no water all this kind of stuff it's it's the most difficult
thing I've ever done but it's very difficult to describe what are the parameters that make it difficult because I run long distances very regular I do extremely difficult physical things regularly that on some surface level could seem much more challenging that what we did
but no this was another beast this is something else but it was also raw and real and beautiful because it's like it's what those explorers did yeah it's what earth is without humans and it and also just like the massive scale of the trees around us was the humbling size difference
between human and tree is both humbling in that like that tree is really old it's the time difference uh lifetime difference and just the scale it's like holy shit we live on an earth that can create those things makes me feel small in every way that life is short that my physical presence on
this earth is tiny how vulnerable I am all those feelings are there and in that the physical uh endurance of traversing the jungle yeah was the the hardest journey that I remember ever taking every step and then that made making it out of the jungle and then made it the swim in the water that we could drink I was just pure joy it was probably one of the happiest moments in my life just sitting there with you Paul and with JJ in the water full darkness the rain coming down and I'll just
us all just laughing having made it through that haven't eaten a bit of food before and the absurdity of the timing of all of it they somehow worked out and how were just three little humans sitting in a river just our heads emerged barely above water with jungle all around us what a life
that was a real adventure that was a real one yeah I'll never forget that so it's a real honor to have shared that of course we had very different experiences when you saw a came in in that situation you're like I have to go meet that guy this up front well I mean we were in the in the river in a
thunderstorm we just are next above we're all laughing our asses off and I mean we're in the river with the stingrays and the black came in and the piranha and all the electric yields and everything and it's pitch black out and then what were we doing we're holding our headlamps off and there was
those swirling moths yeah the infinity moths all making those geometric patterns and it's like we're just three ridiculous primates three friends in a river just laughing yeah because we were safer in that river than we had been in there and we were rejoicing that that that the thunderstorm was
was compared to the war zone that we'd been living in the thunderstorm was safe and it was it really was a beautiful moment and also the like very different life trajectories have taken these three humans in this one place yeah it's like what yeah wow is this universe that would like
because we're kind of like those moths you know what I mean like we're we're we'd come from some weird place on this earth and we'd have all kinds of shit happen to us and we're all pursuing some shit and some light and we ended up here together enjoying this moment yeah
or something else he just felt absurd and in that absurdity was this like real human joy and damn water tastes good water is good man water and those those little oranges yeah those things and then I would just say like do you feel like I feel like running like no matter how much I run
I feel like the like you run you do a workout and then you stop maybe old people who do altars feel this but like I feel like the we would what we woke up it was like you know wake up at dawn 6 a.m. let's start walking you know break camp go and it's like pretty much you just don't
stop all day and it's level 10 cardio all day long and you're sweating buckets and there's no water it's like you would never put yourself through that voluntarily you couldn't you'd never you would never have the resolve to to continue torturing yourself except for that we were trying
to make it to the to freedom to get out and it's like the obsession of that with the compass and the machete and the navigating fuck I think there's something to be said about like the fact that we didn't think through much of that and we just dived into it I think there was like there were
like laughing and enjoying ourselves moments before and once you go and you're like oh shit oh sure and you just come face to face with it yeah I think that's what you know whatever that isn't humans that goes to that that's what the explorers do the you know and the the best of them do it
to the extreme levels well I think that what we did was to to a pretty extreme level because we we left the safety of a river of knowing where we were and voluntarily got lost in the Amazon with very little provisions on a on a very now that we're back I'm now that we experience what
we experienced I really can't stop thinking about how fucking stupid it was that we did that yeah because if we had gotten lost pico was saying to me even if you guys had one of you had broken your leg it's you know days in either direction even if they had sent help for us help would take how long
to to scour all that jungle sound doesn't travel even even a helicopter even if they looked for us they wouldn't be able to see us how would we signal for help can't really build the fire and so it's like if anything had gone wrong if we'd gone a few degrees different different to the west
would have taken us two more days if we'd if we'd gotten injured it'd be it'd be carried through that yeah and so it somehow only afterwards am I really going wow thank god we got out of this thank God after I see so many people going make sure like nothing happens to Lex Friedman yeah I'd be the
deadest mother fucker on earth it somehow works out it does seem to somehow work out let me ask you about Jane good on another explorer of different kind what do you think about her about her role in understanding this natural world of ours I think that Jane is like a living historical
treasure like I think somehow she's alive but she's she's already reached that level where it's like I'm Stein Jane good all like there's these these these incredible minds and you know growing up as a child my parents would read to me because I was so dyslexic I didn't learn to read until I was
quite old and my mom was a big Jane good all fan and and all I wanted to hear about was animals and so I would I would get read to about this lady named Jane good all this girl who went to Africa and studied chimps and who broke all the rules and named her study subjects even though that wasn't
what she was supposed to do and she became this incredible advocate for earth and for ecosystems and for and she seemed to realize as her career went on that that teaching children to appreciate nature was the key because they're going you know with that thing which she says we don't so much
inherit the earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our children we're just here we're just passing through and so if we destroy it we're we're we're we're dimming the lights on the lives of future generations and so she's been really really cognizant of that and she's been a light in
the darkness she's sort of in terms of saying that animals have personalities and culture and and their own inalienable rights and reasons for existing and and that human life is valuable she's very big on that every day we influence the people around us and and the events of the earth even
if you feel like your life is small and insignificant that that that you do have an impact and I think that's a really powerful little candle out there in the darkness that Jane carries what are you thinking about her fieldwork with the chimps that ass the fact that she did what she
did at the age that she did at the time that she did is is incredible it's actually incredible she has that explosion and she also has that relentless relentlessness is like this incredible quality she just you know she travels 300 days a year educating people talking around the world
trying to help bolster conservation now before it's too late and traveling 300 days a year is not fun traveling at all it can be not fun so I started reading the river of doubt but good recommended to me on take us about yeah so that guy has badass on many levels but I didn't
realize how much of a naturalist he was how much of a scholar of the natural world he was so that book details his journey into the Amazon jungle what do you find inspiring about Teddy Roosevelt and that whole journey of just saying fuck it of going to the Amazon jungle of taking on that
expedition well I mean Teddy Roosevelt you could write volumes on what's inspiring about him I think that you know he was he was a weak asthmatic little rich kid that that wasn't physically able that had no self confidence and he was very and he and he had pretty severe depression he had
tragedy in his life and he was very at least for me he's been one of the people like in the one of the first historical figures who were where he wrote about the struggle to overcome those things and and to make himself from being a weak asthmatic little teenager to to to sort of strengthening
himself and building muscle and becoming this barrel-chested lion of a guy who could be the president who could be an explorer and one of the rough riders and he's just everything he does is so is so hyper-ballically you know incredible to come out of war and have the other people you fought
with go he this guy has no fear I mean he must have just been a psychopath and had no fear and then proving it further was that thing where he was going to give a speech to a bunch of people and he got shot in the chest yeah yeah yeah went through his spectacle case and through his speech
and even though the bullet was lodged in his chest this man said don't hurt the guy that shot me I believe he asked him why to do it and then as he's bleeding and in the rain said no no no I'm not going to the hospital I'm gonna keep going with the speech
what a badass that's incredible but going to the John Gole a many levels is really is really difficult for him at that time there's so many things that so many more things even then now they can kill you all the different infections everything and the lack of knowledge just this year
lack of knowledge so that truly is an expedition a really really challenging expedition so there's lessons about what it takes to be a great explorer from that the perseverance how important you think is perseverance and exploration especially through the jungle I think it's all there is if
you hear about the people and and I think that that is a tremendous metaphor for life because whether you hear about that plane that crashed in the Andes and the people were alone and freezing and they had to eat each other and some of them made it out some of them kept the fire burning
and Teddy Roosevelt voluntarily after being president through himself into the Amazon rainforest and survived came so close to dying but survived and so perseverance is all of it I mean that's I think that's our quality as a human so they also mapped so on the biology side is interesting
yeah but they mapped and documented a lot of the unknown geography and biodiversity what does it take to do that so when I see more about the jungle you're always like you capture and create your take a picture right down like so you can find new creatures find new things about the jungle
document them sort of a scientific perspective on the jungle but back then there's even less known much less known about the jungle so what what do you think it takes to document to map that world and you on explored wilderness I mean they're they're clearly pressing botanical specimens
they're probably shooting birds and Roosevelt knew how to knew how to preserve those specimens I mean he really was a naturalist so he knew exactly so if he's seeing these animals to them whereas we'll take a picture and identify it they were
harvesting specimens taking them with them drying them out for them it was totally different and it could be the first you know there's I don't know I forget what JJ said there's something like 70 species of ant birds here and it's like so how likely are you to be the first person to
ever see this one species of bird and so for them as you have this bird and so perfectly preserving that specimen and I think a lot of non-scientific people don't realize that every species from blue whale to elephant to blue jade asparo whatever whatever it is whatever species we have on
record there are scientific specimens and the first people to see them shot them and that's there's museums are filled with these catalogs preserved birds that these explorers brought back from New Guinea and South America and Africa and then put into these drawers and and now we
we labeled them and we saw this is you know this is red and green because this is scarlet macaul this is brown-crested ant bird and this is just they're just categorized it that book of birds you have like encyclopedia birds yo what the human achievement in these pages so people
listening Paul just flipping through a huge number of pages these are just this in the Amazon this is just here this birds of Peru it dude pages on pages of two cans and rsaries and and hummingbirds and ant birds and and smoky brown woodpecker and and tropical screech owl which we just heard by
the way it's just endless who knew there were so many birds I had no idea there was so many documenting all of that and a lot I mean there's also which we got to experience and you're you're pretty good at also is actually making understanding and making the sounds of the different
birds yeah what's your favorite birds on to make uh undulated tinemoo because in the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk uh they're usually the ones that make up what is considered by many to be the anthem of the Amazon can you do a little bird for us
that's what an undulated tinemoo sounds like and it's usually like oh it is getting to be afternoon it's kind of it's almost like hearing church bells on a Sunday it's like you just there's something about it you go ah there he is and like you were saying it's a reminder oh that's a
friend of mine yeah surrounded by friends have so many friends here where does it take to survive out here what is the basic principles of survival in a jungle cleanliness I mean really we talked about this but like you know keeping I have so many holes in my skin
right now look I have mosquito there we go um I have so many spots that I've scratched off of my skin because mosquito bites me and then I scratch it or the other big one is that I I worry that I have a tick not uh deliberately not with my thinking brain but my my my my simian brain just wants to
find and remove ticks and so I scratch and then if my fingernails get too long I remove my skin and then those be get those get infected in the jungle and so staying hyper clean using soap like basic stuff keeping order to your bags um order to your gear things in dry bags make sure you know we did
we we explained that we got in the river during a thunderstorm we didn't explain why we did that because the thunderstorm came when we had eaten dinner but we hadn't set up our tents and so we decided to cover our bags with our boats that we had been carrying our pack refs that we had been
carrying in our backpacks so all of our gear would stay dry so the only thing we could do is either sit in the rain and be cold or sit in the river and be warm and so keeping our gear dry momentary discomfort for future you know that with that that to me was an incredibly smart
calculation to make it's you really just you got to be smart out here you can't you know not running out of a headlamp while you're out on the trail and being stuck in that darkness yeah it really takes just being a little bit on your toes and I find that that
that necessity of being on your toes is a place that I like to live in it's just the right amount of challenge here so keeping the gear organized and all that but also being willing to sort of improvise I've seen you improvise very well because there's so much unknowns so many so much chaos
and dynamic aspects that like planning is not going to prevent you from having to face that in the end of the day no it's been really funny watching you sort of shed your planning brain like day like day one it was very much like so are we gonna and then I I could tell I could see your I could see
your brow sort of furrow when you I would go I don't know what time we're gonna get there and you can go well we'll just tell me and I'd be like I don't know what the jungle's gonna let us do you know let's do let's record the podcast tomorrow okay but we if it if it you know if it rains if it
gets windy if a friaje comes if there's a a jaguar with rabies like anything could happen landslide like anything literally I mean the thing you mentioned trees falling that's a thing in the jungle that's a major thing in the holy shit first of all a lot of trees fall yeah and they fall quickly
and they could just kill you they fall quickly they're huge we're talking about trees that are like the size of school buses stacked yeah and connected to other trees with vines so that when they fall this millennium tree this thousand year old tree boom it shakes the ground pulls down other trees
with it so if you're anywhere near that for a few acres you're getting smashed that's the end of you and so the jungle at any moment that you're out there could just decide to delete you and then the leaf cutter ants in the armions and the flies and everything you'll be digested in
three days you'll be gone gone no bones nothing what do you think would eat most of you uh i would hope that that like a king vulture with a colorful face would just like just get in there like right in the ass just like nature's metal just like when they like walk in through the elephants
ass i'd want that on camera trap i think that would be a great way to go and we'll slowly look up and you just kind of smile yeah just rip out your intestine and just shake it and just victorious over your dead body well but also honor a friend that's another yeah sure but you
know you just you'd look so you know you're white naked ass laying there in the jungle you'd be like face down shit that's why you always have to look good any moment of trade falling you in a vulture just swoops in and eats your heart that's right uh we talked about alone this show a bit
you know rock house yeah who is what we think about that guy rock house rolling welker from season seven he built the rock house he killed the muscox with bow and arrow and finished it with a knife you and had the go pro to mount to you know yeah to document it that's a really mind blowing
i mean so for people don't know that show is you're supposed to survive as long as possible on season seven of the show they literally said you can only win it if uh you survive a hundred days and and and that's there's a lot of aspects of that show this difficult one of which is it's in the
cold the others they get just a handful of supplies no food nothing none of that so they have to figure all of that out and uh this is probably one of the greatest performers on the show rolling welker he built a rock house shelter so what i mean what is survival until it's building a shelter
fire catching food sustain warm getting enough energy to sort of keep doing the work it takes a lot of work like building the rock house i read that it took 500 calories an hour from him so he had to feed himself right quite a lot you're lifting uh two hundred pound boulders and still the guy lost
uh i read 44 pounds which is 20% of his body weight so that's survival what uh lessons what inspiration do you draw from him i think he was fun to watch because he had this indomitable spirit he was just he wasn't there to commune with nature he was there
to win and he was like to me that's the pioneer mentality he just he was just he goes i'm a hunting guide i'm out here i'm gonna win that money i'm gonna survive through the winter he wasn't worried i feel like so many people are like they worry second guessing themselves in my in a video game i
don't know what's my you know just questioning their entire existential identity and this guy was like you know what there's a musk ox over there i'm gonna shoot it i'm gonna stab it now i'm gonna make a pouch out of its ball sack and i'm gonna live off that for the next few months and win a half
million dollars and that's an amazing amount of pragmatic optimism that i just enjoyed man every time he would go we got to get back to rock house and it became and even though he's all alone it was he had a big smile on his face and what made that season so great was that it was him
and then it was cali and and rollin had you know the muscle and could make rock house and then cali was was the opposite she was this girl who yes she could hunt with her bow and she knew how to fish and and she wasn't using raw power but what was so endearing about her was that how much
she loved being out there as hard as it was and as isolation isolationist as it was she was smiling every time every time the show cut to her she was like hey everybody it's morning can you believe the frost like you've been out there for a hundred days amazing opt i think it was really
an amazing show of that that the game is all here the game of life the game of alone and the game of life because the same thing yes you maintain that sort of silliness the the goofiness off the one the condition got really tough and she had a very different perspective as you know
rollin didn't want any of the spirituality it's very pragmatic yeah and from cali is very spiritual connection connection to the land she said something like she wanted not only to take from the land but to give back i mean there's this kind of poetic spiritual connection to the land
is such a dire contrast rolling and but she's still about it i mean to survive no matter what no matter the kind of personality you have you have to be a badass i think she uh took up porcupine quill from a shoulder that was crazy because i think it went in yeah somewhere
completely different and it migrated to her shoulder yeah and the way they understood that is because they have i said that's impossible yeah because i remember that she's like pulling up her shirt and she she's like there's something and then she like pushes it out and i remember
like i was like hold up hold up hold up hold up how yeah and it was because the barbs once it goes in as you move and flex your body it moves on a little bit each time and it gets migrating like i didn't even think of that shit plus if i remember correctly uh i think she caught two porcupines
the second one was like rotting or something or have infected it had an affected body whatever spots on it yeah she chose not to eat it no and then she chose not to eat it at first and then she decided to eat it eventually yeah i forgot that yeah and she that was that that was an insane
sort of really thoughtful uh focused collective decision waiting a day and then saying fuck it i need i need this fat and that was the other thing is like fat is important oh yeah it's like meat is not enough you learn about like what are the different food sources there
apparently there's like uh rabbit starvation is a thing because we have too much lean meat and it doesn't nourish the body fat is the thing that nourishes the body especially in the in cold conditions so that's the thing she yeah she she was she was incredible and i thought
as as as as as as brash and sort of fun as Roland was she represented um a much more beautiful take on on it and it was really heartbreaking when she lost because i mean and like you said still a badass yeah it's kind of like forest griffin versus Stefan Stefan
on like it was like it doesn't matter who won yeah you guys beat the shit out of each other like and she didn't really lose right so she got she got evact yeah because her toe was uh going frostbite frostbite a hundred days you think you can do a hundred days
honestly i've done uh i've i've 18 years in the amazon man i just at this point it's uh i could i wouldn't sign up for another hundred days yeah you know at this point i don't i don't have that to prove i've survived in the wild and uh i wouldn't want to voluntarily take a hundred days away from everyone i know yeah the loneliness aspect is is tough we're not meant for that i really love the people i have in my life and i i wouldn't i wouldn't want and you see on on the show a lot
of the people yeah big tough x navy seals who are survival experts who know what they're doing they get out there and they go you know what i miss my family yeah and they go it's not worth it they have this existential realization they go we're only got i only got so many years here like let's
let's this is crazy it's just some money fuck it and they go home you know it's funny because you sometimes feel yourself in the juggling your loan and there's another guy uh Jordan uh Jonas hobo jodo uh he's the season six winner and he said that the camera made him feel less lonely
yeah i i've heard of him from multiple channels uh one of the things is he spent all of his twenties in uh living in Siberia with the with the tribes out there uh her dog happy people hmm and so he actually talked about that it's one of the loniest time of his life because when
he went up there he didn't speak Russian and he needed to learn language and even though you have people around you when you don't speak their language it feels really really lonely and he felt less lonely on the show because he had the camera and he felt like he could talk to the camera
there is an element when you have in these harsh conditions if you like record something you feel like you're talking to another human through it even if it's just a recording i sometimes feel that like maybe because i imagine a specific person that will watch it and it feels like i'm
talking to that person well i noticed that when things got especially hard and they did get especially hard when we were out in the wilderness that you would begin filming to share that struggle but i also think that i've used that at times where yeah you go well maybe if i
because if you can tell someone else about it then you're on the hero's journey and then it sort of has to make you braver and it changes how you because you i'm cold and i'm tired and i'm i'm hungry and this hurts and that hurts and i don't know when we're going to make it and how
is this going to go and then almost you know well guys we're we're here and going that way and uh and then you're like well i gotta keep going because you like they're still out there if you forget you have to step on that's one of the reasons i want a family i think when you have kids
yeah you have to be like you have to be the best version yourself like for them all my friends with kids that i've seen them go through where until you have a family you're just you're just playing around man i mean you could do important work you can you can have skin in the
other games but it's once you have a little tribe of humans that depends on you yeah if you take that seriously if you want to do that right it's one of the hardest things you could do and it just it just changes everything how is your life changed since we last met speak about changing everything
do you've been for people don't know pushing jungle keepers forward into uncharted territories saving more and more and more and more rainforest there's a lot i could ask you about that there's a lot of stories to be told there it's a fight it's a battle it's a battle to protect this this
beautiful area of rainforest of nature um but since we last met you've made you've continued to make a lot of progress so what's what's the story of jungle keepers leading up to the moment we met and after and everything you go doing right now 18 years ago when i first came to the jungle
i was a kid from New York who always dreamed since i was six years old maybe even younger of going to a place where animals were everywhere and there's big trees and skyscrapers of life and so being dyslexic and and not fitting in in school and and reading about jane goodall and having
lord of the rings be one of the things i grew up on i just chose to come to the amazon and the first person i met was this local indigenous conservationist named one hulio duran who was trying to protect this remote river the less p-dress river which in history apparently faucet referenced either
the less p-dress but he called it ta wa manu and said don't go there you'll surely die from tribes and so there's very few references to this this river in history it stayed very wild because it's been a place that the law hasn't made it that the government hasn't really extended to like
you know we're sort of past the police limit and so jj was out here ages ago trying to protect this river before it was too late and when i met him i was just a barely out of high school kid with a dream of seat just seeing the rainforest let alone seeing a giant anaconda or having any sort
of meaningful experience or contribution to the narrative and somehow overall the years that we began working together and sparked a friendship and began exploring and going on expeditions and bringing people to the rainforest and and asking them for help and manifesting the hell out of
this insane dream that we had i mean we didn't even have a boat we would take logs down the river we would have to cut a tree down every time we wanted to return to civilization we'd have to cut down a balsa tree and float down the river on it yeah it was it's madness like it's madness
it's pure madness and i don't know what made us keep going but along the way people showed up who cared and who wanted to help and if it was a movie it wouldn't even necessarily be a good movie because you'd go oh please you're just telling me that you just kept doing the thing and just
magically people showed up but yeah that's what happened that's exactly the way it went we kept doing the thing that we loved we said it doesn't matter if we don't have funding or a boat or gasoline or friends or or anything we just kept going and along the way we found someone who could
help us start a ranger program and then we found dachshosilva who helped us fund the beginning of jungle keepers and then people like most in insta faan who were there making sure that this thing actually took flight off the ground and then right around the time
that we were wondering what was going to happen and if we're all going to have to quit and get real jobs and if we could actually save the rainforest from the destruction that was coming Lex Friedman sends me a DM and honestly changed the entire narrative because up until then we had been
we've been playing in the minor leagues pretending trying real real hard and the listeners of your show in the moments after you published your episode with our conversation began showing up in droves and supporting jungle keepers putting in five 10 a hundred a thousand we started getting these
donations and the incredible team that I work with we all went into hyperdrive everybody everybody started going nuts we all started spending 16 hour days working to try and deal with the tidal wave that Lex sent towards us just because so many people knew that we were doing this that was an
indigenous led fight to protect this incredibly ancient virgin rainforest before it was cut and people resonated with that and so we we got this this this huge swell of support and this year we've we've protected thousands and thousands of more acres of rainforest because
of that swell of support so current 50,000 acres what's the goal what's the approach to saving this rainforest since we printed this it's gone up to 66,000 acres it's and and as you know in each of those little acres are millions and millions of animal heartbeats
and societies of animals and the goal here is that we're between Manu National Park, Alta Pudus National Park, the Tambopada Reserve we're in a region that's known as the biodiversity capital of Peru one of the most biodiverse parts of the western Amazon
and we're fighting along the edge of the Trans Amazon Highway and so it's it's just a small group of local people and some international experts who have come together and used these incredibly out-of-side of the box strategies to sort of crowdfund conservation to go look we know that
this incredible life is here we have the scientific evidence we have the National Park System if we can protect this before they cut it down we could do something of global significance all these jaguars all these monkeys all these undescribed medicines the uncontacted tribes that we share
this forest with could all be protected and people have stepped up and begun to make that happen and this people from all over the world and it's incredible but what's the approach so trying to with donations to buy out more and more of the land and then protect it so the
approach is that currently the government favors extractors so if you're a gold miner or a log and illegal logger or you just want to cut down and burn a bunch of rain forest and set up a cacao farm the government's fine with that doesn't matter you're not really breaking the law if you
destroy nature so as long as you're producing something from the land they don't see it as a loss that the nature was destroyed permanently yeah it's just wilderness it's sort of just beyond the scope of it's not doesn't or the local people that technically own the land out here the local
indigenous people for instance we fought this year to help the community of Puerto Nuevo who's been fighting for 20 years to have government recognized land these are indigenous people in the Amazon fighting to protect their own land and you know what it was that was holding back they didn't
understand how the the system of of of legal documents worked to certify that title land they didn't really have the funding to go from their very very remote community into the offices and so jungle keepers helped them with that and so really all we're doing is helping local people protect
the forest that is their world that's it if people donate how will that help if people donate to jungle keepers what what you're doing is you're helping someone like JJ who's an indigenous naturalist who has the vision who has seen forest be destroyed he's trying to protect it before
it's too late you're saving mahogany trees ironwood trees k-pop trees skyscrapers of life just monkeys birds reptiles amphibians birds mammals this entire avatar on earth world of rainforest that produces a fifth of the oxygen we breathe in the water we drink this incredible thing as far as
I know it's the most direct way to protect that and so the fact that the fact that we've you know we have large funders who give us you know a hundred thousand dollars to protect this huge swath of land and that goes through through things like this and through Instagram it you know it goes
directly to the local conservationists who who work with the loggers to protect that land before it's cut but one of the most impactful things that has happened this year in the wake of our last conversation was that I got an email from a mother and she said you know a single mom and I work
a few jobs and I can't afford to give you a ton of money but me and my kids look at your Instagram often after dinner and they really want to protect the harp beats they really want to protect the animals and the rainforest and so we do we give five dollars a month to junglekeepers and it was
to me that was so impactful because I used to be that little kid worried about the animals and I saw how a few million raindrops can create a flood yeah I ask that people donate to jungle keepers you guys are legit that money is going to go a long way junglekeepers.org if you somehow
were able to raise very large so the the raindrops would make a waterfall a very large amount of money I don't know what that number is maybe ten million dollars 20 million 30 million what are the different milestones along the way that could really help help you on the journey of
saving the rainforest. If we did if let's just say some company organization or or if enough people donated it let's just say we got that 30 million that money would go directly into stopping locking roads into creating a corridor a biological corridor that connects
the uncontacted indigenous reserves with other tribal lands with Mono National Park with the Tambopata which establishes essentially the largest protected area in the Amazon rainforest and what makes this groundbreaking is that we're not doing this in the traditional way we're doing this
take it to the people and that's what's been so exciting is that you know when he started this when JJ started this 30 years ago he had no idea his father wanted him to be a logger he didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old he grew up bathing in the river he had no idea that a bunch of crazy foreigner scientists were going to show up and some guy in a James Bond suit was going to come down here with microphones and and that all of a sudden the world would know that he was on
this quest to protect this this incredible ecosystem and all those little aliens. Well that's all the important things to remember that the the people that are cutting down the forest the loggers are also human beings the families there they're they're they're basically trying to survive
and they're desperate and they're doing the thing that will bring them money. So they're just human beings at the core of it if they're of other option if they have other options they will probably choose to give their life to save in the community to first and foremost providing for their family and after that saving the community helping the community flourish and I think probably a lot of them love the rainforest they grew up in the
rainforest. Yeah let me look at Pico yeah Pico used to be a logger full-time logger long time logger now he loves conservation. It's like yeah you know it's all a ball just providing people people options there's some dark stuff on the on the gold mine stuff you've talked about you showed me parts of the rainforest where the gold mines are and they're just kind
of erasing the rainforest yeah so at the edges this one the mining happens and it's this ugly it's ugly process of they're just destroying the jungle just for the surface layer of the sand or whatever that they process to collect just little bits of gold and there's also very dark things that happen along the way as the communities around the gold mines are created.
So the entirety of the moral system that emerges from that has things like prostitution where one third of the of the women that are drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution are miners under you know under 17 years old 13 to 17 year old there's just a lot of really really dark stuff.
I think that we have a rare chance to do something against that darkness. I think that this is an example of local people who have taken action done good work been good to the people that have visited harnessed a certain amount of international momentum and now we're on the cusp of doing
something historic and so for the children in the communities along this river it won't be being a prostitute in a gold mine it'll be becoming a trained ranger like last month our ranger coordinator and one of our one of our female rangers went to Africa for a ranger conference and it's like we're
beginning to this is someone from a little tiny village with that shots up river she went to Africa to talk about being a professional conservation ranger and it's like that's that's changing lives and her her daughters then she's married to Ignacio the guy she like her their kids are
going to grow up seeing their parents walking around with the emblem on and go oh I want to and then and then people like pico and Pedro and all these guys that work here are going to go well we have to we have to protect this forest and then they start getting fascinated about the snakes
and then they start caring about the turtle eggs and then all of a sudden they have a way of life and nobody needs to go be nobody needs to go steal anybody's kids to be a prostitute in a gold mine that's horrible and so it's really a it's a win-win for the for the animals for the river for the
rainforest for people were improved its biocentric conservation it's it's just making everything better yeah I've read in an article that said an estimated 1200 girls between ages of 12 and 17 are forcibly drafted into child prostitution around the communities in the gold mines at least one
third of the prostitutes in the camp are under age the girls had ended up in the camp after receiving a tip that there were restaurants looking for waitresses and willing to pay top dollar they jumped on a bus together and came down to the rainforest what they found was not what they
were expecting the mining camp restaurants served food for only a few hours a day the rest of the time it was the girls themselves who were on the menu literally at the end of the road and without the money to return home the girls would soon become trapped in prostitution it's interesting to
me that the most devastating destruction of nature the complete erasure of the rainforest burned to the ground sucked through a hose spit out into a disgusting mercury puddle like the complete annihilation of life on earth goes hand in hand with the complete annihilation of a young
life it's like it's all based around the same thing it's it's the light versus the dark that's that's it's it's the destruction in the chaos versus a move towards order and hope and and and it is incredibly dark and this region is heavy with it well i'm glad you're fighting for the light
is there like a milestone in your future that you're working towards like financially into the donations there is and in the next year and a half as you saw in your time here there's roads working around the jungle heepers concessions all the work that the local people are doing to
protect this land is trying to be dismantled by international corporations that are subcontracting logging companies here and really what we need is 30 million dollars in the next two years to protect the whole thing you've seen the ancient mahogany trees you've seen the families of
monkeys you've seen the Cayman and the river all of this is standing in the pathway of destruction that road they're going to come down that road and men with chainsaws are going to dismantle a forest that has been growing since the beginning this is so magical do you see the snake over there
yeah do you that is okay snake i'm just gonna don't move i don't want you to move i'm gonna just this is one of the most beautiful snakes in the amazon rainforest this is the blunt headed tree snake my favorite snakes i've been hoping that you would get to see this snake i have been
praying oh boy okay okay let's just let's just let's just go right back into this look at this little beauty creation let's keep you away from the fire look at this little blunt headed tree snake wow such an incredible so tell me about this snake harmless little snake
if you put your hand out it'll probably just crawl onto your hand just be real careful with the fire so look i'm just gonna put them like this we're gonna yeah let's just snake safety so he's a tree snake yep nice and slow nice and slow nice and slow so you nice and slow just really so just be the tree be the tree that he climbs on and this is like again this is a snake that's so thin and so small there you go there you go nice and slow just just be the tree let him crawl around so he's
gonna try and do all this stuff let me see if i can just calm him down for a sec let me just see he's very active little snake so see like the snake the other night okay just come look at this i can see the light through his body to me this is an alien this is this strange little
life form his eyes are two thirds of his head i'm not joking you look at their skull he's so tiny he's so tell people listening there's a snake in balls hands right now it's very it's long of course but very skinny very very light and and also for everyone listening the odds
of that as we're sitting here doing this podcast that a snake would just be crawling by in the jungle might sound like something that would happen but the density of snakes in the amazon rainforest makes this a very unique experience can you tell me a little bit about the coloration
scheme yes so a little brown yeah just to describe this as we're as we were talking here it's just a sort of banded white and brown snake with this tiny little head about the size of my pinky nail um two thirds of this snake's head is made up of its gigantic eyes it's got a small mouth
and it's it's about about a third as thick as a pencil it's basically a moving shoestring it's incredibly incredibly thin the only thing i am thinking like so is if we have Dan come and just do some shots of yeah that's true Dan
so what what are we looking at uh the snake that was crawling behind us in the jungle that i we were talking about jungle keepers and what we could do and the snake just showed up at that moment and this is a very active little snake who's out for a hunt tonight and wants to find
something to eat so this is a blunt headed tree snake totally harmless little literally a moving shoestring super beautiful little animal when you talk about aliens to me this is this is an alien like what are you thinking what are you doing right now what do you think about the fact that we
were handled being handled by these giant humans and as you were saying it reaches up to the leaves yeah this snake just naturally knows to go look you just put him anywhere near leaves and he's like i got this he just wants to go right up into that tree i just want you to try holding him
and uh real gentle just be the tree yeah and just just kind of do the same thing you learned last night just nice and gentle yep and see he's holding on to my finger right now he's just going up there you go perfect nice and easy he's a little erratic he's a little goofy maybe his camera shy
maybe a fan of the podcast and gigantic eyes relative to his body size oh jays hello moth traffic traveling in the jungle and then for everyone listening as we're as we're as we're handling the snake that we found that was crawling by us like literally by our shoulders as we're
talking a bat flies through no joke eight inches from lexas ear like just zips past his head as he's holding a snake while we're sitting here in the jungle it's just we're just in it now now he's going to try and back up and how do you yeah why don't you want to want to encourage him to come
back this he's he's weaved this way he's okay he's just he's just trying to back out yeah that did release oh release okay we're gonna this is what i'm gonna do we're gonna say thank you mr snake thank you mr snake thank you mr snake back up into the tree here we go there you go there you go
there you go and then uh we can resume normal podcasting now because we really are in the jungle really are in the jungle that's one of my favorite snakes that's one of my favorite little aliens on this planet look at that and it's going on some long journey it's gonna
the canopy carry the rest of the night so that little snake is one of the million and the life forms hard busy trying to protect exactly um to me i after almost 20 years down here the people here have become my friends the the came in on the river the the monkeys i when i
fall asleep at night i think about all the different heartbeats all the different little creatures here that that when they bulldoze as far as when they when they chop down these trees that they vanish that we we we take away their world and in that very evolutionary historical sense of
remembering the the primordial soup it's like this these this little creatures surviving out here somehow and we have the chance to save it and even if you don't care about the little creature on the pale blue dot each of these little creatures contributes to this massive orchestral hole that
creates climactic stability on this planet and the amazon is one of the most important parts of that and each of these little guys is playing a role in there so one of the other fascinating life forms as other humans but living a very different kind of life so uncontacted tribes
what do you find most fascinating about them would i find most fascinating about the uncontacted tribes that while me and you are sitting here with microphones in a light somewhere out there in that darkness in that direction not so far away is the crow flies there are people
sitting around a fire in the dark probably with little more than a few leaves over their heads who don't even have the use of stone tools who only have metal objects that they've stolen from nearby communities they're they're they're living such primitive isolated nomadic lives in
the modern world and they're still living naked out in the jungle it's truly incredible it's truly remarkable and i think that it's because they can't advocate for themselves they can't protect themselves it's sort of like well we can let them get shot up by loggers and get their
to get let their land get bulldoze while they hide they have no idea that their world is being destroyed but they're they're sort of the scariest and most fascinating thing out there right now in the jungle what do you think they're because you're spoken about them being dangerous what do you think
their relationship with violences i think this violence part of their approach to the external world so from the best i understand it that at the turn of the century industrial revolution we had sudden immense need for rubber for hoses and gaskets and wires and tires and and the war
machine and the only way to get rubber was to come down to the amazon rainforest and get the local people who knew the jungle to go out into the jungle and and cut rubber trees and collect the latex and Henry Ford tried doing Ford landia tried having rubber plantations but leaf blight killed it
and so you had this period of horrendous extraction in the amazon where the rubber barons were coming down and just reaping and pillaging the tribes and making them go out to tap these trees and the un-contacted tribe said no they had their six foot long long bows seven foot long arrows
with giant bamboo tips and they moved further back into the forest and they said we will not be conquered and since that time they've been out there and it's it's confusing because in a way they're still running scared a century later and their grandparents would have told them you know
the outside world everyone you see in the outside world is trying to kill you so kill them first so can you blame them for being violent no is this river still wild because loggers were scared to go here for a long time from almost a century late that's why this forest is still here yes and so
is it a human rights issue that we protect the last people on earth that have no government no no affiliation no language that we can explain we don't know what their medicinal plant knowledge is we don't know their creation myths we know nothing about them and they're just out there right
now with bows and arrows living in the dark surviving in the jungle naked without even spoons forget about the wheel forget about iPhones they got nothing and they're making it work we don't know their creation myths so they have a very primitive existence but do you think their values
or so do you think they're nature similar to ours and how do their values differ from ours this is complicated because the the anthropologist in me wants to say that they have a historical reason for the violent life that they have you know they experienced
incredible generational trauma some time ago and that and because they've been living isolated in the jungle that has permeated to become their culture they've become a culture of violence but yet the the the contacted modern indigenous communities that we work with that are my friends
that work here just the other day we were speaking to one of them who was pulling spikes out of your hand while he was explaining that he tried to help them the brothers los hermanos he tried to help them he tried to give them a gift what did they do they shot him in the head yeah he said
there are brothers and he tried to give them out bananas plantains plantains both full of plantains and they shot at him they shot three arrows at him and one of them actually hit him in the skull and put him in the hospital and he got helicopter evacuated from his community
and so he's brave for surviving but he's uh he's a lucky survivor they they are incredibly accurate with those bamboo tipped arrows and those arrows are seven feet long so when you get hit by one they come out of velocity that can rip through you and the range on a shotgun is way shorter
than the range on a longbow you're talking about a couple hundred meters on a longbow and they're deadly accurate they can take spider monkeys out of a tree and so there's stories of loggers and I've seen the photos of the bodies of loggers who attract who attacked one of the tribes
and the tribes hadn't done anything but these loggers came around a bend they started shooting shotguns at the tribe and the tribes scattered into the forest and as loggers boat went around a bend they just started flying arrows took out the boat driver boats skidded to the side and then everybody
was standing in the river you can't run and the tribe just descended on them and just porcupine them full of arrows shotgun versus bow there's a shotgun shell here by the way yeah from the from the loggers yeah we picked that up yesterday was that yesterday dose I don't know I don't know
one of the things that happens here is time loses meaning in some kind of deep way that it does when you're in a big city in the United States for example and their schedules and meetings and all this kind of stuff it transforms the meaning your experience of time your
interaction with time the role of time all of this I've forgotten time and I've forgotten the existence of the outside world and how does that feel it feels more honest it also puts in perspective like all the busyness all the it kind of ticks the ant out of the ant colony and says hey
this you're just an ant this is just an ant colony and there's a big world out there yeah it's a it's a chance to be grateful to celebrate this earth of ours and the things that make it worth living on including the simple things that make the individual life worth living which is water
and then food and the rest is just details of course the friendships and social interaction that's a really big one actually that one I'm taking for granted because I didn't get a chance yet to really spend time alone hmm I'm when I came here I've gotten a chance to hang out with you
and there's a kind of camaraderie there's a friendship there that if that's broken that's a that's a that's a tough one too you spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle yeah we get a loan on here yeah yeah I mean the first 15 years we were doing this we there would be times that
JJ would be busy in town with his family and I would for sheer love of the rainforest I would have to come alone out here and we didn't have running water I didn't have running water I didn't have lights I had was a couple of candles in the darkness and a tent and I was 20 something years
old living in the Amazon by myself you boat sunk and yeah it's incredibly lonely I had to learn through experience because I thought there was a period I think when you're you know you're young as a young man I had this thing like I wanted to prove that I could be like the explorers I wanted
to prove that I could handle the elements that I could go out alone that I could have these these deep connective moments with the with the jungle and it's like I did that and that's great and you know what the kid from into the wild learned right before he died in that bus
that if you don't have somebody to share it with it doesn't matter but I some kind of like even just deep human level like even if you have somebody to share it with you ever just get a a loan out here just like this sense of like existential dread of like what
you know the jungle has a way of not caring about any individual organism it's just kind of churns it's like it makes you realize that life is finite quite intensely yeah for for for me it's comforting being out here because I find the the rat race the national
narrative the the the the the need to make money that's a worry about war to to be outraged about the newest thing that that politician said and what that actor did and it just there's always just this just unending sort of media storm and and and everyone's worried and everyone's trying to
optimize their sunlight exposure and find the solution and buy the right new thing and to me coming out here first of all I mean something out here because I can help someone I can help people I can help these animals and so I find my meaning out here but also you know there's the
losing the madness over the mountains it's it's nature has always been for many people been where things make sense and to me I think I'm a simple analog type of person that it makes sense that when it rains you get in the river to stay warm and and you you know you
wait for the dawn and you see a little tree snake and and you say it just it just it makes it makes more sense and I think that the the overwhelming teaming complexity that is inside the the ant mound of society can be dizzying for some people and I think that maybe it's a dyslexia maybe
it's just that I love nature but um now if I when I land in JFK I I feel like a frightened animal like it's as if you as if you released like a like a some animal that had never seen it until like into time square and you can just imagine this dog with its ears back running away
from taxis and just just cowering from the noise and it's just hustle and bustle and people are brutal and how much you want it for getting the car yes screaming over the intercom and just everything everything sensory changes and let's get home okay let's go you got a meeting you got to get to
the next place you got to give a talk you got to say out out out here when we finish up here what are we going to do we're going to eat some food maybe go catch a crocodile go walk around the jungle and I like it's slower it makes sense and and there's that again there's that deep meaning of
of of that here where we can be the guardians for good we can we can be we can hold that candle up and and know for sure that we're protecting the trees from being destroyed and it's that simple thing of just this is good there you go it's simple in society I feel like everyone's always
losing their minds and forgetting the most basic of fundamental truths and out here you can't really argue with them you know when we needed water it was like shit if we don't get water we're fucked and that and that's to me that's where the camaraderie comes from because no matter what
we'll be we could go to the most fancy ass restaurant through the biggest most famous people in the world doesn't matter we still remember what was like standing around on the jungle going fuck we're scared we don't have water we got reduced to the simplest form of humans and that's
and that's something and we survived and that's and that's cool you take all the all those people in their nice dresses in their fancy restaurants you put in those conditions they're all going to want the same thing this water and yes so the same thing all the beautiful people how's your view
of your mortality evolved over your interaction with the jungle how often do you think about your death well I don't need more because the I've come to believe that there is a benevolent god spirit creator taking care of us and I don't I don't think about my own death we have a
little bit of time here and we clearly know nothing about what we're doing here and it seems like we just have to do the best we can and so I just it doesn't it doesn't scare me I've come close to dying a lot of times and I just don't think you don't want to have a bad death first of all
you don't want to you don't want to you don't want to be a statistic you don't want to find out you don't want to like try out a be the first to try out a new product and oops it crushed you you know that that's that's a terrible way to go or the people that used to you know the gold rush
they were using mercury and they're all getting or lead it was lead poisoning and it's like I'll mid you know a few million people died that way and it's like you want to you want a good death you know you want to stare down the eyes of a tiger or hanging off the edge of a cliff
saving somebody's like something something something worthy warrior's death but if riding a 16-foot black camin chest boots on screaming yeah that would be fun that'd be a good one a lot of people say that you carry the spirit of steve urban in your heart in the way you carry yourself in this
world I mean that guy was full of joy if I have a percentage of steve urban I would be honored but that guy that I think I think there's only one steve I think that he was he occupied his own strata of just shining light every everything was positive enthusiasm love and happiness and
save the animals and do better and let's make it fun and and and that was so infectious that that it sort of transcended his TV show it transcended his conservation work it transcended business and entrepreneurship it just through sheer magnetism and enthusiasm he just I mean everyone
knew who Steve was everyone loved Steve we still all love Steve and so it's it's just it's just amazing what one spirit can do so if anybody you know makes that comparison I get I get really uncomfortable because to me steve everyone is like just just the goat and so I'm okay with that
well I at least agree with that comparison having spent time with you there's just an eternal flame of joy and adventure too just pulling you a dark question but do you think you might meet the same end giving your life in some way to something you love that is a dark question but I
I think most likely I'll get whacked by loggers I think that loggers are gold miners will take me out I don't I don't picture myself going from animals but that would be heartbreaking too yeah it would but yeah at the same time though like the Kurt Cobain value of that if I died doing what I
love to protect the river I'd be so worth so much more a lot like we'd get the 30 million if I died tomorrow for sure so we've already already talked about this with my friends I'm like if I get whacked yeah do the foundation make the documentary protect the river protect the heartbeat
call it the heartbeat's jungle keeper the heartbeats you know be ready for it because these these things do happen people get pissed if you get in their way and as many happy people as and who whose lives were changing there's also going to be some jealous shitty upset people who are mad that they
can't make prostitutes out of young girls and keep destroying the planet and so they might just erase you me well I hope you like a clean eastwood character just impossible to kill I'll tell you squinted your eyes on cue who do you think will play you in a movie god somebody with the right
nose yeah somebody who can live up to this not as old yeah Italian yeah it's funny do you think of yourself as Italian or human American that's the thing I don't you know eight my my life has been the united nations of of whatever like I just ever to me I just I don't that's the other thing you
go back to the side and everyone's obsessed with with race to me I'm like look leopards have black babies and yellow babies one mother like they're all leopards and and I'm I'm so color blind and race blind and everything else I've lived in India my friends of Peruvian my family we got
Italian Filipino just everything and so I'm so immersed in it that that when I find it very jarring and disconcerting how much time we spend talking about different religions and it's the differences in humans I'm like dude we're we're talking about whether or not our ecosystems
are going to be able to provide for us we're talking about nuclear what we're talking about this pretty serious shit on the table and we're over here arguing over like shades of gray of it's so trivial and that should drives me crazy and and as does the outrage where it's like no you you
you have to care I've been I've been criticized for not caring enough about that and I'm like I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you who cares what the hell I am who gives a shit with the hell I'm a human we're all human yeah it's not that easy but it's kind of fun sometimes and and we're at a
better time and hit like when you think about like the middle ages like even if you were a king hmm you still didn't have that good you didn't have pineapples in the winter you didn't even know what the fuck a pineapple was we have pineapples whenever we want them hmm we can fly on planes
to other countries whether or let's clarify we you mean a large fraction of the world you know what I mentioned to you one of the biggest things I've noticed when I immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States is the how plentiful bananas and pineapples were the fruit
section the produce section of the didn't have to wait in line had the grocery store could just eat as many bananas and pineapples and cherries and watermelon as you want that's not everybody has that uh that's true not everybody has that but but everybody could be that king no but but but a
growing number of people today can feast on pineapple can feast on pineapple and have toasters and new distracting apps all the way until the grave that's the thing that I also noticed is I don't think so much about politics will I'm here or we haven't even talked about it man don't talk about
the stupid uh differences between humans now except to just kind of laugh at the absurdity of it on occasion I'm really too busy trying to survive glaciers and jungles and avalanches and all kinds of shit do you think nature is brutal as Warner herzak showed it or is it beautiful
I think the brutality of nature is the chaos and I think that we are the only ones in it that are capable of organizing in the direction of order and light so yes there are going to be hyenas tearing each other apart yes there's going to be war torn nations and poor starving children but
we as humans have the power to work towards something more organized than that so there is a there is a force within nature that's always searching for order for good it's kind of a unifying theory if you think about it I mean all of the chaos of history and the wars and and the chaos
of nature we through technology and and organization there's so many people more people today than ever before I think who are so concerned who will realize that the incredible power like what Jane Goodall says about you know how you can affect the people around you how you can do good in the
world how you can change the narrative of conservation from one of loss and darkness to one of innovation and light like we can we can do incredible things we are the masters as humans and I think that I think that we're on the cusp of sort of understanding the true potential of that
like I just think I just think that more than ever people people have harnessed this ability to do good in the world and be proud of it and and and just change the the darkness into something else when you have lived here and taken in the ways in the Amazon juggle how
your views of God you mentioned how your views of God change who is God I've come to believe that again back to that that Christ wasn't a Christian Muhammad wasn't a Muslim and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist that like the game the game is love and compassion and the universe is chaotic and
dangerous and nature is chaotic and dangerous but we if if this is some sort of a biological video game the our reality that the test is can we be good and we go through it every day can you can you be good to your parent can you be good to your partner can you be good to your co-workers
can it's so difficult and we see how people can cheat and steal and hurt and destroy and and the incredible impact that it has on the world the the returning exponential impact that one act of kindness one act of good can do and so I see nature as God I see the religions is different
cultural manifestations of the same truth the same creative force maybe me and you have the same beliefs and your aliens are my angels well thank you for being one of the humans trying to do good in this world and thank you for bringing me along for some adventure and I believe more
adventure awaits thank you for being enough of a psychopath to actually just sign on to come into the Amazon rainforest in a suit and a year ago when you told me that you were going to do this I truly didn't believe you so for being a man of your word and for the incredible work you do
to connect humans and to create dialogue and to do good in the world and for all the adventures that we've had thank you so much thank you brother Lex thanks man thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosalie to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from Joseph Campbell the big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure thank you for listening and hope to see you next time