#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
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The following is a conversation with paul rosey, his second time at the podcast, but this time without 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 the video capturing some aspects of that adventure in a week or so.

IT included everything from getting lost and dense unexposed wilderness with no contact to the outside world, to taking very high doses of I wasa and much more. Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist, exploit author. And as someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the reinforce for this mission, he founded jungle keepers.

You can help him if you got a jungle keepers that work. This trip for me was life changing and expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world unfortunate existing with all of you. So i'm glad I went, and i'm glad I made IT out alive.

And now a quick, you second mentioned responsable. Check them out in the description is the best way to support this podcast. We got ship station for film, yahoo finance for investors, Better help for mental health next week for business, business software, a leaf for naps and geography for selling stuff on internet juice wise.

My friends also, if you want to work with an amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, get extreme that, come slash contact. And now onto the full address. As always.

No, as in the middle, I try to make this interesting. But if you must keep them friends, please do check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff.

Maybe you will too. This episode is brought you by ship station is a software designed to save you time and money and fulfillment. Shipping stuff is on internet IT, uh, integrates with sharp fire and whatever else he saw stuff and 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 point eight to point b, part of that is the theoretical computer scientists at me. Because when you simplify that problem and formulated as a graphic problem, then you can perform my kind of optimization on IT, which takes me back to some of my favorite courses on the theory in the practice.

So new merc timidity, we talking about not only new programming and then the motivate al stuff with complex programing. A particular kind of formulation of an opinion ation problem can be easily to solve, a hard to solve. When I look at this world of logistics and shipping me stuff from point a to point b with there's like a million point in a million combinatorial madness of that.

It's really exciting that there is systems that enable that all to work. And i'm glad ship station existence, i'm glad there's solving this tRicky but extremely important problem. Go a ship station that console's and use code legs to sign up for your free sixty day trial as ship station that comes lash legs.

This episode is also brought you by yahoo finance assign that provides financial management reports, information and useful investors. I use IT for the cool little feature of IT letting you add your portfolio and um thereby letting you monitor IT and get news about religious things. So never A T D M A account which will found there, which I gives us switch over Charles Allen.

So there's a really nice interface that lets you monitor that. But of course, as part that face, you can also see news of the crazy stuff that's going on the markets. He gives you an insight in what the people who really have money invested in the success of companies are thinking about, where they're excited about, where they're cynical about all that kind of stuff.

So it's a nice lands that we should see the world, one that contrast with the more kind of political and the geopolitical lands of jail from the get, and also contrast with the historical lens, you know, read a lot of history books in there time. Slow down. The a federal option downs of every day are not as important.

Of course, when you're living in the moment in the day this week, the option downs of the world are extremely important, and is if you have money invested in a certain small slacks of that world. So I use yao finance. Monitoring that perspective on the world for comprehensive financial news and analysis is good to yahoo finance that com that's yahoo finance star com.

This subsoils also brought you by a Better hope sport T H E L P, help they figure out when you need to match with the lessons therapy under forty eight hours for individuals were for couples, embassies, mbs, like crazy numbers, like a three hundred and fifty million messages, chat, phone video sessions, over thirty five thousand licensed, over four point four million people. They got help talking about a network. So I was just talking about the logistics of shipping stuff from a to b.

Here's the logistics of the human psyche, the collective intelligence and the collective psyche of the human species, seeking to explore the shadow of the individual minds. But in so doing, explore the collective shade of our species. It'll be cool to visualize all that anyway.

We're just individuals. We don't have a way to take the perspective of the species. We only have our mind, our conscious mind, in the subjective view that IT provides the world for that subjective view, it's good to clean the lens, sort of speak every once in while.

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This episode is also brought dubai next week and all in one cloud business, measured system as I was a deep in nature, disconnected completely from the world, and the sounds of the urban world, no machinery, know people. Nothing, just nature. You can hear water.

You can hear the wind. You can hear the animals, the insects, the little in the big, and just that, no people. So as I was in that, I can just really think about the productive world.

We'd say the world of companies and IT is, indeed, are the many things that makes me happy. IT is one of 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 large scale, by starting 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 for all the cool things that humans have built.

But running a company is, uh, tRicky and that's what next sweet helps with. In fact, over thirty seven thousand companies have upgraded to next week by oracle. You can take advantage that sweet flexible financing plan and that sweet the com slash lex.

That's not sweet the com slash lex. This episode also brought by eight sleep, and it's new and amazing part for ultra. One of the things in the I mean, there's a few creature conference taken away when you're out in nature, especially when you're deep out in nature.

And of course one of things you remember is the ability to have a bed to go to a stuff of sex, not that kind stuff, but a bed that um can be cool. Man, you've amazing to get the A C bed into the medical jungle because it's it's hot out there and to be able to cool down, which I do with the asy would be a anyway, they've upgraded from part three, part four. The pot four does the two weeks, the cooling power.

And they also added a super cool thing called pot for ultra, which has an extra base that goes between the matches and the bud frame. They can control the position of the bed, so can elevate, you say, to, like, a reading position as a really, really cool idea on many fronts, including, like you have this integrated system that IT does, the sensing of the sleep time in the sleep face in the H. R.

V. And Harry in all that. So IT does the cooling of both sides of the bed separately. And now we can control the positioning ing in the bed is crazy.

I really love IT when products keep rapidly evolving, improving as the exciting to me got islip a conflict legs and use code legs to get three hundred and fifty dollars off the pod for ultra. This episode de is also brought to by sharp fy, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I used in just a few minutes to create an online store like three me a conflate ore to sell L A few shirts.

IT can be a small store, IT can be a gigging tic store, and all is super easy. And I have A A lot of third party apps that are integrated seems in, for example, including undermind printing. So I can just add a shirt there.

And then you have a bunch of company that do on demand printing, the printing and ship ship take care of the fulfilled and all that kind of stuff. And all of IT is seamlessly integrated, super easy to monitor. Once again, there is a kind of theme in this discussion of networks, of networks of human buying and selling, shipping, communicating all of that.

And i'm just so glad that people have created systems, products, services, many of which available online, to connect humans together, unlike humans, do their human things and help them further enjoy life in all the ways that life can be enjoy in the twenty first century. So thank you to shop and fine, and thank you for all the sponsors of this podcast that are helping create systems of that nature. Sign up for a one dollar promotes trial period shop five dog outside slgs that's all lower case. Got a shop fight consule legs to take your business to the next level today. This is extreme podcast to support IT to please check out our sponsors in the description and now their friends, here's paul rosey.

We're all we right now, paul lex.

we're in the middle. nowhere.

It's the amazon jungle. This vegetation, there's insects, there's all kinds of creatures, a million hard beats, 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 proxim ity of the indian cloud forest in the low and tropical rainforest, we are in the most biodiverse part of planet earth. There is more life per square acre, per square mile out here. Then there is anyone 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 last few days.

We've been through bed.

Let me ask you a ridiculous question. What are all the creatures right now if they wanted to, could uh.

causes harm? The thing is, the amazon rainforest has been described as the greatest natural battle field on earth. 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 turning machine of death.

And life is kind of this moment of status where you you maintain this collection of cells in a particular DNA sequence, and then, and then IT gets digested again, a recycle back. And we named into everything. And so so the things the things in the bar is, well, they don't want to hurt us.

There are things that are heavily defended because, for instance, a giant anteater needs clause to fight off a jack war. A stingray needs a stinger on its tail, which is basically a sorted knife with venom ic to deter anything that would hunt that stingray. Even the catfish have pectoral fans that have razor long state knight size defense systems.

Then you, of course, the jaguar is the hearts vehicles, the perona, the candidate 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. With the exception of maybe mosquitoes, every other animal just just wants to eat an existing peace that's IT.

But there is each of those animals describe have a kind of defense and a few accidentally step into its home. Yeah, into that radius. IT can cause harm or make him feel threatened.

Make him feel threatened.

There is a defense mechanism that is activated.

some defense mechanism. Moon, you talk about seventeen foot black came in crocodile that with significant size that could repute half an icon, is the largest snake on earth. Bush masters that can grow to be nine to, I think, even eleven feet long. I've caught bush masters that are thicker than my arms.

So for people don't know, bush masters snakes, what are these things? these?

This is a liar, I believe is the law is vapor on earth van extremely vanities with hinch teeth tissue destroying? Like if you get bitten by a bushmaster, they say you you don't rush and try and save your own life. You try to save or what's around you look at, look around at the world, smoking last cigarette, call your mom.

That's IT. So that moment of status, that his life is going to end up properly when you interact. One of those, yeah.

I even have even this, this seemingly.

Can I just, paul, how incredibly beautiful that is. You just reach tear, right?

It's like it's like a even the seemingly beautiful little firm. If you if you go this way on the firm, you're fine to search out with. Soon you go this way, there's invisible little Spikes on there if you want.

Yeah.

I feel that like everything is defended. If you're driving on the road, you have your arms out the side. 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. Me now, so what what would you do? Like were going to the dance jungle yesterday, and you slide down the hill, you foot slips, you stand down, and then you find yourself staring a couple of fear away from a bushed, massive nego leader here, for people somehow don't know, are somebody who loves, admire snakes, who has met thousands of snakes, has work with them, respects them, celebrates them. What would you do with the bush message? Like.

face to face, face to face? This has happened that have been nice.

nice.

I've come face to face with the bush master. And there's two things, the two reactions that you might get. One is if the bush master decides that it's vacation time, if it's sleeping, if you just had a meal, they'll come to the editor trails or beneath the tree and theyll just circle up little spiral, big spiral, big pile of snake on the trail, not just sit there.

And in one time, there is a snake sitting on the side of a trail, beneath a tree. For two weeks, the snake was just sitting there, resting, digesting his food out the open in the rain, in the sun in the night 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 read to defend themselves. And so I once came across a bushmaster in the jungle at night, and this bushmaster turned his head towards me, looked at me and made IT very clear, i'm going to go this way. So I did the natural thing that any snake enthusiast would do, and I grabbed its tail now, eleven 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 it's like that with most animals, you know, jack will will turn and look at you and just remind you of how small you are.

Like, what did you see in the snake eyes? How did you say that this the this is gonna your end, if you d proceed is ready.

This, I wanted to get by the tail and shown to the people that were there maybe worked with the snake a little bit as an eleven foot snake. The snake turned around and made IT very clear.

Like not today.

pal. It's not going to is in the eyes, in the movement, in the neck push yeah, like he just looks a little bit too. Yeah, too ready. I love this.

Okay, so you know.

you just know, you just know, where's like the snake you met last night? Yeah, beautiful thing. Such a calm middle thing.

You just focuses on eating baby lizard and little snails and things. And that snake has no concept of defending itself. IT has no way to defend itself.

So even even something the size of a blue jake could just come and just pect that thing in the head and swallow. And it's a helpless little snake. So it's israel, a kind of depends on the animal, depends on the mood to catcher in each one has a different temperament.

The Grace of this movement was mazarion ing e maybe, and the promoting ing projecting onto.

But as a tung flicking was a sign of curious, trying to figure out what was going on is like, why am I on this tread mill of human skin? There is just trying to get to the next thing, trying to get hidden .

and try to get away from the light. Also, the texture, the scales is really fascinating. Ans, first neck, i've vertie is so interesting, just such an incredible system of muscles that are all interacting together to make that kind of movement work and all the texture of the skin of scales.

What would you love of all snakes? From my first experiences of the snake to all the thousands of experiences you had a snakes. What do you love about these creatures?

I think it's when you just spoke about IT, was that the first snake you've met and IT was a tiny little snake in the jungle. And you spoke about IT with so much light in your eyes. And I think that because we've been programmed to be scared of snakes, there's something, there's something wonderous that happens in our brain.

Maybe maybe is just the joy of discovery that there's nothing to be scared of and whether it's a rattlesnake that is dangerous and that you need to give distance to which you look at IT from a distance and you go wow, or it's a harmless little grass naked, you can pick up and enjoy and give to a child. It's they're just the strange, legless animals that just exist. They don't even have I loads.

They are so different than us. They have a tongue that senses the air and to me are so beautiful. And I i've my whole i've been defending snakes from humans and it's it's they seem misunderstood.

I think they're incredibly beautiful. This every color and variety of snakes, as venous snakes, as tree snakes, as huge crushing annon, as is just of the two thousand six hundred species of snakes that that exist on earth. There's just such beauty, such complexity and such a simplicity to me, to me. I feel like, I feel like i'm I am friend with snake, and and they rely on me to protect them from my people.

Friend was 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 aggressions indicates uh offence and so a particulates python has been documented is eating humans. And icon as although what IT hasn't been publicize, they have eaten humans.

Um every single other snake, from bullet constructor to bush masters to spitting cobra to grass snake to garden snake to everything else every single other snake does not want to interact with you. They've no interest. So there's no such thing as an aggressive snake.

Once you get outside of a anaconda articulated path on aggression, could be trying to eat you. That's predation. But for every other, the snake, a rattle snake, if IT was there, would either go escape and hide itself, or would rattle tail and tell us, don't come closer.

Cobra will hood up and begin to his and say, don't approach me. I'm asking you nicely not to mess with me. And most other snakes are fast, but they stay in the trees or their extremely camouflage.

But their whole eos just don't bother me. I don't want to be seen. I don't want to be missed with. In fact, all I want to be do is be left alone, and once in a while, I just want to eat and buy the way. When you see a snake drink, your heart will break. It's like seeing is the only thing is cuter than a puppy like watching a snake touch its mouth to water and just you just see that that little mouth going as they suck water in and is like it's just so adorable watching the scale animal just be like I .

need water in the state of vulnerability yeah but brow, there's nothing cuter than a little pop with the tongue.

baby ball, python, bb elephant.

So like people, they just take IT in.

They can be at a puddle and they just take IT in. Or one time in india was with a snake rescuer, and we found this nine foot king cobra, this god of a snake. They're your figures hanna is there are lat name and they're y're snake either they're the king of the snakes, the largest animal snake and the people that call called the snake rescuer because that's a profession in um you know what had gotten into their kitchen in 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, know, why do you think the snake would go in a house and he's quizzing me and I actually went, you know, I don't know, as a warm, as a cold, you know, like sometimes cats like to go into into the warm, warm cars in the winter. And he was like, east thirsty. He goes to watched this.

He took a water bottle poured over the another snake standing up. Snake stands up three feet tall, is a huge king cobra with a hot, terrifying snake to be around. He leaned over to the snake, and the snake is standing their 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 started 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 center? Is IT fear almost like they don't notice this? Or is IT where source the unknown aspect tivat the uncertainty is, is a source of danger.

What animals live in a constant state of danger, like if you look at that deal that we saw last night as stocking through the jungle, wondering what's going to eat IT, wondering if this is the last moment it's going to be alive. And like the animals are constantly terrified of that, this is their last moment.

I just for the listener, will walk into the jungle late at night, so as darkness accept our headlands on, and then all sudden ball stops. Zx, he looks in the distance. He sees two eyes. I think you thought that jagger was at a dear and was moving itself like this, like a scary or maybe trying to figure IT, trying to localize itself, trying to figure .

on to see around .

you're doing the same to IT the two of you like moving your head yeah and back deep into the jungle like I don't know it's pretty far away, still see IT. So yes, that's a thing to actually mention. I mean, the with head lamp, you see the reflection in their eyes. It's kind of incredible just to see a creature, to try to identify a creature by just through 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, came in orange nights.

Res orange snakes can usually be like orange moths, spider 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, dear, did your first thing is, what animal is this that I am staring back at? Because through the light you kind of a get, you see the reflection of the the bright light of the leaves.

And I couldn't tell at first was actually that those big bright eyes IT could have been nossa could have been jawa could have been ideal and then wanted to this movement. That's the cats do they try to see around you're like that, maybe like freebies here. We're going to get a lucky. It's going to be a jag right off trail.

Your definition of lucky, a complicated one as a fascine process when you see those two, I try to figure out what is. And IT is try and figure out what you are. That process a to talk about came in.

We ve seen a lot of different kinds of size. I've seen a baby one, a bigger one. Tell me about these sixteen foot plus apex predators of the amazon reinforce .

the big bed black came in, which is the largest reptilian predator in the amazon. Accept for the anaconda kind of both share that that note of apex predator, they were actually hunted to endangered species level in the seventies because their their leather black scale. But they are coming back, the coming back, and their huge, and they are beautiful.

And I was, I was walking near a lake, and I never understood how big they could get, except as walking near a lake last year and was following the stream. You know, it's like when you found a little stream and this just little trickle of water and overside, this river water had been running the other direction on the, on the stream river comes up to me. I swear, god, this animal looks me and I want, hey, he was like, didn't expect to see me there and he turned around he's like, did a little spin started to run down the stream then he turned around.

You could tell he was like, let's go and I know not enter for morphing here. The animal was asking me to come with, so I feel the river routed down the stream. We started run down stream. Looks to me one more time is like, you jumps into the lake and I like, what does he want me to see?

Now in the lake, this river otters doing dives and freezing out and going up and down and up and down, and they're very excited, the screaming, the screaming all the sudden, and I ve never seen anything like this is referred like game of thrones. This crackhead comes flying out of the water. All of the river waters were attacking.

This huge black came in sixteen feet head, half the size of this table, and he was thrashing her tail around, creating these huge waves in the water, trying to catch, and and there's so fast that they were zipped around her, biting her and then going around in this outer sort. I got into species, looks to me watched this, but booking with this kid IT was amazing. And I, for the first time, I got to stand there watching incredible species fight happening.

They weren't trying to kill the came in. They were just trying to mess with IT and the chain was doing his best to trying to kill these orders. And they were just having a good time in that seek sort of hyper intelligent animal like wolf sort of way where they are just going you can .

catch us yeah like intelligence and agitated versus like raw power and dominance. I mean, I got to handle some smaller came in in just the power they had. You know, you scale that up to imagine what a sixteen foot even attend for any any kind of like in the kind of power they deliver. Maybe can you talk to that like the power they can generate with their tail.

with their neck, with their jaw? Alligators and came in and crocodile have some of the strongest bite forces on our think of salt water crocket our wins as the strongest by force on earth. And you you got to hold about a fotos at a four foot spectacle camin. And you got to feel, I mean, you're a black belt, your jitsu. How how do you compare the the explosive force you felt from that animal compared to what a .

human engineering it's it's difficult to describe in words. There is a lot of power. We're talking about the power of the neck like the I mean, there's a lot you can generate power all up and down the body.

So probably the tale is a monster, but IT is just the neck and you know not not to mention the power of the bike that in the speed too, because of the thing I saw and got the experiences how still in calm, at least for my amazon perspective, that seems calm, uh, still. And then from that set of zero to sixty, and I just just go wide stretch. And then there's also a decision that makes in a second, whether as a thrashes is going to can 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 viewed as as a friendly dog.

Generally not every single one of them. But as a rule, spectacle came in puppies. You released one of the river, and I did nothing, didn't bite one of your fingers.

You just swim away. We dropped on the river. And what did you do? IT shows peace.

Now, I had a smooth front came in a few weeks ago, and it's probably a three and a half footer not big enough to kill you, but very much big enough to grab 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. And the one that you got to see, this one has Spikes coming off.

And they're like, like, like left over dinosaurs, like they evolved during the dinosaur times and never change. They're Spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growth that you don't see on the other. Smoother came in.

And I tried to release this one without getting bitten. And I thread into the stream, gently into the water, just went well and tried to pull my hands back. And as I pulled my hands back, this came in in the air, turned around and just try to give me one parting blow and just got one tooth wac rites of the bone of my finger.

And bone injury feels different than a skin injuries y instantly. And IT just reminds you of that's a came in with a head, this pig and IT hurt. And I know that I could have taken off my finger.

Now you could scale that up to a black chain. It's it's rib crushing. It's zebra had removing size, you know just just meet destroying. Its it's incredible. Its nature is metal sort of, you know.

just raw power. So what's the the biggest clock you've been able to handle?

We were doing came in services for years, and we would go out at night. And you want to figure out what of the populations of black came in. Spectable came in, smooth front to came in, dwarf came in.

And the only way to see which came and you're dealing with is to catch IT. Because last time you get up close with the light, you can see the eyes and 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. A, I write about the first one that mean J, J, called together, which was probably little bigger than this table, and probably mid twenty years, 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 camin that was slightly longer than I am and on five nine. So I jumped on this probably six foot crack and quickly realized that my hands couldn't get around its neck, and my legs were wrapped around the base of its tail. And the thrash was so intense that as I took me one side, i've barely had enough time to realize what was happening before IT beat me against the ground.

My headlam came off now, blind in the dark, laying in a river in the amazon rainforest, hugging a six foot crocodile. And I went to George, as I always do. But I, in that moment before, even like god, I knew I couldn't let go the crock.

Because if I let go of the crock, I thought she's going to destroy my face. So I said, okay, i'm stuck here. If I just stay here, I can't release that. I need help. But I was like, i'm never, ever, ever, ever gna try and solo catched across this big again as like, this is, this is, I knew in that moment I like this good enough.

So anything longer than new control? The tale you don't have bared control of anything.

Yeah, that's a spectacle. Came in, a black came in is a whole other order. magnum. It's like saying, like, go, you know, I P I was play fighting with my golden or tribe of versus as play fighting with, like, you know, h what's the biggest, scariest dog you could think of the dog from sandlot, a giant ka illa dog thing like a, like a malamed, something huge, what I call massive.

Yeah, massive. And you mention dinosaurs. What do you admire about black theyve? Been here for a very, very long time. There's something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way being, about their presence in the jungle with crocodiles.

You're looking at this, this mega survivor. They're in a class with sharks or it's like i've been here so long when you talk about multiple extinctions, you talk about the sixth extinction, earth going through all this stuff that crackles and the cockroaches i've seen IT all before. They like men. We remember what that comment looks like and they're not impressed.

Yeah, they have this. They care this wisdom, their power in the simplicity of their power, they care.

And they're just sitting there in the streams and then they don't care. And even if there is a nuclear hall accost, you know that there would just be some crock sitting there, dead eye in that stagnant water, waiting for the life to regenerates of the CAD.

Again, it's gonna the remaining humans versus the cross. And the cockroaches and the crochet are just .

background noise here, sons of bitch.

you know, we are talking about individual black came in and came in and the species of came in. But enew, they're together. And you see multiple eyes, which I gotten to experience.

It's quite a feeling there's just multiple eyes looking back at you. Of course, for you, that's an immediate excitement. You immediately go towards that you want to see, you want to explore IT, maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, you just described that feeling that when they're together and they are looking issue. So head above water, eyes reflecting the.

Yes, so the other night, lex and I were in the river with J. J. 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 slotted with all this rain coming down. IT was such a dn, you could hardly hear anything.

And all the way dow river, I just see this came in eye, in my head lamp light, and I started walk and towards IT, because I like, this is even Better. We can catch a came in while or in this thunderstorm in the amazon river. And when J, J, went, pail is too far.

J, J, very rarely, very rarely like he he'll make a suggestion like hel usually go like maybe it's far. But in that situation, deep in the wilderness, unknown came in size. He went, Paula, so far.

Don't leave the three of us right now. We were too far out to take risks. We were too far out to be walking along the river bet at night because then, you know, right here at the research station, if you step on a, you get evicted out where we went.

nothing. so. 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 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 sizable, probably about twelve foot black came in right next year raft. I watched its head lander bubble, the bubbles that was all coming up right next year, a raft as he, he was moving along the bottom of the river because he looked at me, went under, and then my raft passed in. Yours came over him.

So now looking back, and your raft is going over, this black came in and i'm gone. 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 one hundred percent that came and just wanted us to go so you could go back eating fish.

Yeah, that's IT man is humbling. It's commonly these giant creatures, and especially at night that you were talking about, for me, is both scary. When is just beautiful that had got under, because like underwater ers, they are domain, so anything can happen.

So what is IT doing that it's had has gone under. IT could be bored. IT could be hungry, looking for some fish. IT could be maybe wanting to come closely to investigate. Maybe you have some food around you, maybe it's an old friend, yours and just want to say hi.

I don't know. I have a few on the river. No, when we see their heads go under, it's just they're just get out the way we're shining a light of them and they're going, why early at night, i'm uncomfortable head under.

So these came in again. You think of IT is a big aggressive animal, but I don't know anybody has been eaten by a black came in and the smaller species, smooth front S. A came in towards, came in spectable came in. They're not going to eaten me. But again, at the worst, if you were doing something inappropriate with a came, you jumped on IT and we're trying to to do searching and bitch 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 cain. And the camin just swims away.

And so in my mind came in, or just as the peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the reference to me, they are my friends and I worry about them, because two months ago we are coming up river, and on one of the beaches was a beautiful, about five foot black canyon with a big machine cut right through the head. The whole cmon was wasted. Nothing was eaten, but the came in was dead.

What do you think that was?

curious? Humans 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 peo would never kill. A came in for no reason because IT dos make any sense. So these are clearly people who aren't from the region, which usually means loggers because you've come from somewhere else.

They're doing a job here and they they're just cleaning their pots in the river at night and they see eyes come near them because they came in croppy smells, fish. And then they just wake because they want to see IT. They're just curious monkeys on a beach. And again, my friend of kamen, I protect from my type.

That said, you know, you will 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 the black came when I feel like just a bit of a misunderstand IT could lead to A A bone crushing situation.

but not for a little five, four, cmon. And I think that's incredibly species. S W.

about humans are ball.

Now, like all my friends do the same thing. They go, you swim in the amazon rain for, you know, you swim in that river. And I go, yes, every day we backflips into the river. We've been swiming the river how many times with the perona and the stingray and the kendell and the came in and the anaconda of IT in the river with us and we just do IT. And what's that for you? So what what allows you to doing to do that knowing and having researched all of the different things that can kill you, which I feeling most of them are in the river, what allows you to just getting there with us?

Well, I think it's something about you where you become like this portal through which is possible to see nature is not threatening, but beautiful. And so in that you naturally, by hanging out with you, I get to see the beauty of IT. There is danger out there.

But the danger part of IT, just like there's a lot of danger and city, there's a danger in life. There's a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally, physically. There's a lot of ways to die in stupidist of ways. We went on an expedition to the forest is twisting your ankle, breaking your foot, getting a bit from a thing that gets infected is is a lot of ways to dying and hurt in the student service in a non dramatic, came in eating you alive kind of way.

Yeah, IT IT strikes me as unfair, because humans are were still in our minds. So, so programs to worry about that predator, that predator, predator predation, we've killed everything. Black came in a common auth, the endangered species list. We exterminated walls from north america. Actually heard a suburban lady one time, tell her son, watch out foxes or geta foxes.

Yeah.

the baby rabbits and mice.

Well, in the case of apex pressure, I think when people say dangerous animals, they really are talking about just the power of the animal. And the black king would have a lot of power, lot about. And so it's almost just a way to celebrate the power of them.

sure. And if it's in celebration that i'm all for IT because my god, is that power like the waves of of a theory that you saw IT when that tail, I mean, saw you saw the tail respects with that perfect, amazing thing with all interlocking scales that works. So it's like a perfect creation of engineering. And then and then when you have won us to this thick and always said, that thing is moving with all the acceleration of that power, 哇， the volume of water, the sound that comes out of their throat, there are such their dragons.

We talked about the scales of the snake would like they came in just the way I felt was an incredible, just the armor, the textures or so cool, I don't know, like the bottom came and have a certain kind of texture IT. Just all feels like power, but also all feels like design really well. It's like, it's like expLoring through touch, like a world war two tanker or something like that.

Yeah, is the engineering? I went into this thing. Yeah, that like the mechanism of evolution to create a thing that could survive for such a long time is just like incredible. This is a work of art. The pot eo, the defense mechanism is the power of IT the damage can do how effectivity is as a or all of that all you can feel that in just by touching IT never see the .

the mash up where they put side by side the image of, I think it's a falcon in flight next to a dealt bomber and they're almost the exact same design. It's incredible .

like that was the equivalent .

for a crock because that maybe a tank is one like an armada .

like cause yeah.

there may not be A A machine, a war machine equivalent of a crocodile. I'd have to have plica big draw the water.

Mean, we we talked also about hipps. Those are interest increased from all the way across the world, just monsters, hipps and rhinos. Hipps are bigger, usually rhinos are bigger.

Linos rino s after elephant is the largest right.

right now. They can be terrifying to, again, when you step into the defense.

absolutely. But I have to tell you, after being around so many. White rios, yes. And ah they are all sweet hearts and I mean I mean sweet arts and I mean when you look at a right now it's like a living dinosaur know a mamo but somehow its screams dinosaur because IT seems like nice to see me in the end and from another age with the giant horn.

And there's so much bigger than you think, like the minivan sized animals like you're we're not taller than they are at the shoulder and they have the strange shape head in the huge horn and they sit there eating grass all day. So if rhino is dangerous to a human, it's because the rhino is going, don't hurt me, don't hurt, don't hurt my baby and then they like, you know what, i'll just kill you what would be easier because you scared me yeah now you're too close to that right now. 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, know? Rino s can be dangerous if provoked, otherwise their peaceful fat grass unicorns, you know, like they're really pretty calm. The way of these incredible giant animals and the largest animals on our planet, the black, came in. The rino s the elephants, all the big, beautiful stuff, is becoming less and less.

And IT almost reminds when I can game of throne like there in the beginning they're together used to be dragons and I was like this memory and it's like, yeah, we used to have a maths and we we used to have Stellar seek cows that were sixteen feet long manias. And its there are things we used to have the case, bian tiger, that only one extinct in the nineties our lifetimes and it's that's mind blowing to me that that has haunted me in some a child. I remember learning about extinction and I went, wait, you're telling me that I mean being a kid and going by the time I grow up, you're saying that gorillas could be gone, elephants could be gone.

And because we're doing IT and then I adjust that. I I remember remember looking at the the nightlight being black because as crying, I was so upset. And H, I was lone some George that turned of the glp tours, where there was one left, and as if if we just had a female, he could live. And I has a six, seven, eight year old that destroyed me.

or i'll just starting to get laid, including that turtle.

including that turtle for few hundred years.

So for Young people out there, you think you having trouble think about that turtle?

Think about that turtle. yeah. You know, there's a turtle that Darwin and Stever when both.

oh yeah, yeah, I heard about that turtle. And they live a long time. Yes, we've seen things they've .

seen things that that there's a great leg internet joke where they like, they like accusing him of like being in congress with modern times like he did nothing to stop slavery. He didn't find the world more to like from the cherney .

cancelled the church h what a world we live in. So it's interesting. You mentioned black came in and an icon, as are both apex.

So IT seems like the reason they can exist in similar environment is because they feed on slightly different things. How's IT possible for them? Took coexist. I read that an icon as can eat came up, but not black came in. How often do they come .

in conflict? So annon, as in chain, occupy the exact same dish, and they're born at almost the exact same size. And unlike most species, they don't have sort of a size range that are confined to they start at this big baby, came under this big baby and icon as a little longer.

But there's to the thinner. They don't have legs. So it's the same thing in in terms of mass, and they're all in the streams or the edges of lakes or swamps.

And so the baby and economy eat. The baby came in. Baby came in.

Can't really take down an icon to that. 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 popper back. And so they had to survive. But the anaconda, the came in kind of jews as they grow.

Can you actually explain how the anaconda take down a came on like, would at first use construction and eat IT? Or what's the methodology?

yes. So annon does have a kind of IT like a three point construction system where their first thing is anchor. So like to do so. The first thing is match on to you.

I am writing this down like, yes, this is just like master class here.

This is for when you're restful and ana on and .

not just in case and you'd be like to coach in the sideline .

and you let him take the back yeah so so one time me an jji, we're falling in. Heard of college packers and jj teaching me, tracking were following the the hope prints through the mud. And we're doing this, and i'm talking about no backpacks, just met die bar feet running through the jungle.

And we come to the stream and juges, like, I think we missed him, you know, I think they went, i'm like, gna know they went here, look, and not because i'm a great tracker because I can see hand, you know a few dozen footprints, hundreds of individual footprints right there and go, no, no, they just cross here today 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've follow them for a long time. And I was like, cool.

And then I was trying to gage like, can I drink this dream? And I see a copa when a cop is a salt deposit where animals come to to feed coyote. A is is a deficiency that most of reverse here.

And all the sun I just hear like the sound of a wet stick snapping just that bone crush. And I looked down. And there's about a sixteen foot and iconic wrapped around a freshly killed pecheries wilber.

And what this anna had done was as that all the pigs were going across the stream danican a had grabbed IT by the jaw, swiped the legs wrapped around IT, bent IT in half and then crushed its the ribs and that's what the antony to do, whether it's to mamas 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 gona come off. You actually to go deeper in with 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 x hail, they go a little tired and you're never gone 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 antigonus, had gotten IT.

And as the pig was thrashing, the antonona religion had bent in half. And I just heard those vertebrate going, yeah. And so for a came at the same thing, they just grab and they rap around IT.

And then they have to crush IT until there's no response. They'll wait now or they will wait a long time till there's no response from the animal that overpower IT. Then no, then no reposition.

Probably you won a little bit, should open their jaw and then start forcing that entire. Now here's the crazy thing, is that an anacondas stomach acid capable of digesting an entire crocodile where nothing comes out the other side. And when you see how thick the bony plate of a crocodile kull is that that can go in the mouth and nothing comes out the other side, that's insane. And so I always made me wonder, on a chemistry level, how you can have such incredible acid in the stomach that doesn't harm the unaccounted itself.

And some are able to digest is some kind of interest. There's levers of protection from the self, but this seems like the such a simple system as an organism. But that simplicity, taking a scale, could just do the can swallow. I came and digest slowly, I know.

but my question was, how on earth is IT physically possible to have this haleh bio that can digest anything, even something as as as horrendous, as as a came and scales and bones and all the hardest shit and nature, and then not hurt the snake itself? And I had a chemist to explain to me that it's probably some sort of mucus system that that lines the stomach and 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 nicander you .

when an anaconda wrapped around you and you, you find yourself in, in the, 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, reelin, ancient power. That doesn't care.

They're just trying to get you to stop. You just want you to stop ticking and there's nothing you can do in this. I find IT very uninspiring when I encounter that kind of power. When you even if it's that you see, you know, you see a dog run.

No, you ever trying to out run a dog and they they just zip by you and you go, wow, you know or you see a horse kick and you go, oh my god, if if that huff hit anyone's head is not come three states over and it's like it's like there there is muscular power that is so far that, like you said, that explosive that we dream of doing IT like imagine if I A moitie kickboxer could could harness that sort of came in power than smash um and so it's it's just all inspiring. I think it's really, really impressive what animals can do and where we're all you know, we're all the same sort of makeup for the most part. All the mamas know we have our skeletons look so similar.

We all have like if you look like kangaroo biceps and chest IT looks so much like like a man and if same thing goes for a bear or you ever see a naked champ chimps with ala and so it's IT looks like a body builder like it's cuts and huge, huge everything. It's got pets and they ve got that face. This just like just let me in .

when where .

you want to do something .

but yeah but there's 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. The most humans, because humans, I guess, have more brain, so they get lazy. They start puzzle solving versus. You know, using the bias directly.

Well, yes, I know and I had this question. Okay, so I know that whole you are what you eat thing. now.

We one time here had two chickens, and one of the most, a wild chicken, like from the farm, had walked around a toll, like finding insects. And the other chicken was like factory raised. And so we caught the heads off of both of them, started getting ready to cook him.

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 rays chicken had darker, more singui muscles, less fat, was clearly a Better made machine. And so my question is, is that what's happening with us? Know if you go see a sherpa who have been walking his whole life and pulling, you know, and walking behind muscogees and lifting things up mountains and breathing clean air and not being in the city verses someone has just been shown down eyes hot for forty years and never getting off the couch like I imagine it's the same thing that you will become what you eat yeah I mean.

like you and I 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 pack on the baby is just there is built different when when you apply your body in physical way your whole life .

yeah like you can't replicate that like just like that chip has from constantly moving through the canopy, constantly using those arms just like if you are you if you see an olympic athlete or you hug rogan, exactly you just what why is there so much? Must I that's .

exactly what I feel like when you give my hoggy. This is definitely a chmela some sort how how does that just just that the construction of the antonia, just the the feeling of that as are they doing that based on instinct or there some brain stuff gone on like, is this just like a basic procedure that they're doing IT and they just really don't give a them they are not like thinking, oh, paul, this is this kind of species who takes good or is this just a mechanism? M just start activating and you can stop IT .

with an anaconda. Really think it's the second one. I do think that they're impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane. I think there 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, they got a big, slow giant and he just goes around my hand, and then he goes back to the same spot like, and I like, no. And then he comes right back to the same spot. It's like, it's like he'd just going, fuck you.

Now here's the question, if the mosquito stupid and you can catch IT.

what does I make you and stupid, do I flicked the wasp me the other day and flew back like twelve feet and an in the air corrected, and then flew back at my face and made so many correct like calculations and corrections and decided to come back and let .

me know about IT was like, and that was probably went back to the nest.

said, what happens he tried to flick me and I showed .

him 你 还有 个 叫 connect， yet you actually mentioned to me just on the topic of an on is that you've been participating a lot of scientific work on on the topic. So 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 on a paper on a couple of papers were one of them on anacondas and studying Green and icon to hunting .

patterns said about so um the lead authors of that paper patch champaign Carter pain uh 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 copper.

And then other people began noticing that anion to seem to always be beneath these copas, where mamas were gonna coming. And that that contrasts with what we knew about anaconda is what we understood about an econic. 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 the amazing scientists, he had worked with the kd university for a long time, worked to thus for a long time. And and he he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an antonia right around here. And when we're able to see their movements and that of these papers are showing that they actually do pursue their prey.

They do move up and down using the streams as cord or 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 antonia, obviously is not. You can just sit in one spot.

IT has to put some work into IT. So they're using and they're using communication to use the streams. You could be walking in the farce in a very shallow stream. I see a sizable and a conduct looking for a meal.

So in the shallow stream, IT moves not just in the water, but in the sand. yes. So IT IT also likes to borrow a little bit.

They borrow quite a bit. So these large snakes Operate subterranean more than we think. Like this times that you'll go with a tracker, you go the celebrity set and i'll say, like you will be over the sink snakes underground snake has found either a recess under the sides of the stream you saw last night, where all the fish have have their holes under the side of the stream.

There is a, there is 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 walk by IT.

we walk by IT. And he stuck his head out because he thought we'd done. And then we turned around, and I just got a glimpse up because I was in the front of the line and he was right back into his cave. You guys are not going to touch me.

And so yeah with the antonis it's been really exciting and um in twenty fourteen jj and me and most and impact lee, we all we ended up catching what at the time was the record for unique marines scientifically measured was eighteen feet, six inches, two hundred twenty pounds, one of the largest female antonis 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 anaconda in lowland tropical rainforest. You've seen how hard IT is tough to move, to Operate, to navigate in this environment.

And so when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about the species, you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them and then finding out a way to keep tabs on. Because even if you get lucky enough to see an annonc by the edge of a stream, to to be able to observe IT over time, to learn its habits, or to put a radio transmit on IT, or to take any sort of valuable information from experience, is almost impossible. And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote about mother of god, us jumping on annon as and trying to catch them.

And at first IT just seemed like something we were doing to learn to, to just try and see them. But I ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would have scientific implications later on, because now is allowing us to try and find the largest antonis. And people used to say there's no way there's twenty five for twenty seven foot will there's just that video of the guy swiming with the twenty foot and icon to and so now as we keep going on going well, maybe through drone identification, we could find whether the largest annonce are sitting on top of floating vegetation.

And even then, how do we restrain them so that we could measure them, improve this to the world? It's sort of a sid quest. But so by .

doing these kinds of studies, you figure out how they move about the world, what motivation of in terms of when they hunt, where they hide in the world as the size and and other change. So all of that that that those 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 fifteen hundred this something like four thousand species of butterflies in the amazon rainforest and of the fifteen hundred species that are here in this region, all of them have a larval stage caterpillars right in each of the caterpillars has a specific host plant that they need to need to eat in order to become a successful atterley IT into the next lifetime 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 mouth.

It's one of the it's one of the two largest moth in the world, is the largest mouth by wing span. Huge IT looks like a bird, they White moth. We still I believe I believe that we still don't know what the catapult oit looks like.

It's twenty twenty four. We have iphones and peanut shape rocketships like we don't know where that moth starts his life. Yeah, we saw and figured that out.

By the way, the rocket ships have shape that way for efficiency purposes, not because they wanted to look, make a look at happen and speaking, which I have ran across a lot of penelope es, while explore you and make me I know it's not just a figment of my imagination and pretty sure they're real, is that you explained IT to me and they they make me very uncomfortable and of off. I don't know what the purposes and who they're supposed to track, but it's but certainly, paul, like I really enjoys them. Yeah yeah.

Was clearly, you've done some, some research and you've noticed a lot. I having seen them, there was there was there .

was a time when I almost fell and to catch my baLance side to grab one of the penises of the penis is unforgettable. Ancona, the biggest battle anaconda in the amazon versus the biggest black kamen because you mentioned there, like there's a race, if there's a fight to U, F, C in cage.

who wins the biggest in the bat.

biggest. The batter that you have can imagine, given all the studies you've done of the two animals species in that you .

talking about an eighteen foot, several hundred pound black came in versus twenty six foot, three hundred fifty pound and nanda. I think it's it's it's a death stelmach. I think the came in slams the anichebe bites on to IT the anaconda PS the came in and they both thrash around until they both kill each other because I think the came will team up so bad.

And the king is not going to let go.

He's going going to let go. But then he's he's going to realize that he's he's also being constricted. So then he's going to stop and he's going to keep slammed down on that. And iconic and the anionic is going to keep the shirt ting. But if the kamin can do enough damage before the end, it's again, it's almost like a striker versus judi yeah you know if you can get enough elbows in before they lock you.

how fast is a construction?

So pretty it's no. It's incredibly, it's incredibly quick notes. You you take the back and get me and it's that it's I have maybe thirty seconds, maybe on the upper side if you haven't sinit under under my throat, but if you've got a good position over is there .

any way to wrap the joke on to the choke? Defendants.

not unless you have outside help, unless you have, you know, another human or another ten humans coming to unwrap the tail, help me. But for an animal, like, if a deer gets hit by an antics, no way that I don't stand a chance.

So the black amy would bite. Some were somewhere close to the head and then and try and hold on a thrash yeah.

I I don't think a large black cmt, here's a thing. Every Fishermen knows us like the biggest fish. They're smart. yeah. And more importantly, they are shrug. They're a careful a huge black came in that sixteen feet long isn't going be messing with a big and account like they they, they, they want.

They won't cross path because while they technically occupy the same type of environment that black came is going to have this deep spot in a lake, and that anaho is going to have found this floating forest like sort of black stream back waterworld. It's going to be, and they'll made that their home for decades, and y'll already have cleaned out the competition. So maybe if there was a flood and they got push together that they could have some sort of a show down.

But almost more certainly is that when they get to that size that came in at any sign of danger, bloom right under the water just be it's almost like it's like even if you what do you learn when you're a black bet, you know what do you do with the street fight? You still run away. There's no reason for a street fight. And I think the animals really understand that.

No reason for this. So like a giant and a con and a giant black came, and then they could probably even call exist the same environment, knowing using the wisdom to avoid to fight a war.

or they would have a big show down. And one of them either die or have to leave. They have a territorial dispute.

yeah, without killing either .

of them and to nature, anything could happen. One of the things that me impact wrote te up was that I saw a yellow tail crew, which is like a six foot rat snake eating an oxy roper mEllenda is, which is the red snake that we found last night, and just no one had ever in scientific literary here, we ve never seen a creepy eating an oxygen is before. And so I had the observation in the field.

I sent its patch champagne patridge IT up paper. And so it's like, this is really cool. That's a really cool system because we're just out here all the time. You end up seeing things jj is dads on anonymous.

A taper taper is the size of a cow and that I didn't lie, you know it's something you trust your sources on that he saw enough stuff. He didn't need to make up stories. You know how? You know, what I love now is when you go to, when you ask people, when we are going to the mountain, Jimmy, yeah, J, J.

Said to him, he goes, have you ever seen a puma up? Peer in the mountains and jimmie goes there up here and J, J went, no, no. Have you seen IT? And jam went, no, never seen one. And you know how most people got? Yeah, i've seen that makes me trust the person when they admit, no.

haven't seen that they are out here. I haven't seen James has been living there. His whole life is all life. This pumas in the mounts, you know.

mountaines pumas, whatever, know this, all different names for them. They're distributed from, I think from a alaska down through argentina. That's they're everywhere is is extremely successful species from deserts to high mountains, everything.

I think you're same pumas have a have a curiosity, have away about them where they like explored, like follow the people, like just kind of figure out, like just a curiosity which is opposed, causing harm. hunting. I got a stuff like, what is this about?

I think it's based in predatory instinct. Ts, 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 can't even think of IT like that, like a rabbit just going to either eat or run away this really two settings. When you think of something like a river giant river otter or a tyra, which is they called a mongo here, it's it's a huge orbar IO wheel and i'll come check check out. I woke up at my house every day and there is a tire climbing up the side of the house and he was looking down at me sleeping and it's like he came checking 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 are like, like me. I'm curious, I got time. Let me check this out.

gather, gather information. I want to how and sophisticated their world model is. I call 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, that besides the i'm sure they're have enough you know, storage up there to I keep all that, but they probably keep the important stuff. But in all of integrated experiences they have into like what is dangerous, what is tasty, all the kind .

of 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? The so many incredible examples of controlled studies where the researchers weren't understanding how to shed being. So insurance tables, 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, yeah, where you see one of our workers walk down the trail and then five minutes later, a cat behind him by the way.

we're walking just exactly the same area, also exactly the same time yeah yeah.

So we're out there and there's dear and those cats and there's a jag war and there's 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 this all these little eyes and hard beat I love .

the jungle night is exciting thing thing you turn off the head, you all around you and just the sounds.

everything you hear, the cats, the birds, they're all screaming about sex yeah, all the time they're just trying to get late yeah 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 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, you know, of that 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 or 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 of of biodiversity. And i'm addicted to and I truly love.

except for the times over the last few days when we walked on of jungle without a trail. And that's just a different experience.

What how would you categorize if somebody said, lex, I think i'm going to go for hike through the jungle, not on the trail yeah, what would you tell him?

Every step is really hard work. Every step is a puzzle. Every step is a full of possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude ways, just a wast nest under a leaf, A A hole under a leaf on the ground, where if you step in, you going to break 你 ankle， leg and going to not be able to move for a long time.

All kinds of ants that can hurt you little or can hurt you a lot bullis. There's snakes and spiders. And a oh my favourite, they have got to know intimately, is different plants with different defensive mechanisms, one of which is just Spikes so sharp you have, I don't know if you brought IT, but this is .

bring bring up.

There's an epic club .

with the Spike spt.

There's so many trees that have Spikes on them. Sometimes they're obvious Spikes, sometimes less than obvious. Spoke s in you IT could be just as innocent as you take a step to a dance jungle that could be an innocent placing of a hand on that tree that could just completely transform your experience, your life, by penetrating your hand would like twenty, thirty, forty, fifty Spikes and just changing everything. That's just so a completely different experience than going on on a trail with you where you're observer of the jung vers, the .

participant of .

IT and 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 a sort of caviar with our scientific progress and that we already explored the amazon. So because in between each tributary is you, this is just between some of them, must to say, hundred miles of unbroken far. 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 access. And the places where people are doing research have been down here long enough. I see all the P.

H. D. Come down here, and they all go to the same few research stations. They have a bed. If you get hello dropped into the middle of the jungle in the deepest, most remote parts, you going to find microscope stems, you're going to see little species variations, you're going to see A A type of flower that jj has never seen before, like what happened every day.

As you start walking through new patches of forest, if you start finding new species and everything here changes, you just go a little bit of river, and the animals you see differ. You go on this side of the river verses on the north side of the river, the two other species of primate said that don't exist here. That's in the mamo paper that we, with the the emperor Camerons and the pig, my marmosets that the .

rangers found yeah the the meal papers look at the diversity of life in this one region of the amazon. We talk, talk more about that memo. Diversity along the last dress river.

Once again, the memo paper patch champion the prolog. He was sort of leading on this with a bunch of other scientists who have worked in the region, including holidays. Donald of oxford myself. I really just made a few observations. The jungle keeper, er's rangers, got featured because they're the ones that spotted a pigmy MMA said that had previously been unrecorded on the river. I got to I got to contribute because I had I had the only photograph that I believe anyone has of an emperor Cameron on this rivers is the first proof of emperor Cameron on this river. And that's exciting it's exciting because um you know you you can post post a picture or share a scientific observation or write about something and then what happens as you get these these like couch experts, these armchair experts who who will come and said, you know no no, you don't keep blue yellow a cause there I can tell from my bird book IT says they are not there and i'll tell you you're wrong you know no you don't get bully monkeys or empty chair but but we but we have proved and so we're coming together to .

try and add to that knowledge my generals of amateur experience, of the species of encountered, here's like this, should not exist whatever the the real. This is C. G.

I like what? Just the colors, the weird. I mean, there's A I think I called IT, the paris helden .

caterpillar because .

it's IT looks like really very transparent. So of is transparent. All you see is this White, beautiful, foreign, just this cattle is doesn't doesn't look real in their species. Like how many species have not discovered? And is there species they're like extremely bad as we have discovered yet?

If you look up how many trees are in the amazon rainforest is something in the order of four hundred billion trees. There's something like seventy to eighty thousand species of plants, individual types of plants here, fifteen hundred species of trees. It's it's so vast that it's comparable like the the scale is like only comparable to the universe in terms of stars and galaxies and and and for the sheer immensity of IT.

And so we're describing new species every year. And just walking on the trail at night, you and I have seen you know you see a tiny little spider hidden in a crevice. Has the scientific eye ever seen that spider before? Has IT been documented? Do we know anything about his life cycle? They're still so much that here that is completely unknown.

And we have pictures of all these butterflies. Somebody went out the butterfly net and caught these butterflies, took a picture of IT, gave IT a name, put in a butterfly book. What do we know? What host plant do they use for their catapult? Is what's their geographic range? What do we actually know? Not that much. So are the creatures out here that haven't been described?

absolutely. And some of them could be extremely effective, a predators in initial environment?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, certainly, certainly in the canopy. Fifty percent of life in the rainforest is in the cannery, and we've had very limited access to the canopy for all the history. You know, if you wanted to get up into the rainforest canopy, you basically have to climb a vine.

Or what? Scientists, when as a kid, I was used to see them with, like the sling shot of the bone hours, the shooter, a piece parachute over a branch, pulled the rope up, and then you don't do the ascension thing, and then you're up in the tree getting swarmed by sweat bees, getting stung by a wasp. You're trying to do science up there in that environment is incredibly hostile.

And so having cannot be platforms, I actually met a guy at a french film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over the cannery of the amazon and then lay these big nets over the, over the broccoli of the of the trees. And the nets were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets and then reach through in poll cactus and lizards and snakes, whatever. Just take species from the cannabis.

That's how difficult that is that that scientists have resorted to using hot air balloons. And so having a tree house, having canopy platforms, having it's it's starting to get to starting to be more, more access to the rainforest canopy. And so we're beginning to log more data. You know we've even observed in our tree house, which is supposed to the town in the world, we're seeing blizzard that we don't see on the ground lizards that have never been documented on this on this river like we're seeing snakes were saying we saw the snake inside a travis on that tree in the strangler c 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 left up there.

Yeah I mean, you when you wake up in the canopy y in the morning in the amazon rainforest, as soon as that the darkness lifts, as soon as that purple comes in the east in the morning, the holler monkey start up, yeah, and then the parts start up, and then the tiny start going, and the ma start going, and pretty soon and everybodys going to the spider monkey. Groups are all calling to each other. And it's just the whole dawn corse starts and it's so exciting.

So you should say when they are screaming is usually about sex.

sex or territory, usually sex and violence .

or implied violence or the threat of violence. Yeah, I mean.

how are monkeys in the morning? They are letting other groups know this is we're we're at we're going to be forging over here. You Better state way. And so it's a little bit respectful as well.

There is order in the chaos. So just speaking of screaming mcs early, these beautiful creatures, they are a lifelong partners. We sick together. So there's your demonorum. 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 the cause 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 monogue in some species that they their lifelong partners and then there's like lack of mono, amy, other species.

it's all interesting. I mean, there's the anti monogamy crew whose like you know we were never meant to be monogenic. We're supposed to just be animals.

And there the other side of the crew that's like, we were meant to be monogamous. We are monogamous creatures. Guess what god wanted between the men and a woman and other people? Like, yeah, but I know about these two gay penguins.

And so that's natural to and so that everyone tries to draw their their identity, they're trying to to justify their identity off of the not the laws of nature. So the fact that may cause a monogamous really doesn't have anything to with anybody except er that it's beneficial for them to work together to raise chicks. It's difficult.

They rely on iron with trees or guha pms, and it's difficult to find the right hole in a tree. There's only so much mca real estate, so they need to use those holes. And each one of those ancient trees, as usually five hundred years or more, is is a valuable mccaw generating site in the forest.

And so of those trees go down, you lose exponential amounts of the cause. And that's how you get endangered species. And that's why we're trying to protect the ironwood trees.

Another ridiculous question, dumb. If every jungle creature was the same size, who would be the new apex pressure, the new alpha at the top of the future?

Do that's like super smash brothers of the jungle? That's credible? Yeah, like bullet ant. If you had a bullet ant that was the size, yeah.

can IT be like a, like a tournament.

So everyone is pound for pound ratio. De, yeah, for efficiency. So you have basically like a six foot bullet ant versus a huge black came, and versus in an econic, versus also lots .

of the size of jaguars. Vers, yeah, well, let's let's go. bull. Vers.

but there are comparable to size. I don't know, man, I never thought about that every bullet and has his giant. Yeah, giant, giant manta les, you could probably grab the black hat. And then at that amount of Venus, you're talking about a bucket of vum going into that black me, black came is going to get paralyzed immediately.

Or insects have just a just a tremens mt of like strank. I don't know how they generate what the gem here that is the natural world can create the same kind of power. And the bigger thing is like. Like just these tiny creature are the ones are able to have that my strength. I don't know how that works.

but I can at a leaf cut and lifting that leaf that doesn't make S I I don't .

know that the limit of physics. I think it's just the limit of evolution how that that works. One of the most .

interesting limits that I heard, uh, somebody talking about recently was the reason that dinosaurs didn't get bigger, even bigger, because the the the the the conditions on earth were favorable towards IT was that at some point, their eggs reached this physical limits that their eggs reach to size. The eggs were so big that that eggs need to breathe for the umbra 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 premiere 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 maybe a lot a lot of them like bio physics limits that's fascinating. Just like the the enterprise between biology, chemistry, physics of like a life form is this thing. There's a lot involved in creating a single living organism that could survive ve in this world.

And bigger, you know, being big is not all was good, but being a big creature for many reasons. Like you are saying, the big feature seems to be extinct for many reasons. But in in the human world is because there seem to be a higher value .

given the current size of the jungle. I think that the the M V P, the pound for pound goat is assets talking about a midsize forty, forty, fifty pound cat can climb that does unlike a jag war, jag war. Every time IT hunts, it's going after a deer catches a deer dear could hit with its, with its antlers IT could tear with a tobes.

It's risking his life for that meal. And also a lot us last walk around at night and climate tree, eat a whole bunch eggs, eat the mother bird too, kill a snake, maybe mess, ran, eat a baby, came. And they can have whatever they like.

And there they're sleep enough and and smart enough to get away from predators. They don't really have predators. And so they sort, they sort of occupy is a 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, you d probably be like, can also a lot, or I would say, giant river orders, which is so damn cool because they're the local column logo, that real river walls, because they're so tough and they're so social and so like us, because the intensely familiar groups, they live in holes by the sides of lakes, and they swim through the water, and they catch fish all day long, peroni. They eat them just like the scales go flying as they ate these perona. And they're so joyce in the way they swim. And they have friends and they have family. And they, I think be I think we could relate to being a river at a really because I can't picture being a cat and being so solitary and just marching along a fifteen mile route and making sure there's no other cats coming in on your territory and marking that territory seems IT seems very solo and very catlike.

So lonely existence. And we humans are.

River road is is like having a big italian family. You like constant eating. You're free, you know, is like causin .

problems with the black. Cmon, take down a there is a source of a lot of fear for people. What what do you find beautiful of facing about these creatures? They're also kind of social. At least they .

hunt in Operating groups. Yeah, not in the a million way though, on as are in large schools. But I office so different.

Like if you, I can talk you all day about how how much I D love to be an auto. Also going back to the fighting thing, audits and whistles muscle a day tend to be very loosen their skins. If you grabbin an order can still rotate around to buy you.

So it's like, I B by the back, you're stuck, you know, like we can you grab them by the skin, yeah, they can rotate around and just shrug you apart so they are they're really cool fighters. Perona fish, fish, I don't know, you know, I don't identify with fish in in terms like that. I think living out here has made me think of fish is kind of rapid food that cannot can be gotten like for to me, a pair. Ona is, when I see a aora, I I think about how I wanted to taste.

Yes, so like fishes is a food source of so many creature and jule. So the primarily food source, but are is their predators, their serious predators.

They are serious pretres. I found a baby black came and not that longer. He is missing all of his toes because the prison is had eaten them off is really sad.

He just had these stumps and summer around the water. And like, you are not going to. He was like, eight inches and he was such a cute little, popular big guys.

And I just like men you are already are missing all your toes as like, just a matter of time. Now he can't get away. So some big okami haris going to come and just nail .

and pop in .

dental bite off a little bit.

And that makes you vulnerable. And that vulnerability is exploded by some other species.

And then that that the end humans are brutal too. Like, 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 stingrays ff so he could use IT for bit and then throw the live fish back in the river. To me, that is incomprehensible amounts of cruelty, with, with, with flaw logic in every direction. Like if you going to use the thing is bate use IT as bait. If you've going to remove its tail, well.

then just kill IT altogether yeah.

Or if you want to save the animal and not kill IT, then don't mame IT before you return IT to IT. IT was such a weird.

if you kill an animal, you wanna use IT to as full as by using as a food source, by cooking about, you know, eating every part of IT all that.

So, yeah, so we have weapon eating poco. yeah. And your time here.

fried bugger is great. Friday zing is .

delicious full of you. You could tell IT makes you healthy. I feel Better workout. So what? 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 man, Victor, whose whose married to a native girl, he said, it's time to go poco fishing. And at the time, we were stuck out here and we had no resupply.

Everybody's busy, and so everyone has demoralized. The staff was hungry. We were hungry and IT really became the thing of like, hey, go catches simpatico. They were working on the trails, they were installing the solar where 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 camp on the beach, and in the morning Victor's wife was was canoe with with the panel. Dead quiet. Don't let the panel touch the wooden boat. Nicki to was bounced in the middle of thing vicars on the front with his huge fishing rod.

And i'm sitting there and he goes all catch the first when you catch the second and he's got this huge fishing rod in a piece of half rodd and meat from the day before and he smacking IT against, what six. He just let him smack against the water and i'm going and we're floating down the river and i'm gonna is not onna work and we're floating and we're floating and a half hour passes and i'm gone. It's done.

I want to go back to sleep. I'm so i'm just not a morning person and all of a sudden of fish hits that line, almost pulses man off of his feet and he swings the thing in the fish comes on the boat. And then I realized he got a big metal melt on the boat so you could try to shut that fish off.

And it's this huge, or shaped, thick, muscular poco. And as soon as I saw that fish, I just thought, ww, 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 and the cord and the hook, none of which we made, and the skill that he had from knowing how to fish a poco, because others SE no chance that you're getting that fish.

They hide. Very, very suspicious of what you're doing. We had gotten this fish onto the boat, and boom, you hamit like a caving pom, doesn't die. Boom, you have to crush at skull.

And now you have this fish, and you're holding this genetic material, the sustained for your life that has been developing since the dinosaurs is so beautiful. The act, the sacred to act, of eating that of of the fish, of the competition with the fish. And we spent the morning fishing.

We got three pcs, three huge giant vegetarian perona. And I I just remember touching them with so much reference, thinking about the incredible history and how that before these rivers existed, those pcs were were swiming 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 the time when I was just for fun and IT was IT was really.

really special. While humans using them for sustains, there's a collaboration there. That's that's something also i've seen the jungle that there's creatures using each other and it's a good dance of either a mutually using each other.

It's or spacious or syn biotic. It's interesting like there's A A medicinal plant you grabbed that was full of ants. They were like trying to murder you by biting, but they were defending the plant that they were using for whatever purpose.

But there's a clear dance there of the ants using the plant, the plan existing, therefore, other applications and other used for humans. And there's that kind circle of life happening. But the answer was a defense ment.

So the plant didn't have its own defense. Man, that isn't 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 one spot, and I was like, the ants got on your backpack and I said, I shit, this is that tree. Did you actually get bitten by one of those because they are incredibly painful? yeah. And on a one, yes.

Yeah a surprising painful because is small that there is nothing like i'm luckily have not been beating by bullying.

But it's just it's amazing because they live inside the tree. The tree comes standard with holds in IT that allow the and to move into, exist, safe and IT protects their eggs and they protect the tree. And so we saw that spot where there's a perfect circle around the trees because the ants had excavated the other vegetations so that those trees could have no competition to grow.

The incredible calculation of how ents know to get come programs to garden that tree, and the tree somehow has been genetically informed to have ant habitat within itself. It's 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 yet when one of the things you mention that also a source of a lot of existence, al confusion for me is ants. yeah. And the intelligence of different questions.

In the forest there is giant colonies. There's this giant systems. But even just looking at a single colony of ants than collaborating leave, cutter's is an incredible system. So individual, the ants, some kind of dumb and simpler stic. But taken together, there is a vast intelligence Operating that it's able to be robots in reszke in any kind of conditions as they able to figure out a new environment, able to be resilient, any kinds of attacks and all that kind of stuff. What if I 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 cutter apparently digest roughly seventeen percent of the total biometry of the forest, everything, all these giant trees, all that left litter, seventeen percent that almost a fifth of this far as cycles through lef c colonies.

So they're constantly, we're generating the forest. There are 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 you friends as you go through the junk, we see all the cap up try is a canada.

There's leaf country is doing what they're supposed to do. And it's it's just so beautiful I find them very beautiful armies to so tough, they're so ready to fight that the huge Mandates they are just ready to, they're they're transporting their eggs are moving from here to there. Anything that's in the way is getting eaten. They're just savage. They kind of you for that unless you tied to a tree.

The savery is cute.

I find, yes, kind of reassuring. You know, you want certain things to be tough. That's the part.

oh, that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the nature mechanism. yeah.

Powerful play, 不， 不。

yeah.

army ants are so savage. You know, if you, if you step on armies, they all come a cause I just attack onto your feet, and they'll ll just across their own life for the good of the thing. And they'll be trying to kill your shoes.

And there's something funny about that to me. There's something like kinds reassuring again, unless unless imagine if you are going to the jungle and you slip and you fall and you twist your knee and you fall in just the right way, but you you can get up. Yeah, you can't.

You stuck there. And then army hans find you. Yes, they will take you apart. There are records of horses that have been tied up. An army ants come, and i'll take out the .

whole horse. Imagine the pain of that.

IT might be raining on us very hard very soon.

You a pause? nope.

I think we'll stay here until the ship goes down.

We we should mention that there's this one source of late and was shrouded in darkness.

And now the nights is going to take over soon. And we are in the amazon rainforest.

What is the reinforce represent to you? When you zoom out, look at the entirety of IT.

Carl sagan, 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 into me.

The rainforests represent the crown jewel of that, as far as we know, into the best of our knowledge and with our shrug, scientific brains at their full of capacity. This is still the only place that we know that has life. And given that the fact that there are still these tropical towing complex ecosystems that we are barely understand, crawling and full of the most incredible life is just to me.

It's, it's, it's so wonderful. It's so incredible. Those, the waterfalls and the birds and the cause and the jack was is barely believable. If you were to theoretically tell a hy hypothetical alien, I live on this planet there. There are just these places where everything is interconnected.

Everything means something to something else in the whole thing is this system that keeps us alive in each tree is pumping air into the river. 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, and 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, the greatest celebration of life and probably the greatest chAllenge for us as a global society. Because if we can't protect the crown, drew the best thing, you know, the most beautiful part, then we're really, really missing the point.

Yeah, the diversity of organisms here is the biggest celebration of life. That is the core of what makes earth a really special thing. That said, you and I ve been arguing about aliens for prey march the day I shot up. You brought a math to this fight. Luckily, the tables long .

enough .

I can Carried me see to you, earth is truly special. Yeah, you don't think there's other earth out there. Millions of other earths in our galaxy. When you look up, you know, we are sitting in the amazon. Okay.

I 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 a sign that the storm will actually pass, and then you'll pass. And that's what you're doing, three, four, five and going to pass. You're not going to 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 OK. Why do you think there are 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. So I agree with you that the likelihood is there all indications point to IT.

IT would be fascinating, especially if IT was done. Especially, you know, imagine finding of a planet of alternative life forms, not necessarily even intelligent ages, planet of butterflies, whatever. 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 for the first, maybe life originated here, maybe god, universe, whatever. Maybe, maybe this is IT. This is, this is the, this is 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, taking an assumption into reality without, I mean, you know, aliens are right now about israel santos. We think they're out there, but we're not sure maybe a little more real because I could make sense. We no one has an alien.

No one seen an alien. No ones even seen sell your life. And so i'm not again, if they showed tomorrow, great, let's study them. But right now, we have this very simple thread going on where we can't stop killing each other in our living environment.

And so while some people can specialized in looking to the stars into other planets and talk about planetary species, i'm very much concerned with the fact that here in our home turf or living environment, where the air is good and the rivers are clean and the trees are big, and there's ma flying to the sky and salmon in the rivers, not only do we have a responsibility to each other into our children to protect this incredible gift, that is our entire reality seems kind of weird to at some point in conservation seems kind of ridiculous, like you're begging people to not pollute the things that keep them alive. It's almost kind of silly at a point. But but we have this incredible thing where they are efficient, the ocean in the rivers, they come standard with life on earth.

And we're harming the ability of earth ecosystems to provide for that life. And we are the generation that's going to 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 consciousness 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 of these are other species that have their own stories. And so i'm more bio centric than antipope tric 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 agree, there's sound agree to which when you imagine alien, you forget if I for a moment, how special important life is here on earth.

Yes, but is also a way to reach out through curiosity in trying to understand what is intelligence? What is consciousness? What is executive thing that makes life on special? Another way of doing that, and I see the jungle that same ways, basically treating the animals all around us, the life forms all around us as kinds of alliance, as that's a humbling way that the intellectual humility would wish to approach the study of.

Like, what the hell is going on here? This is truly incredible, that are, are the animals who have met over last few days conscious? What is the nature of their intelligence? What is the nature of their consciousness, what motivates them? Are their individual creatures or they are actually part of the large system and how large the system is? Earth, one big system, and humans are just little think natives of that system or, uh, are each of the individual animals really the key actors? And everything else 是 呢， emerging complexity of the system.

So I think thinking about aliens is a necessary, I like my tague with a little drop of poison from time ways is a necessary protections of the system of our thinking to also say, hey, we don't know what the fox going on around here, sure. And aliens is a nice way, say, okay, uh, 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, permitted the entirety of the universe that there is a force that's creative.

Now the force that created life is is a big one. And then your thing is, what do you mean by that? There's aliens living among you mean extra terrestrial?

yes. Living among us? Yes, you believe that not .

like a hundred percent, but there's a as a good percentage. I don't understand how is possible for them not to be a very large number. Varian 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 of more on your side than that they're here because just like big for like we have camera traps, we have DNA sequencing through through water. Now like we can you tell me no one found one wing nut of a, of a, of a ship and all like the egyptians up until right now, no one in russia saw like A A crash ship took a picture tweet that ship real quick.

You know I I think there's no big food. There's no trivial media stations surveilLance. I think if they're here, they hear in ways they're not comprehensible by humans because they're far more advancing humans.

There are far more advance of any life forms on earth. So they're even if it's just their probes, we would cannot just even comprehended, I think is possible that they Operate in the space of ideas. For example, that ideas could be aliens, feelings could be aliens, cautiousness itself could be aliens.

So we can restrict our understanding what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that Operates, view natural selection on this particular planet. IT could be much, much, much more sophisticated. IT could be a space of computation, for example, as we in the twenty first century, developing increasingly sophisticated competition systems with artificial intelligence that could be Operating on some other level that we can even imagine.

IT could be opening a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand. We we barely understand point of mechanics. We use the econometrics is a way we used to make very accurate predictions, but understand why it's Operating that way.

We don't. And there are so many draggin tic, powerful cosmic entities out there that we detect, sometimes can't detect dark matter, dark energy, but that's out there. We not exist, but we can 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 human understand.

So aliens, in in the strict biological sense, like, like, like, like torture crabs, we agree that there's they're not. We haven't found physical aliens.

The only way I can imagine finding physical alias is if alien species are trying to communicate with the humans or or with other life forms, and are trying to figure out a way to communicate with us such that we dome, humans will understand, like, let's create a thing.

You, there's a math, the the size of a small legal .

right .

is my IT just my band of .

the park? Yes, OK luck.

I love you. So, so what wouldn't IT be interesting? You 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 that the religious people were calling Angels, and then everybody had this realization that whether you call them aliens are 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 is there is a cAllen.

tim.

there's a scholars and not scone your hand. This now score my hand of a monkey with a bullet head that I found on the floor of an indigenous community where they are monkeys. I don'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 is my feeling and i'm not requiring anybody else have this feeling. But because we know because is the only place that we know that there's life and we 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 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 to trash. And yeah, extinction is happening, but we have to be an into planterre 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. It's like that's that's we're just being angry teenagers who are going god for a while and it's like, what if you just rolled up your sleeves and said, holly, shit, way to second.

You know, we can pretty much do whatever we want. We can fly all over the world. We have we can to heart trans plants.

We can watch netflix in the amazon if we wanted, like we can do all this amazing stuff we can capture on video, our adventures and go back, and we will watch them again and again and again. There's so much incredible opportunity that technology has allow us to do. And with that, with the richest and history, and 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 most beautiful things earth has ever created in the that little organism. IT isn't capsule te, the entire history of earth and IT is beautiful. So both things are true, and we we should worry about the extension, al, destruction of human civilization through the weapons we create.

And we should become multiple inter species as a backup for that purpose. But also remember, this places 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, we very hold a human score. It'll give you, uh IT IT IT ita way on you first because you look into this, the holo eyes of this face, and suddenly you go.

You feel your own cheat to, you feel your own score and you go, holy shit, you go what is going? It's like taking asset. You just go. I forgot that i'm a ghost in happening a meat vehicle on a floating .

rock but even even a monkey. Yeah it's lake. Looking at a ancestor, you know, is not a direct ancestor, but there's a it's like you, like you, you looking at a potto at a reflection .

little blurry.

but it's so blurry, but it's still there, is still there. And like the roots of who we are, still there is all kind of incredible everything of the the tree of life just kind of where we came from.

Yeah.

the jungle is a femoral that just keeps its the system that just keeps forgetting because it's just turning and turning and turning and turning has in some ways no history. But to create the jungle, to create life. And there's a deep history of lots of death, sex and death, a festive .

sex and death, life on earth.

That's what i've seen this kull. Yeah.

there's something, it's something kind of terrifying about that image to me. Like when I hold that every then at night, you hold that school, you IT just reminds you that you're temporary.

Yeah, both you and I will one day have one of those here. 嗯。 Mine will be bigger.

Got the male .

competition continues .

the silver back slap s the lessor once .

again deal letter debbra .

you wanted .

like this plant. What are your favourite animals to interact with? I mean.

my favourite, absolute favourite animals interact with is one hundred percent elephants, which there is 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 cuti.

Most adults probably think of have A A similar misconception of them when you see an elephant, when you see a twelve foot tall bull elephant with bone coming out of its face with huge tusks and those giant, it's it's an octopus faced butterfly eard. But he is that 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're dirt on their back and the flower peddles and that little heroes, they have hair all over their body and their the power to throw a car over to flip IT. Just one of the most impressive animals on earth.

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 went an elephant allows you to be in its space is because you you're showing submissiveness and and respect for the elephant space. And they're so intelligent that their communicating with sizing vibrations through the earth, that they have a material society, that they can remember the the maps of their ancestors.

And do you know how to find find water, that they can solve problems there? There such beautiful animals. And the so talk about aliens, this alien looking, these big, weird heads and the trunks with all those muscles.

And there's so different than us. But but yet I actually think that we we grew up together. You know, they kind of raised us sibling species that we 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 think I see them more like aliens.

more like non human beings .

that we share the earth west. So I don't see IT as wear. Humans and their animals actually see human elephant 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 intelligence, especially the big ones of their own societies that overlap and sometimes coal develop. Yeah I think whales.

I think elephants, I think there's there's those higher no one suggesting that sardines are know somehow need human rights or something. But I think the elephants need representation in governments because they occur, they they influences 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 are just oversize cows that we have to be scared of. It's there's they're not the same as as domesticated livestock there. One of the treasures of earth I mean, look, let's just say a little Green men showed up and you said, they said, what's earth?

It's like, well, there's mountains, there's rivers. It's like, how how do I do this? Mountain's rivers, elephants? Like it's like one of the first things of baby learns is elephant is even if he's never seen one is just so iconic on earth like you said, um um that s dinner .

oski the elephant .

walking over the camera. I haven't seen that you said it's incredible.

So at to fear the postcard from earth, I mean, is a celebration of earth, yeah, in all forms. In one of the critical big creatures in that film is an elephant and steps over the audience in the hoeg, the whole steer reverberate that power. And somewhat is size.

Yeah, somewhat is like, how did earth create this? IT is a weird looking creature, but we take you for granic as we've accepted that this earth can, this kind of thing. But this is weird, beautifully weird.

beautifully weird. I mean, I mean, elephants is something really impressive and and wise about them. There's also a beautiful weird that isn't so what that doesn't come with so much grander, like to me a giraffe is beautifully but there are just know the eighteen foot tall camel deer things with you giant necks and they're strange and they are they're absolutely serene ly beautiful. But they don't they don't have that deep intelligence that the elephants have. There's something that elephants .

have you see in their eyes. Where's how is the intelligence manifest itself?

Well, this is the thing. Are a lot of people, a lot of the when was reading friends to walls book? A lot of what he was saying was that, you know, people give elephants human problems to solve in controlled environments and call, you know, study on elephant intelligence, whether if you're watching wild elephants and you're in the wild, you're gonna be watching them in a way that there they're looking.

You've pulled up in a soph ari 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 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 the water hole, and there's a warthog, and I don't know why, but this world tag decided he needed to get in. And and there is a Young male elephant, and he kept turning around to this world ogan just been like, don't make me do IT. Now, this elephant did not need to hurt the world tag and the world tag, which is, I need to drink, I need to drink.

I need to drink. Much simplify ing. The elephant was like, you could just tell, he was like, watched this and he just went back and crushed the word hog like IT was a big beetle and crushes pElvis.

And the world hog drag itself away and its front legs and probably went off to die. But this Young elephant put out his ears and he, like, period around the tail, oh, and he was like, liquid. I did destruction. And it's like, that's a very related type of, he was annoyed with the water. And, and, and, and so you see them do these things.

I mean, the most magical thing, and I have spoken about this many times as that, I was walking with a heard 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 are crossing through a village which is very delicate, because the matriarch are leading the babies, and these villagers who have no idea what an elephant is, and they are watching the elements across in the matriarch bct. This girl up against the wall, and SHE was terrified, standing there with her back in the wall, and the elephant just put a trunk out and touch the girl stomach, and then the other elephants came, and they all started touching her stomach.

And the the ranger there explains me, just when she's pregnant, they know she's pregnant. They can smell, they can tell, and they are curious. And they all, all the female elephants came to investigate the pregnant girl, and he had no idea what was going on. And it's like that stuff, that stuff. And it's .

cool to hear that, you know, with the crushing in the pride of the Young elephant, that there is a complexity of behavior, just like like with humans, and you know, human pretty, yes, to think. And humans are capable of good and evil. And sometimes we attach these words. I love that there is just as an orchestra of different sounds and that that want to sex which that's a bamboo rack calling out for me. I mean .

good lucky body, good hunting.

Um you know humans are capable of evil things and beautiful things, and I wonder animals are the same. You think there's just different personalities and different light trajectories for animals like as they develop in their understanding social interaction of survival of maybe even a primitive concepts of right and wrong within social system. Do you think there's a lot of diversity in personalities in and behavior, just like different people is a different elephants.

of course. And and what I really like is that you said is a perception of what's right wrong, because elephants have a code of ethics. And so as the the simple as example is that as Young males begin to grow, they start developing these tasks.

And those tasks are tool, and they use them. So for indian elephants, the females don't have to asks, and the males do. Females kick the males out of the herd. The females keep all the sisters in the ants, in the, in the cousins together, but the males are their own thing.

And so here's a thing, if you have to, what you get as these these cruise of male elephants and the older males will know this play fighting that goes on around, you know, two Young males can play fight, but the older males, they'll kick a mass, they'll show them how to behave theyll explain who gets to talk to the females, who gets to interact, who gets to mate, who gets the best vegetation tea. And so there's an order establish. 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 fall off and and breaking in.

Other kids knows you ve got a there's gonna be consequence. Maybe you'll get suspended, or maybe that kid d'd get his friends and beat living shit at whatever IT is society regulate tes your behavior. And elephants have a very strict, very predictable, sort of like the males teach the males how to run things in the females, which which really have the final say, their matriarchial. They're the ones leading the heart where to go, the males follow where the, where the wise females tell them where to go to.

That regulation mechanisms from that emerges a kind of moral system under which they Operate. What's right and wrong for an elephant?

Yeah, for an elephant, right and wrong. For elephant is not the same as what's right and wrong for grizly pair. Grazy pair fear male grizly bear.

And you see a female with cubs. You just kill those cubs and then you can make with that, you can make with her and put your own cus in there. It's like bets, a whole different types.

Ethics he had the value of a child. Life is different from species. species. Some of them hold the sacred.

And that's why I think I I resonate so much of the elephants, because there I think they are. I think we are kind of material, at least I grew up material, like women were the force in my life, my family and most my friends as families. Women kind of have the final say. And I feel like this the way is 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 in my aliens, there's a lot of people trying to understand, trying to study the origin of life. Oh, I love this first.

What do you think is life versus non life? Like when you look at like answer, or even like the simply the organisms? We saw a frog in a stream yesterday that was a good leave frog as like this, flat as a sheet of paper, and IT does a lot of weird things.

Then he found a way to exist in this world, but that's a single living organisms with a bunch of components, but that there is a life form that existing this world. What is the difference to in that in iraq? What was that?

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 to you is that .

I I think to me life is something that grows in response to stimuli like in basic biology, one or one. I think and i'm fine with that. I don't need you to be more romantic that, but I think it's actually comical.

How how do you get from a rock to an arana ten, 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 are just, there was nothing happening. And then there is always sudden there was a cell and the cell had function and then IT complexioned. And then I started reproducing and found male and female parts.

and and .

what like we are. So on unequipped to understand how the hell we got here, let alone answer, or or even bacteria.

I see the sumi, uh, in very simple mathematical models, like something called a game of life. They're clio thoma. You can 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, by mathematics at all. And IT seems like from primordial soups you get a lot of good shit in the force of getting from soup to like two humans and microphones.

Yeah.

not understood. And IT seems to be a thing that happens on earth. I tend to think that is a thing that happens everywhere in the universe. And there is some deep force that's pushing this alone in some way that there's something we I don't want to sort of simplified, but there is something that creates complexity out of simplicity that we don't quite understand. And that's something that created the first organism, living organism, is that like leap from no life to life on earth, as a weird one.

as a weird one. Because you can imagine, I think, that what the earth is, four or four point five billion years old, 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 that everything we all the same book when our 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. Pro, and and I think the first bacteria came in around three, three, three point seven billion years ago. So there was like, at least like, you know, bunch billion years, where there's just nothing or just a planet. And then we started seeing fossils of the first bacteria.

and the bacteria stuck around for for a long time. A billion, two billion years is just very, very long. Just bacteria, just bacteria.

But a lot of them and 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 life on earth, you know the predator prey dynamic does a really call innovation, is almost an innovation. Like features to the iphone, like nice, like pressure pry. Uh, you create so complex multiple la organisms, uh, emerging from the water to land. That was weird as a as a interesting innovation, how whatever LED to humans, that is a lot interesting stuff there I see .

I can't even get that far. I can 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 is just it's it's wild even and I could imagine being on another planet and how incredibly valuable this thing would be. This, this is impossible to replicate.

I'm looking at IT through the candle light right now. I can see all of the structures in this leef, the incredible structures in the sleeve that look exactly like the veins in my arms, which looks exactly like the rivers that are flowing across this landscape. And it's like, life has this this overwhelming pattern that IT uses and is so beautiful.

I I just think it's yeah. But when you imagine the the days of the lightning in the volcano in the primordial soup, it's there's 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 lead them to different answers there.

Not to give you spoil as postcard from another dinner, ask his film. The idea there is, is there's probes that send out from earth to all these other planets, and each probe contains to humans a man and a woman, and those two humans are in love. So I think of a couple in love. They sent there with all the information, basically believe that holds information, what IT takes to create life on other plant, to recreate a earth, planets, and the two humans hold all the information for the things that make life under especial, especially in human civilization, is love consciousness. The the social connection to all that information is in the probe, and the postcard from earth is a those humans waking up, remembering all the information that is earth, that like a celebration of all the things that make earth magical throughout his history of the diversity of organism involved, that you're loading all that in to create life on that new planet, which is something I think galen says are doing the sending probes author, the galaxy, and they just haven't arrived yet. But anyway, as another.

uh, that's so beautiful and one of the things that I I think I I, I want to see that so much, and one of the things that I love about our osc y'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 two other world's alien civilizations. And in the fountain, IT was sort of what I thought he did so beautifully, was brave together.

Those three stories were in one. I don't remember if he's in a space ship or if if that's supposed be like his soul. The other one, he's a scientist in sort of like comparable times to hours.

And then he's the spanish explored but either way, there's the tree of life and it's sort of bredes together all of the major religions. And IT made me think of that quote that you hear what says, you know, god, what was IT? Um Chris wasn't a Christian and butter wasn't a boot st and muhammad wasn't a muslim. They were all just teachers who are teaching love and it's like the fountain the fountain sort of says nature is that that driving force and its 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 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 got of that movie.

Got among many things, you also artists trying to convert the thing that is nature into the thing that we humans can understand, the complexity, the beauty of IT. That's so there are oski tried to do those couple of films. That's something that I hope you do action in the medium of film to that be very interesting, and you do that in the medium of books. Finally, how much you think we understand about the history of life .

on earth think we got IT all wrong? No, I don't know. IT seems like they changed all the time.

You know, they say, they say that easter island, when I in college, they were bigger till you, that easter island, they ruin their environment and their environmental will collapse. And that's why there was nobody on easter island. There was a cautionary tale, we could ruin our environment.

And now that seems that they have changed their mind on that when humans entered north amErica seems to be hugely up to speculation. And you know that the africa is spreading, that we all spread out of africa, then that the place in overkill extinction theory is like IT. Seems like every few years they updated and they change IT and they say the guys, no, no, no, no. The guys from ten years ago, actually, my new theories, the best theory, let's write some books and get me on let and IT seems like there's a new prevAiling theory that's really always exciting energy about how we got here and where we came from and how we disperse, ed, and maybe even has some political infants, how we should use the amazon moving forward, like amazon was engineered by people. So fuck IT, I just cut a town.

Yes, attention, believe that we mostly don't understand anything. But there is an optimism in continuous ly figuring in out the puzzle. And we offline talked about the the gram hancock flin dio debate on on rogan.

I like debates personally, so double represents mainstream archeology. And I actually like the whole science, the whole field of biology. You're trying to figure out history with so little information, you're trying to put together this this puzzle, and you have so little, and you're desperately clean onto little clues.

And for those clues, using the simple possible explanation to understand. And now with modern h technology as as they 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, uh, what kind of things they eat, how they interact with each other, kind are they create when they exist, that what are the time frames are like on of self.

And I 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 gram hand kok talks about like law civilizations, which I like also because he gives you have a kind of humility about maybe there's giant things we don't know about or we get completely wrong and that's always good to like. Remember.

it's confusing to me to imagine like what I do not even know what like what and the where the egypts go, like what happens but they are doing so good that so much cool shit um but I mean, I was reading antipope gc 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 can 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, available. And it's just is 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 are?

Like, now I know that there's methods to try to figure that out, but really, again, the airbase is so large, it's almost like we trying to create a narratives that make sense for us. You know that I am ten percent neander thought, therefore I can bench press this much. And therefore my aggressive tendencies have an explanation. In reality, there is so much diversity personalities that they, they far overshadow any possible histories we might have.

Your aggressive tendencies don't have any explanation.

Now you need to show you.

listen to me right now. Sorry, don't be. Don't shot me out again.

He had one of things. You know, I talk a lot about as different explorer. Yeah, who do you think is i'm just strong, ridiculous tion, one after the other. Who do you think is the greatest expLoring all time?

Oh god, I love shackleton. But I I hate the cold. So I don't really, I can't even read about IT. I hate the cold so much. I I can't even go there for fun.

I think percy false t in the amazon was was the goat in terms of just sheer, the last of the Victorian era. You know, march forward, go deeper, just stop at 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 soft.

I would not want to, like, leave my family behind. I wouldn't wanna like, even if you told me that I could leave earth and expLoring and I could go touch the moon. I'd like, no, absolutely not like the highway is dangerous enough, like I would never risk dying in space. This guy left his home, went out into the jungle out there with her renders gear compared to the camping er we have today no headlamp and just explored for years on end.

Well, let me actually push back and you have that explore. There's definitely a thing in you, just me, having observed you behave in the jungle and in the world, your poll, 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 rain force, a part of the world that, like, is that cold shit? This is beautiful.

I think that's the same kind of prepared. So maybe not going out to the stars and you like I can see you doing exact the same thing. So he disappeared ninety twenty five during the next edition to find an ancient law city which he and other people believed existing and was on reinforce. So there's that pool like i'm going to go into there with the 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 give him. And he started goofing and like doing a song and a dance and just being ridiculous.

And the trial is like, what? Now they like away. Don't shoot him yet. That's a funny one. yeah.

And they they actually, he kind of like, on a human level, used used humor to save his own life on multiple occasions, to the point where he d escalates. The situation was like, look, we're not here to fight. We're here.

We have a pilum maps. You know, oh, my guys have very bury danger malaria like we're dying out here. If you guys just go on your merry way, we'll on our mary way.

And like, incredible, he was so tough. And then that guy from shackled to his expedition ended up on one of forest expeditions. And you, he's a proven explore.

He's been through the antarctic. And the guy was like, fuck the jungle. Absolutely fuck the jung.

He is like, and is a great quote, he says, without a machete I in that something, you know, I don't remember exactly the words used, we said without a machete in this environment, you don't last 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 am not where in shoes right now yeah bullet dance, venomous x Spikes through my feet, tripping over myself. I don't have a head lab. Unbelievable risk right there. We're sitting on the edge of tragedy.

Can you explain what the the purpose of the machi in the situation is? Like what? What is a masada? How does that work? How does that allow you to navigate this exceptionally environment?

So this is the tool that I spend most of my life Carrying. This is in my hand for ninety percent of my time. And in the jungle you really need a issued, is so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through.

And like a jack war and oso, a lot of these other animals that are more horizontally based in load of the ground, they can make IT. Like when we got stuck in those bamboo patches and we were just hacking through and it's dangerous. And there's as you hit the bamboo IT rickshaws and have Spikes and then one piece falls and IT pulls A A train of vine that has Spikes on IT and that hits you in the neck and IT just the jungle is savaged to humans.

But if you are an guilty, a little road, or a jwt or a dear, you can kindly slip through this stuff in the deer of developed, really small antlers. They can just kind of weave through low to the ground and so and so rust, these vertical beings walking through the juno IT really helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonal, posing your movement at all time. So I said is just a very, very useful tool. Um you can help you pull phone at your body as you saw last night.

We can use IT to find food. Do you want medi fishing? You cut a fish head off with a machete by like I was swimming and then you basically you know a machi, the water and the other fast.

And I think about that fish without is happy, kept moving. So was just using, I guess, this nervous system to to swim beautifully. I mean, I did so many questions there .

about how nature works. You will this explain? Because the way that I should, he hit this fish, took his just his eyes off of, and his lower jaw was still there. So it's really just like the brain and and the top draw that came off. And this fish, as the the dust cleared in this stream, this fish was, I found a very haunting in a very like into Stellar lar way, like IT was just, the programing was still there, but the brain was gone and the fish was just still moving, and I was gonna e, but he was still swimming. And IT looks like like like a live fish was really.

and you still trying to catch IT.

which is to catch because every time I caught IT IT, IT would freak out. And then you jump back in the water and unprogrammed here from years in years of living in the amazon, that everything can hurt you. So you actually become quite, you know, a mouth lands on you, you flick, because IT could be a bullet ant.

And so even the fish year, a lot of the fish, you 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 holding IT, when I would twitch with that explosive power, just like the came, and I, I, I would get that fear response and release him. And so that happens three or four times before I finally said, this is stupid.

Even though slippery, he hasn't got ahead. I can hold on to me. I put on my my pocket, put on my pocket. Now we fried them up.

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 Michaeli is used to cut through this extremely dance jungle is bines.

By the way, this world like things, they're extremely strong, and they go all kinds of directions to go horse out on all of this. I even how three, we have a tree right above that makes no sense. There's like a tree that kinds failed, and then a new tree was created on top of IT makes IT just makes no sense. He is like, sometimes trees come from the from the sky, sometimes they come from the ground. I I only 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 the mechanism.

strong lives and so stranger fix as you go across the worlds ecosystems that hold belt of, whether you're in rainforest, in the amazon, the congo, indonesia, all across the tropics of stranger fix.

And the amazing thing that this, that the species does, it's become a keystone species across the planet with a hyper influence on the ecosystem, whether IT is because they produce fruit in the dry season, when the rest of the forests is making IT hard for animals to find fruit, to find fruit. And so the bats, the birds, the monkeys, they all go to the strongly 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 pop on another tree after reading, strangle fs. And the match stranger fix sends out its vines, gets to the ground. And then as soon as I began sucking up nutrient out competes, that tree for a light, grows, hyper drive around the trunk of that tree.

And then eventually that tree will die in the strength, will win. Because IT got a IT got a boost step to the top, where these little trees down here, they are going have to wait their turn, if to wait until the tree falls, until is a light gap, and 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 strong fix, yeah top down trees 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 purse false and exploration waiting IT was like for him back then one hundred years ago. I am, go to the jungle.

See, the thing is those guys didn't go with the locals. They came down here with like mules, and they try to do IT their way. And so he's one of the people that wrote about the Green hell, the jungle as the impressive 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 J, J. Right now we would shady fish and fish. We could start a little fire.

We do IT all in. Sure, it's like to J J. Screen 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 legs that you can eat. And inside the nuts on the ground, there's grubs that you can need. And if you really needed to, you could just jump on a camp and need that because the tails are pretty full of meat and it's like there's actually unending amount of amounts of food here. And so if they were pretty, you know they were strange.

If you able to tune into that frequency, I feel like your you and J J I are able to tune to the to the frequency of the jung goal that is A A provider, not a destroy your human life, right? Yeah like um I think to be collaborated with, not fought against. Yes, but we're coming at that with .

that 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 dad s opinion of the jungle would have been overwhelming and collective murder as her dog says um and so purse for that 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 medicine and our ability to survive infections. And and so it's still IT is different for us. IT is different.

We're coming at this very, very different. But for IT to me was like the last of like the real swashbucklers like the really batched crazy explorer that just went out into into the dark spaces on the map. And it's very hard for me to identify with him.

But with, for instance, Richard f. Shelties from harvard, that's someone where you go. okay. Now we're getting to the point where I can start to understand just me, just like the conyers and they tell you the conyers showed up, you know they killed the the spanish killed two thousand inker on the first. And then they marched to this city. And like when I hear about, can you imagine yourself just like slaughtering a bunch of women and children and soldiers and then just like drinking some wine and doing IT again much, I can't actually rap .

my head on that. Yes, this seems like an entire .

different world, not like different world.

different value system, different stem, different relations. Violence in life and death. I think we value life more. We value, we resist violence more.

Yeah, but I just, I can't like if we saw a car X, I feel like if I saw a car accident, like, you know, if you see a little bit of war, some violence like IT affects you. These people were so comfortable with those things. IT was such a Normal part of there that the spartans, the the committees, like they became so comfortable with war. The point that became what they did and I did.

that is celebrated IT and direct violence too, like taking that medi and murdering me. Or if I get to the macadam, first, me murdering you.

not a chance pitch.

And then I would put the show and the number of D. M. I would get from murdering you. Meanwhile.

a half the world right now is messaging me, saying my dms are filled with, take care of legs. Don't lose legs. Make sure legs comes back safe.

Lex is a national treasure. We love legs. Make sure he holds a snake amount .

of love that is out there. Meanwhile, I merged from the jungle of blood on me with a machi.

and I take over the .

instagram a right. So what do you think makes a great explore, whether it's person force that Richard events all these, whether say who, which eventually he is a biologist? So that's another alliance to wish to be an explore is to study the the biology, the immense diversity, a biological life hall around this .

Richard ever shout um I know about him from reading way Davis book one river, which is a big half ty five or six hundred page home about the amazon and IT covers two stories Richard df. aniela. And I think it's in the forties. I think it's like pro war two era where he's in the amazon looking for the blue ori and the cure for this and that, and he's pressing plants and he's gone to these indigenous communities where they still live completely with the forest, and they and they drink IaaS asa, and they they talk to the gods and he learns about how they believe that the anna came down from the milk key way and swam across the land and created the rivers. And sort of, he came down and and and even though he was a western scientists from harvard, he embraced the indigenous perspective on the world, on creation, on spirit ality.

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 ethnocentric ical spiritual wave of what medicinal compounds are contained in these plants, and how do the local indigenous people use and understand them. For example, you know, if eighty thousand species of plants in the amazon rainforest and four hundred billion trees in the amazon rainforest, the statistics of likelihood that through trial and error that humans could discover iowaka, it's it's astronomically that one of these trees and a route, when put together, allow you to go access the spirit realm and see ho sanom ic shapes and and talk to the guards. That's that's that's almost almost enough to inspire spiritual thought itself.

The fact that trial and arrow IT would take millions of years or something I forget with the figure is it's incredible. But Richard evanturel was one of the first people that came down and saw that. And then one rivers where way Davis comes back, I believe, in the seventies and the heartbreak of the book is that all of these incredibly wild places with with naked native tribes and these intact belief systems, way Davis comes back in a lot of the same places that shutters went.

Now there's missionary schools and they are wearing discarded nights. And you know whatever there's nike's in the seventies, but like western stuff has made IT in, they've been contacted, domesticated, forced into western society in. You know, a lot of them then forget the thousands and thousands of years that that i've gone into creating the medical al mechanical knowledge that the indigenous posses about how to cure your infections and how to treat illnesses from the medicine compounds flowing through these trees is lost in a single generation with with the modernization.

Yeah, he he wrote the plants of the gods, their sacred healing in a hosen agent's powers that is interesting. You mention like how to discover that, like how do you find those incredible plans, those things they can warp your mind, are all kinds of ways, of course, physically heal. But also, I take you a mental journey that's interesting. So you don't think and air is possible.

I was reading about A I O S. And their staying there thing. 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 communal, es IT would take tens and tens of thousands of years, or perhaps even centuries, before even the possibility is like that thing.

Bunch chips on a keyboard. They write hamlet. It's like astronomical odds to get to await this and this, those together. And so what the local people believe, the god's revealed the 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. I was a, what do you think exists in a spare world that could be found by taking that journey?

I think that IaaS asa is, I can only speak from personal experience. And for me, that was as if your brain is a house you've lived in your entire life, and it's a big house to mention. And as many, many rooms that you didn't even know exist, hidden rooms behind the bookshelves, under the floorboards, rooms that you had no idea where there.

And some of them are fantastic, and some of them are terrifying basements. And iowa takes you on a journey through that at 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 the show is supposed to be able to guide you through that. But in my experience here, you're so deep inside, like falling through nebulous, out in space, no physical form or crawling through the jungle like it's like you is really, really powerfully. It's not like, it's not like the recreational drugs that that everyone does, like where you go. I did mushrooms and I could see, I could see music like and I was talking to my friends, but not like you're faced down on the floor, usually vomitings 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 .

as a really good way of looking at as a big house. And you get to open doors you've never have before and discover what rooms are there inside you. You ever think about that like that there's part of yourself you have discovered yet, or maybe you have been suppressing. How much are you expLoring the shadow? A boy to say, you mean caryn g and Jordan Peterson are in a deserted island today.

I didn't make my bed today.

There's no Better in an island.

great. I want to see you in Jordan Peterson. Do I ask you together? I think I think that's that's the thing I asker to me. You know, if i've kind of told you about, like i've i've experienced some things that really made me believe that that there's that there is a benevolent force around us, but to me, iowa was like a was a ride through the scariest parts of the universe to sort of be like, here's here's what I could be like.

You know the that's why I came up with my idea that you like deep space or just space, outer space is just the outside of the video game. And this is IT. Because when I was on, I was ask, I was, I was one of the jungle creatures and I wasn't paul, and I didn't have a name.

And for a long time I saw many things, and I was, I arrived at the spot in the jungle where there was a big tree, and all the animals were there. And they were all not in words, not, not any language that we can understand, but they were all discussing what to do about the threat. In the end, IT was all, IT was all leaving, IT was all flying up, and IT was fire, and the jungle was being destroyed. I was like, and then after that, I was just space and stars and silence, like crushing vacuum silence for years. And I was terrifying, does fucked and terrifying when I came back and night hands, man, I can read my own name.

And 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 see 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 going to be god. God is a thing that crash the video again. Oh, so then we're that somebody is are N, P, C, like one. And P, C, yes, you yeah, you created me.

It's just like, hello, where you can kind of kill the empathy is because I .

see I put the machine behind you.

Okay, I think i'm just going to take a stand here. I think that because people, i'm just just fuck a fuck in plan at half way. I think that because people live indoors in climate controlled boxes in cities far away from nature, they're completely lost track of everything.

This real and theyve started to think that we're living side as simulation. Notice that nobody Carrying an al pack up a mountain and thinks that were living inside of a video game. They all know that it's real because they've had babies on the floor of a cold, hot.

They understand the consequences of life, they understand the fish and how harder is to get them in the basic rules of the wind and the rain in 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 asked her if she's looking 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 to starting to to to parity itself. It's people going, I have no meaning in my life anymore. So is this even real? And again, go ask the shop.

Go ask the schema. They're there. Are you forget .

what fundament matters in life? What is the source of meaning in a human life?

Ah if you talk about .

such subjects, nevertheless, you could for a time straw in the big full of questions. And if you do IT for short enough of time, you won't forget about the things that matter, that there is human suffering, that there is human joy that is real. Our time in the jungle was very hard.

Did you suffer enough to know that it's real?

Yeah, I man, I was hoping for waiting in the whole time.

So that's a, that's actually a really good waiter. 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, in our feet, in our legs, and we were lost in the jungle. And I was nighttime, and we didn't know that 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 happen to you. And that was, I saw you crouching by the side of this puddle, wasn't even a flowing streams, so we couldn't drink IT.

And you were just trying to wash the sweat off of you. sure. And you you looks being, 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 in the simple reality of the fact that we were so thirsty that IT hurt and that IT was a little scary.

Yeah, he was scary. But also, there's like A. A joy in the interaction with the water because IT calls your body temperature down. And there's like a faith in that interaction that eventually will find clean water because waters plan to for on earth this kind of like a dilution onal faith and eventually will find I was just like a little celebration. I think the cooling aspect of the water cause the in the bind temperatures high from traversing the really dance jungle.

And just the cooling will somehow ground, doing away that nothing else for the is there was a little celebration of life, of life on earth, of earth as a jung. Goal of everything was a nice, a nice moment, I think about that. Had a couple of those is one in the pottle and one in the river. One was a full of delusion in fear, and the other one was full of relief and celebration.

Yeah, I I know this this thing that they they say with the 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 that thirsty water becomes god, it's all you want. And also, and also the other thing is that when when we're out there, IT felt so good to be so lost and so tired and so like we're doing levels like, like, how would do you how do you describe the physicality of what we are doing, the level of physical, like exertion?

What is something that i've haven't trained, and you know how you train for that kind of thing, but is extremely dance jungle. So every single step is like completely unpredictable terms of the train your foot interacts with. So the different variety of slippery, that is, chunk of floor is vacating.

Some things mean the slope matters, but some roots of trees are slippery, some are not. Uh, some trees on the ground already ride through. If you step through, you going to a potentially fall through so can beat a shower hole or could be a very deep hole with some leaves and vegetation Carrying up a whole where if you fall three can break a leg and was your footing fall rolling down hill.

And if you roll down hill, i'm pretty sure there's a ninety nine percent probability that you'll hit a thing will Spike on IT. So there are so many layers of avoiding dangers of the small dangers and big dangers all around you with every single step. So there is like a mental exhAusting that in like that just a perception and you're just observing you, you are extremely good at perceiving, having situation, awareness of taking the information and that's really important.

And filtering out this stuff is not important. But even for you, that's exhaustion and for me is completely exhausted and just paying attention, being attention, everything around you. So that exhAusting was surprising because I like, just moment when .

you like, I don't give you. And I G I and I I T T lean against the street. And then what happened every year.

and then you have to care. And then there is bad luck because there is, wasn't there is, there is stic a million things. And that is physical, mentally, psychologically, exhaustion, because there is the uncertainty.

One is this good and is, uh, in our particular situation, opened on hills, opened on hills, very steep downward, very steep upward. No water, all this kind of stuff in IT. It's so the most difficult thing i've ever done. But it's very difficult to describe what the paramus that make IT difficult because I run long distances, very regular. I do extremely difficult YSL things regularly that on some surface level could seem much more chAllenging than what we did.

But now this was another beef, this is something else, but was also raw and real and beautiful, because I like it's what the explores did, yeah, it's what earth is without humans, and did, and also seek the massive scale, the trees around us. Was a the humbling size difference between human and tree is both humbling in that like that tree is really old, is a time difference, lifetime difference, and just the scale like, holy shit, we live on the earth. That concrete those things makes me feel small in every way.

Life is short. That my physical presence on this earth, st. Tiny, have vulnerable. I am. All those feelings are there. And a nt, the physical endurance of traversing the jungle, yeah, was the the harder journey .

that .

I remember taking. Every step and that made making IT out of the jungle estimated. The swim in the water, they look a drink. I logia pure joy.

It's probably one of the happiest moments in my life, just sitting there with you, pn with J, J in the water, full darkness, the rain coming down, and all just us, all just laughing. Having made IT through that, haven't eaten a bit of food before in the absurd of the timing of all of that somehow worked out. and. How are just three little humans? Sitting in a river, just our head emerged barely above water, but jungle all around this not a life .

that was a real adventure.

That was a really as a real one. Yeah, i'll never forget that. So it's a real one that i've shared that. Course, we have very different experiences. When you saw a came in in that situation, you like, I have to go me.

that guy is A I A in river in a thunderstorm. Just turn next above. We all laugh and asses off.

And I mean, we're in the river with the ingrates in the black, came in in the frana and all the electric eels and everything, and it's pitch black out. And then what were we doing? We're holding our headlamps off.

And there is a swirling moa's s the infinity moths, all making those geometric patterns. And it's like, we just three ridiculous ous primates, three friends in a river, just laughing. Yeah, because we were safer in that river, then we had been in there, and we joining that that that the thunder storm 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 that, like very different life trajectories have taken these three humans into this one place.

Yeah, it's like, what? Yeah, wow.

is this universe that would like because we are kind of like those mos. I mean, like we're where would would come from some wear place on the earth and we have all kinds of should happen to us and or all pursuing some shed in some light and we ended up here together. Enjoy this moment yeah, as something else, they just felt absurd. And in that absurd was a psychology, human joy. And to hand water .

tastes a good water, good man water, and those those little oranges. Yeah, those things. And then I would just say, like, do you feel like I feel running? Like, no matter how much I run, I feel like the like you run, you do or work out and then you stop.

Maybe people who do ultras feel this, but like, I felt that we would wait. We woke up. I was like, now wake up IT on six A M, but start walking you know break camp, go and it's like pretty much you just don't stop all day and it's level ten cardio all day wrong and you're sweating buckets and there's no water.

And so you would never put yourself through that voluntarily. You could you never you would never have the resolve to to continue torturing yourself, except 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 machi and the navigating fuck.

I think there is 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 those that were like laughing, enjoying ourselves moments before and once you going, you like, oh shit, oh shit and you just come face to face .

with the yeah .

I think that's what you know, whatever that is in humans that goes, that is what the exports do the, you know. And the best than do IT to the extreme levels. 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 on a very now that we're back now that we experience or experience, I really can't stop thinking about how fucking stupid was that. Did that because if we had gotten lost pico assay to me, even if you guys said one of you, i'd broken your leg.

It's, you know, days in either direction. Even if they'd sent help for us, help would take how long to to score. All that jungle sound doesn't travel even, even a helicopter, even if they looked for as they ouldn't able to see us.

How do 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 to the west, were had taken us two more days, if we'd, if we got ten injured, would be Carried through that.

And so IT somehow, only afterwards. And I really going, well, you, thank god we got out of this. Thank god.

After I see so many people going, make sure nothing happens. Select freeman, i'd be the dead is mother fuck on earth? No.

IT somehow works out.

IT does seem to somehow work out.

Let me ask you about jan. Good on another explore of different kind, what you think about her, about her role in understanding this natural world of hours.

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 einstein, jane, good all like these these incredible minds. And you know, growing up as a child, my parents would read to me because I was so delicate. I didn't learn to read until as quite old, and my mom was a big jane, good, all fan in and all I wanted to hear about those animals.

And so I would, I would get rid to about this lady named jane goodall, girl who went to africa and study chimps and who broke all the rules and named her study subjects, even though that wasn't what you were supposed to do. And he became this incredible advocate for earth and for ecosystems, and for, and he seemed to realized as a career when on that, that teaching children to appreciate nature was the key, because they're going to that thing, which he says, we want so much, inherited thy earth from our ancestors, but borrowed from our children. We're just here.

We're just passing through. And so if we destroy IT, we're dimming the lights on the lives of future generations. And so she's been really, really cogent of that. And she's been a light in the darkness SHE sort of in terms of saying that animals have personalities and culture and and their own available 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, insignificant, that you do have an impact. And I think that's a really powerful little candle out there in the dark knight that jane Carries.

what reading about her field work with the champs.

But at as the fact SHE did what he did at the age that he did at the time that he did is incredible, actually incredible. SHE has that explored gene, and he also has that relentless relentlessness, is like that, this incredible quality SHE just, you know, SHE travels three hundred days a year educating people, talking around the world, trying to help bolster conservation. Now, before it's too late. And traveling three hundred days a years, not fun. Traveling at all can be not fun.

So I started reading the river of doubt book you recommended to me. And so yeah, so that as bad as so many levels, but I didn't realize how much of a natural 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 as well in that whole journey of just sing fuck of going to the I was a jungle out of taking on that expedition?

What I mean, teddy roseville, you could write volumes. And what's inspiring about him? I think that he he was a weak asthmatic little Richard kid that that wasn't physically able that had no self confidence in he was very and he and he had pretty severe depression.

He had tragedy his life and he was very um at least for me he's been one of the people like one of the first historical figures who where where he wrote about the struggle overcome those things and and to make himself from being a weak as matic little teenager to to sort of strengthening himself and building muscle becoming the barrel chested lion of a guy who could be the president, who could be an explorer ah one of the rough writers and is just everything he does is so is so hyperbolical you know incredible to come out of war and have the other people who fought with go heat. This guy has no fear. I mean, he must just been a psychopath and had no fear. And 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 and was .

spectacle case 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, and no, no, no, not going to hospital. I'm going to keep going with the speech what a bad as that's incredible.

But going to the jung gal at many levels is really, is really difficult for him at that time. There are so many things that so many more things, even than now, they can kill you all the different infections, everything in the lack of knowledge is the sheer lack of knowledge. So that truly is an expedition, a really, really chAllenging expeditions. So there's lessons about what IT takes to be a great explore from that, the perseverance, how poor things, perseverance and exploration, especially to the jungle.

I think it's all there is if you hear about the people. 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 in freezing and they had to eat each other in some of them made IT out, some of them kept the fire burning, and teddy road voluntarily, after being president themself, into the amazon rainforest and survived.

IT came so close to dying, but survived. And so perseverance is all of IT. I mean, that's that's I think that's our quality is human.

They also mapped so on the biology size, interesting, but they map to document a lot of the unknown geography by diversity. What does that take to do that? So when I see move about the jungle, you're always like you capture increase, you take a picture right down like, so you can find new creature, find new things about the jungle.

Document term serve a scientific perspective on the jungle. But the backend is even less known, much less known about the jung. So what waiting IT takes the document to map that world. I knew unexplored wilderness.

I mean, there they're clearly pressing meta ical species. They probably shooting birds and and rose vult know how to knew how to preserve those species. I mean, he really was a natural list.

So he knew exactly if he seeing these animals to them, where we will take a picture and identify that they were harvesting species, taking them with them, drawing them out and for them, IT was totally different. And and IT could be the first. You I forget what change said.

There's something like seventy es of antbirds here. And it's like, so how likely are you to be the first person to ever see this one species of burden? So for them, as you have this bird, so perfectly preserving that special, I think a lot of a non scientific people don't realize that every species.

From blue whale to elephant to blue jade, a sparrow, whatever, whatever is whatever species we have on record, there are scientific investments, and the first people to see them shot them. And that's the museums are filled with these catalogues, preserved birds that these exports brought back from new gini in south amErica and africa, and put into these drawers. And and, and now we do, we label them, and we, this, this is red and Green, because this is scarlet mca, this is the Brown crusted altberg, and this is just the just cater.

that book of birds you have, like a psychometric birds.

what the human achievement in these pages.

So people listing page, flipping through a huge number of pages. This is just this in the amazon and pool.

This is just here, the birds of .

perou IT .

do pages on pages of two kings and our sorters and and humming birds and ant birds and and smoky Brown woodpecker and tropical scree yellow, which just hurt, by the way, just it's endless. Who knew there were so many birds? I had no idea.

Were so many documenting all of that. A and I mean, there's also which you got to experience you you're pretty good at also is actually making understanding and making a song of the different birds. What's your favorite birds .

on to make a underlaid cinema? Because any proposal lar hours of dawn, dusk, they're usually the ones that make up what is considered by many to be the anthem of the amazon.

Can you do A A little bird for us?

That's what the unrelated tinny 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 do something about IT. You are areas .

unlike you were saying. It's a, remind you, that's a friend of mind. Yeah, surrounded by friends.

Have so many friends here?

Does IT take to survive out here? What is the basic principles of survival in a jungle cleaning?

Ss, I mean, really where we talked about this, but like, you know, keeping I have so many holes in my skin right now with mosquito every go, I have so many spotted that i've scratched off of my skin because was quito bites me, and then I scratch IT. Or the other big one is that I, I, I worry that I have a tick, not a deliberately, not with my thinking brain, but my semi 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 infected in the gentle, and so staying hyper clean using soap like basic stuff keeping order to your bags um order to your gear things and dry bags. Make sure you know we did we we explained that we gotten the river during a thunderstorm.

We didn't explain why we did that because the thunderstorm 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 package fs, that we had been Carrying our backpacks. So all of our gas, they dry.

So the only thing we could do is either sit in the rain and be cold, or sit in the river be warm. And so keeping our gear dry, momentary discomfort for future, you know that that to me was an incredibly smart calculation to make because you really just, you got ta be smart out here. You can, you know, not running out of a headland.

Boy, you're out on the trail and being stuck in that darkness IT really takes just being a little bit on your toes. And I find that that that necessity of being on your toes is is a place that I like to live in. It's just the right amount of chAllenge here.

So keeping a gear, organizing all that, but also being willing, this provides, see, you provides very well. There's so much unknown, so, so much chaos. Dynamic aspects IT like planning is not going to prevent you from having to face that in the other day.

No, it's been really funny watching you sort of shed your planning brain like day, like day one. I was very much like, so are we gna? And I could tell, I can see you.

I can see your brow sort of flow and you I would go, I don't know what time we're going to get there. You go just tell me and I feel like I know jungles gonna let us, you know, let's do. Let's record the podcast tomorrow. Okay, but if IT, if IT, you know, IT rains, if IT, it's windy, if a freeh comes, if is a jack world, rabies like anything could happen. One slice 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 shit. First of a lot of trees fall, yeah, and they fall quickly. And they could just kill you.

They fall quickly, their huge. We're talking about trees that are like the size of school buses, stacked and connected to other trees with fines, so that when they fall, this millennium tree, this thousand year old tree, boom and shakes the ground, pulls down other trees with IT. 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 cut around in the army, ants in the flies and everything, you'll be digested in three days you've gone, gone.

no bones, nothing who think would eat most of you.

I would hope that that like a king vulture with a colorful face would just just get in there like, right, the ice, just like nature is meet al, just like when they like walking through the elephant. S I, i'd want that on camera trap. I think that would be a great way.

And up smile.

yeah, just rip out your and testers .

and just shake IT Victorious .

over your dead body well but also .

honor friend yes sure but you .

know you just you looks so you know your White, naked asian there in the john gar, you d be like face down should .

that's why you always have to look good any any moment treating fAllen univac just swooped in and eats your .

heart matter right?

We talked about alone the show .

bit rocket house. Yeah who's were .

waging about that guy rock's roll in Walker from season and seven, he built a rockies. He kill the moskos with born arrow and finished IT with a knife and .

had the go pro mount, you know, to document IT. That's a really mind blowing. I mean.

so for me, we all know that shows your supposed survive as long as possible. On season seven of the show, they literally said you can only win if you survive hundred days and that there's a lot of aspects of that show that difficult one of which is is in the cold the others they get just a handful supplies, no food, nothing, none of that.

So have to figure all of that out and um this is probably one of the greatest performers on the show, rolling Walker. He built iraq house shelter. So what I mean, what is survive until is building a shelter.

Fire, catching food, sustain, warm, getting enough energy to sof, keep doing the work. IT takes a lot of work like building the rock house. I read that IT took five hundred calories an hour from him so that he had to feed himself, right? Quite a lot.

You're lifting two hundred pound boarders, and still the guy lost, I read, forty four pounds, just twenty percent as body weight. So that's survival. What are 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 common with nature. He was there to win.

And he was like to me that the pioneer mental, he just, he was just, he was on a hunting guide. I'm out here. I'm going to win that money.

I'm going to survive through the winter. He wasn't worried. I feel like so many people, like they worried, second guessing themselves and my a video game. I don't know what's my, you know, just questioning their entire existence al identity and this guy was like, you know what there's a moscow over there.

I'm going to shoot IT, i'm going to stab IT and i'm going to make a powerhouse of its balls sac and i'm going to live off that next few months went a half million dollars. And that's an amazing amount of pragmatic optimism that I just enjoyed. Every time he would go, we got to get back to rocksand.

IT became, even though is alone, IT was, he had a big smile on his face. And what made that season so great was that I was him, and then I was Kelly. And and roland had, you know, the muscle and could make rock house.

And then Kelly was was the opposite. SHE was his girl who yeah he could hunt with her bow. And SHE knew had a fish and and SHE wasn't using raw power.

But what was so endearing about her was at how much SHE loved being out there as hard as IT was and as isolating, isolationist as IT was. He was smiling every time, every time the show cut to her shoes. OK everybody, it's morning.

Can you believe the frost, like you've been out there for a hundred days? Amazing option. I think he 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 is the same thing. Yeah, he maintained that sort of silliness, the goodness after, when the condition got really tough, and he had a very different perspectives. st.

Roland didn't want. The spirituality is very progressive, for kal is very spiritual connection to the land. SHE said something like he wanted not only to take from the land but to give back. I mean, there's just kind of put wet experience to connection to the land as such a dire contrast to roll en in. But she's still bad as I mean, to survive no matter what, no matter the kind of personality you have, you have to be a bad as I think SHE took a poke pine quill on a shoulder.

And I was crazy because I think IT went in somewhere completely different, and I immigrated her shoulder. And the way they understood that is because they have, I said, that's impossible. I remember that she's like pulling up her and she's like, there's something and then she's like pushes IT out.

And I remember like as I pull up, pull up how yeah and IT was because the barbs wanted IT goes in. As you move, you inflection your body IT moves on a little bit each time and again to migrate. Like I didn't even think .

that should plus if I remember correctly um I think he called two pork but as the second one was like .

a or did I had had no and then he chose .

not eat at first and then he decided to eat eventually yeah forgot that yeah and SHE thousand and saying so have really thoughtful of focused, collected decision waiting a day in the same basket. I need, I need this fat and those the other thing is like, fat is important. Oh yeah, like me is not enough.

You learn about all. Like what are the different food sources there? Apparently there's like rabbit starvation the thing because you too much lean me.

IT doesn't nurse the body. Fat is something that nurses the body, especially in in cold conditions. So that's a thing .

SHE ah SHE SHE was he was incredible and I thought as as as as brush and sort of fun as rollin was SHE represented um A A much more beautiful take on on IT and IT was really heartbreaking when he lost because I mean and like you said, still bad as kind of like farce script versus stuff and button stuff on like I was like IT doesn't matter who won yeah you guys to beat the shit out of each .

other like and SHE didn't really lose right? So SHE SHE got evicted because her toe was a going trust, trust by a hundred days. You think you do a one hundred days?

Honestly, i've dona, i'm eighteen years in the amazon and I just at this point it's I could I wouldn't sign up for another hundred days. Yeah, you know, at this point, I I don't have that to prove. I've survived in the wild and I wouldn't have voluntarily take a hundred days away from everyone .

I know yeah well in the suspect.

Is tough. We're not meant for that. I really love the people I have in my life, and I wouldn't I wouldn't involve.

And you see on the show a lot of the people, big, tough x navy seals who are survival experts who know what they're doing. They get out and ago, you know what? I miss my family.

Yeah and they go, it's not worth that. They have this existential realization. They go, we only got, I only got so many years here.

Like, let's s this is crazy. Just some money. Fuck IT and go home.

You know, funny because you sometimes film m yourself in a jogger in alone and there's another guy, uh, Jordan jonas hoo joro. He's the season six weather and he said that the camera made him feel less slone's. I've heard of him from multiple changes.

One of things is he spent all his twenty years in living in siberia with the, with the tribes out there, her happy people. So he actually talked about that it's one of the longest time of his life, because when he went up there, he didn't speak russian and he had to learn language. And even though you have people around you when you speak language, he feels really, really lonely.

And he felt less slone's on the show at the camera, and he felt like he talks 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 visages are recording. I sometimes feel that like IT. Maybe because I imagine a specific person, I will watch IT, and I feel i'm talking that person.

what? I noticed that when things got especially hard and they did get especially hard when we were out, the willingness that you would begin filming to share that struggle.

But I also think that i've used that at times where yeah you go maybe if I can if you can tell someone else about IT, you're on the heroes journey and and then that sort of has to make you braver and that changes how you because you i'm cold an entire 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 gonna go and always of a well, guys were we're here. We're going that way and and then you're like, why gotta keep going .

because because you like they're ya so you have to be the best version herself. Like for them all.

My friends with kids that i've seen them go through where until you have family, you're just you're just playing around men, I mean can do important work. You can you can have skin in in other games, but it's once you have a little tribal humans that depends on you ah if you take that seriously, if you want to do that, right, it's one of the hardest things you could do. And IT IT just IT just changes everything.

How is your life change since we last met?

Speak about changing everything.

Do you been for people don't know, pushing jungle keepers forward into uncharted territory is saving more, more, more, more reinforce? There's a lot to ask you about that. There's a lot of stories to be told.

There is a fight. It's a battle. It's a battle to protect this, this beautiful area of reinforce of nature. But since we last night, you mean if continue to make a lot of progress? Ah so what's the story of jumper keepers leading up to the moment we met and after and everything you're going doing right now?

Eighteen years ago, when I first came to the jungle, I was a kid from new york to always dreamed, since six years old, maybe even Younger, of going to a place for animals were everywhere. And there there's big trees and skyscrapers of life. And so being to sexy and not fitting in in school and in reading about jane git all in having lord of rings be one of the things I grew up on.

I just chose to come to the amazon. In the first person I met was this local indigenous conservationist named one holy odo dan, who was trying to protect this remote river, the last peer dress river, which in history currently force IT references ced either the less p dress, but he called IT taaoa manu and said, don't go there will surely die from tribes. And so there's very, if few references to this river in history has 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 sort of past the police limit.

And so J J was out here ages ago trying to protect this river before I was too late. And when I met him, I was just a barely out of high school kid with a dream of sheets of seeing the rainforest, let alone seeing a giant anaconda ving 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 even have 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 have to cut .

down a ball and flow down IT.

IT was its 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 would go, oh, please, you just sign 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 one we kept doing the thing that we loved.

We said, we do not 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 range of program. And then we found dex silver, who helped us fund the beginning of june keepers.

And then people, like most instance, define who are 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 freeman sends me A D M.

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 with our conversation, began showing up in droves and supporting junger keepers, putting in five, ten, one hundred and 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 sixteen hour days working to try and to deal with the title wave that lex cent 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. 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, fifty thousand acres, what's the goal? What's the approach to saving this reinforce.

since we printed this is gone up to sixty six thousand 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 mono national park, alter put his national park, the tambo pot, a reserve were in a region that's known as the biodiversity capital of perou, one of the most bioware 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 use these incredibly outside of the box strategies to sort of crowd fund conservation to go, look, we know that this incredible life is here. We have the scientific evidence. We have the national pork system.

If we can protect this before they cut them down, we could do something of global significance. All these jg as 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 as people from all over the world, and it's incredible.

but what's the approach? So trying to with donations to buy a more more of the land in a protected.

So the approach is that currently the government favors extractors. So if you're a gold miner or a log in a illegal logger or you just want to cut down and burn a bunching of rainforest and set up a kao form, the government's fine with that doesn't matter. You're not really breaking the law.

If you're destroy nature, as long as you producing something from the land they don't see as a loss, the nature was destroyed permanently.

Yeah, it's just wilderness, sort of just beyond the scope of its site, doesn't. Or the local people that technically owe the land out here, the local indigenous people, for instance, we fought this year to help the community of ports on the ivo, who has been fighting for twenty years to have government recognized land. These are indigenous people in the amazon fighting to protect their own land.

And you know, that was that was holding back. They didn't understand how the the system of of of legal documents worked to ascertain fy that title of 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 don't know, how will that help?

If people donate to jungle keepers? What what you're doing is helping someone like jj.

who is an indigenous .

natural alist, who has the vision, who has seen forest be destroyed. He's trying to protect him before it's too late. You're saving mahajan's trees, ironwood trees, keppoch trees, skyscrapers of life, just monkey's birds, rapt and hibiya birds, mamas, 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, the fact that we have we have large founders who give us one hundred thousand dollars to protect this huge SAT of land, and that goes through through things like this and through instagram, 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 impacting things that has happened this year in the wake of our last conversation was that I got an email from a mother and he said, you know, a single moment, and I work a few jobs, and I can't afford to give you a tony money, but me and my kids look at your instagram often after dinner, and they really want to protect the heartbeats. They really want to protect the animals in the rainforest. And so we do. We give five dollars a month to june. Keepers and IT was, to me, that was so impacted, 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 junger keeps. You guys are legit. That money is going to go a long way. Jungle keeps that work.

If you somehow were able to raise very large, so the rain drops should make a waterfall a very large amount of money. I don't know what that number is. Maybe ten million dollars, twenty million, thirty million.

What are the different milestones along the way? They could really help help you on the journey of saving the reinforce. If we did.

if they say some company organization or or if enough people donated IT, let's to say we got that thirty million, that money would go directly into stopping login roads, into creating a corridor, a biological cord or the connects the uncontacted indigenous reserves with other tribal lands with mono national park with the temple pot, which establishes essentially the largest protected area in the amazon rainforest.

And what makes this ground breaking is that we're not doing this in the traditional way. We're doing this take IT to the people. And that was been so exciting is that, you know, when he started this, when J.

J. Started thirty years ago, he had no idea his father wanted him to be a loggers. He didn't have shoes until he was thirteen years old. He grew up bathing in the river. He had no idea that a bunch of crazy foreigner scientists, we're gonna 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 in all those little aliens.

Well, that's all the important thing to remember, that the the people that are cutting down the force, the loggers, are also human beings and families there. Their they're basically trying to survive and they're desperate and they're doing the thing that will bring the money as so there's just human beings at the core of IT.

If there are other options, if they have other options, they will probably choose to a give their life to save in the community too, 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 rain force. They grew up in the rain force.

Ah let me look at pico. Pico used be a log of time, larger, long time, longer. Now he loves conservation, more conservation like yeah no.

it's all biologists providing people people's options. There's some dark stuff on on the gold mine stuff you've talked about. He showed imports of the reinforce with the goldmine are they're just kind of a racing the reinforce.

So at the edge, this when the mining happens, this is ugly. Ugly process of their just destroying the jungle just for the surface layer of the sand of whatever that they process is to collect a little bit of gold. And there is also very dark things that happen along the way as the communities around the gold mines are created. So that entirely the moral system that emerges from that, that has things like prostitution, were one third of the of the women later drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution or minors under under seventeen years old, twenty to seven 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 taking action, done good work, been good to the people that have visited hardest 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 um 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 something from a little tiny village with fetched huts up river. He 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 annoy you. The guy their kids are onna grow up seeing their parents walking around with the emblem on and go, oh, I want to and then and then people like peo and pedro o and all these guys that work here 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 legs. And then over sun, they have a way of life. And and nobody needs to go be nobody.

Nobody needs to go still. Nobody's kids to be a prostitute and a gold mine. That's horrible. And so it's really is a win win for the for the animals, for the river, for the rainforest, for people, will improve its bio centric conservation. It's it's just making everything Better.

I have read in an article they said in estimated twelve hundred girls between ages of twelve and seventeen are forcibly draft into child prostitution around the communities in the gold mines. At least one third of the prostitutes in the camp 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 reinforce. What they found was not what they were expecting. The mining cm serve food for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time, I was the girls themselves who are on the menu literally at the end of the road without the money to return home, that girls will soon become trapped in prostitution.

It's interesting to me that the most devastating destruction of nature, the complete ratio of the rain forest, burned to the ground, sucked through holes, spit out into a disgusting mercury puddle, like the complete anna lation of life on earth, goes hand in hand with the complete a nil lation of a Young life. It's like it's all based around the same thing. It's it's the light risk of the dark that's that's it's the destruction in the chaos versus 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 near future that you working towards like financial interactive .

donations there is in, in the next year and a half, as you saw in your time here? There is there's roads working around the joo heap's 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 thirty million dollars in the next two years to protect the whole thing. You've seen the ancient mahogany I trees. You've seen the families of monkeys.

You've seen the came in in the river. All of this is standing in the pathway of destruction. That road, they are gonna come down that road.

And men with chain saudis are going to dismantle the forest that has been growing since the beginning. This is so magical. Do you see the snake over there?

You do. There is no.

i'm just gonna don't move. I don't want you to move. I'm going to just this is one of the most beautiful snakes in the amazon rainforest. This is the brunt headed trees .

and .

favorite snakes. I've been hoping that you would yet to see the snake. I have a problem.

Oh, boy.

okay, okay, we like, let's just to work back into this. Look at this little beauty creation. Let's keep you away from the fire. Look at this little blunt had a tree snake.

Such an incredible. So tell me about the snake.

harmless little snake. If you put your hand out, i'll probably just crawl on to your hand. Be real careful with the fire.

So look, i'm just onna put him like this. I'm going at. Yeah, just snake safety.

So he's a tree snake. Yeah license law, license law license. So you nice and logic 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 then and so small. They go, they go, nice, just just be the treat.

Let him crawl around, so he's going to do all this stuff. Let me see if I can just calm down for that. Let me just see his very active with snakes, so see like the snake yellow night, just cosh.

Look, sure. I can see the light through his body. To me, this is an area.

This is the strange little life form. His eyes are two thirds of his head. I'm not joking.

You look at their kull. He's so tiy. He's so there's a snake and poland right now very as long, of course, but very skinny.

very light. And and also for everyone listing the eyes of that as we're sitting here doing this podcast, that a snake would just be crawling by and the jungle might sound like something that would happen. But a, the density of snakes in the amazon rainforest makes this very unique experience.

Can you tell me a little bit about the coloration scheme?

Brown, yeah, just to describe this as as we were talking here, sister, sort of banded White and Brown snake with this tiny little head about the size of my pinky nail um two thirds of the snakes head is made up of its gigging tic eyes. It's got a small mouth and it's it's about about a third stic as a pencils, basically a moving shoestring. It's incredibly, incredibly sin. You don't think I am thinking lexus, if we have done, come and just do some shots of liam, that's you then.

So what, what are we .

looking at? The snake that was crawling behind us in the jungle, that 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. He wants to find something to eat. So this is a blood 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 are handled being handled by these giant humans?

And as you were saying, IT reaches .

up to the leaves, and this naturally knows to go, look, just put anywhere near leaves. And it's like, I got this. He just wants to go right up into that tree. I just want you to try holding him and a real gentle just be the tree yet and just just kind of do the same thing you learned last night just nice and gentle yeah and see he's holding on to my finger and I just gone up the perfect, nice and easy. He's little radici hee's.

little goofy. Maybe is crazy. Maybe a fan of the podcast. And gigantic guys relative is body is huge.

J hilo, math .

traffic, trafic jungle.

And then and for everyone listening, as as we're handling the snake that we found that was crawling by us, like literally by our shoulder as we're talking a bat flies through, no joke, eight inches from lexis year, like just zipp passed his head as he's holding a snake while we're sitting here in the jungle, is just we're just ended now. Now he's going to try back up and how do you I want to want to once encourage .

him to come back. This.

his weave, this way, he's OK back. Yeah, I please. Okay, this is what i'm going to do. We going to say, thank you, mr. snake.

Thank R. R. snake.

mr. Snake, back up into the tree. Here you go. Here you go. Here you go, here you go and resume Normal podcasting. Now.

because I really are in the jungle.

I really are in the jungle. That's one of my favourite snakes. That's one of my favourite little aliens on this planet. Look at that.

IT is going on some long journey is good .

to the can be.

Carry the rest than I. So that little snake is one of the million the life forms. Hard, busy, are trying .

to protect exactly to me. I, after almost twenty years down here, the people here become my friends. The came in on the river, 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 bull those this forest, when they, when they chopped down these trees, they vanished, 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 is this little creature is 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 orchestra hole that creates climactic stability on this planet. And the amazon is one of the most important parts of that in each of these little guys is playing a role in there.

So one of the other fascinating life forms is other humans, but living a very different kind of life. So uncontacted tribes, would you find most fascinating about them?

What I find most fascinating about the uncontacted tribes? That will mean you are sitting here with microphones and a light somewhere out there in that darkness, in that direction, not so far away as the crowd lies.

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 there. They're living such primitive, isolated noma tic lives in the modern world. They are still living naked out in the jungle.

Truly incredible, truly remarkable. And I think that it's because they can't advocate for themselves. They can't protect themselves, sort like, well, we can let them get shot up by loggers and get to get let their land get butters while they hide. They have no idea that their world is being destroyed. Um but the sort of the scarious and most fascinating thing out there right now in the jingle.

what there because you spoken about them being dangerous. What do you think there are relationship with violence? I think why is violence part of their approach to the external world?

So from the best, I understand 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 Roberts 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 rubble, tries and collector attests.

And Henry ford tried doing for lana, tried having ruby plantations, but leaf blight killed IT. And so you had this period of horrendous extraction in the amazon, where the ribbons were coming down and just raping and pilgrims tribes and making them go out to tap these trees. And the uncontacted 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, 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, for a century late. That's why this far as to still hear. 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 knowledges. We don't know their creation, miss.

We know nothing about them. And they are just out there right now, posing 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 mates, so they have a very primitive existence. But oh, do you think their values. result. Do you think they're a nature similar to hours? And how do their values differ from hours?

This is complicated because the the antipope gist in my wants to say that they have A A historical reason for the violent life that they have. You know, they experienced incredible generational trauma some time ago, and that and because theyve 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 are speaking to one of them who is pulling Spike out of your hand. While he was explaining that he tried to help them, the brothers was minus.

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 him a bananas plantains plantains boat .

full of plantains.

And they shouted, they shot three hours at them in.

One of them actually hit him in the skull and put him in the hospital. He got a helicopter evacuated from his community. And so he's brave for surviving.

But he's he's a lucky survivor. They, they are incredibly accurate with those bamboo tipped arrows. Those arrows of seven feet longs.

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 long bow. He talking about a couple hundred meters on a long bow.

And they are deadly accurate. They can take spider monkeys out of a tree. And so their stories of loggers, and i've seen the photos of the bodies of loggers who attacked, who attacked one of the tribes, and the tribes had done anything.

These loggers came around the band. They started shooting shotguns at the tribes, and the tribes scattered into the forest. And as loggers boat, when around a bent, they just started flying. Arrow took out the boat driver, boats skid to the side and then everybody was standing in the river. You can't run and the tribe just to send IT on them and just poke .

pine full of arrows. Shogun versus bow. That's a shock and shell here, by the way. Yeah from the from the loggers.

Yeah, we picked that up yesterday. Was that yesterday?

Those I don't know.

I don't know.

One of the things that happens here, time loses meaning in in some kind of deep way that IT does when you're in a big city in the days, for example, their schedules in meetings in all this kind of stuff. IT transforms the meaning, your experience of time, your interaction with time, the role of time of us. I've forgotten time and I forgotten existence of the outside world.

And has I feel.

IT feels more honest. IT also puts him perspective like all the business ness, although IT kind of takes the alt out of the ant colony and says, hey, this, you're just an ant, is just an aloe and there's a big world out there yeah, it's a it's a chance to be grateful to celebrate this earth of hours and the things that make IT worth living on, including the simple things that make the individual life for the living, which is water and in food. From the the rest details, of course, the friendships and social and reaction is a really big one actually, that when i'm taken for granted because I didn't get a chance yet to .

really spend time alone .

and when I came here, i've gotten I just hang out with you and there's a kind of come right, right? There's a friendship there that if that's broken as a, that's a, that's a tough one too. Do you spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle? Ever get alone on here?

Yeah, yeah. I'm in the first fifteen years we were doing this week. There would be times that J J would be busy in town with his family, and I would for share 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 and have light sell. He was couple of candles in the darkness and attend.

And I was twenty twenty years old living in the amazon by myself. He boats sunk. And yet it's incredibly lonely. I I had to learn through experience because I thought there was a period. I think when you you know you're Young, as a Young man, I had this thing like, I wanted to prove that I could be like the explorer. 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 it's gray 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 doesn't matter.

But I A suncani like even just. Deep human level are given. If you have somebody share with. You ever just get a alone out here, just like this sense of lake existential dread, like what you know, the jungle has a way of not caring about individual orgasm is kind of turns. It's like IT makes you realize that life is fine quite intensely.

Yeah, for me it's comforting being out here because I find the the rat race, the national narrative, the, the the need to make money, that to worry about war, to to be outraged about the newest thing that that politician said, what that actor did and IT just, is always just as 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. Its nature has always been, for many people, been where things makes sense. And to me, I think i'm a simple analogue type of person that IT makes sense that when IT rains you get the river to stay warm and and you know you wait for the dawn and you see a little tree snake and and you say IT IT just IT makes IT makes more sense I think the overwhelming teaming complexity that is in the ant mound of society can be dishing for some people and I think that maybe is that is sexier, maybe just that I love nature. But um now .

if I when .

I land in J, F, K, I, I feel like a frighten animal like you as if you released like a like some animal that had never seen on to like to time square. And you could just imagine this dog with the tears back running away from taxes and just covering from the noise. And it's just hustle and bustle and people are brutal.

And how much you wanted for that is get in the car is screaming over the intercom and just everything, everything sensory changes. And let's get home. Okay, let's go.

You ve got a meeting. You've got to get to the next place. You're got to give a talk. You ve got to out, out, out here.

When we finish up here, what are we going? Na, do we're going to eat some food, maybe go catching a crown, go walk her on the jungle and highlights 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 be we can hold that candle up and and no 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 truth. 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 and that's to me, that's where the come rotten y comes from because no matter what will be, we can go to the most fancy s restaurant through the biggest, most famous people in world doesn't matter. We still remember what was like stand around on the jungle, going full scared, and 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 and that's cool.

He tack, all the, all those people are nice dresses in their expansive restaurants. He put in those conditions, they're all gonna the same thing as water.

And yes, so the same thing, all the beautiful people.

How's your view of your mortality evolved over your interaction of the 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 penev lent god spirit creator taking care of us and. I 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, have 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 to be the first to try out a new product in ubs. IT crushed, you know that that starts a terrible way to go. Or the people that used on the gold rush, they are using mercury g or LED IT was LED poisoning. And it's like a mid now few million people died that way. It's like, you wanna you want a good death, you know, you want to stand and down the eyes of a tiger hanging off the edge of a Cliff, saving somebody to have something, something to something worthy .

warriors death but riding a sixteen foot black came .

in just boots on screaming, yeah um that will be fun. We'll be a good one.

A lot of people say that you Carry the spirit of Steve in your heart in the way you Carry yourself in this world. I mean, he dug, I was full of joy if .

I have a percentage of server when I would be honored. But that I think there's only one, Steve. I think that he 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 is sort of transcended his T V. Show a.

Transcended his conservation work, IT. Transcended business. And entrepreneurship is just through 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 it's just amazing what one spirit can do. So if anybody you know makes that comparison, I I get I get really uncomfortable because to me, Steve, one is like just just the gold. 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, an 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 worked by loggers. I think the loggers or gold miners will take me out. I don't I don't picture myself going from animals, but that'll .

be heart broken too. Yeah, I would yeah.

at the same time though, like the curt cobain value of that, if I died doing what I love to protect, ever, I be so worth so much more like we'd get the thirty million if I died tomorrow, for sure. So we've already already talked about this.

My friends, and like, if I get waked, do the foundation make the documentary protect the river, protect the heartbeat, call IT the heartbeat jungle he, the heart beats, you know, be ready for because these things do happen. People get pissed if you get their way. And as many happy people is, and who whose lives changing, there's also gonna some jealous city upset people who are mad that they can make prostitutes out of Young girls and keep destroying the planet. And so they might just, they receive me.

Well, I hope you like a clean this with character, just just impossible to kill, like you squinted your eyes. On q, who do you think we'll play you in a movie?

Got somebody the right knows somebody who can live up tradition as all.

Yeah, italian. yeah. It's funny. Do you think of yourself as italian or human american?

I think I don't. You know, my life has been the united nations of of whatever. Like, I just to me, and I just, I don't.

That's the other thing. You go back to society. Everyone cestus with race to me. I'm like, look like pards have black babies and yellow babies. One mother, like, they are all lepardo and i'm so color blind and race blind and everything else. I've lived in india, my friends are proved an my family, we got battle and Philippines, just everything.

And so i've i'm so immersing IT that that when I I find that very daring and disconcerting, how much time we spend talking about, uh, different religions and just the differences in humans. And I do we're talking about whether not our ecosystems are going to be able to provide for us. We're talking about nuclear.

What we're talking about this prety serious shit on the table and we're over you're arguing over like shades of gray of it's it's so trivial that should drive me crazy and as as the outrage where it's like, no, you have to care. I've i've been criticize for not caring enough about that and i'm like, who cares what the hell am? Who gives a shit what the helm? A human, all human.

Yeah 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 are king couldn't have that good. You don't have pineapples in the winter. You even know what the fuck pineapple was. We have pineapples whenever we want them. We can fly on planes to other countries.

either less clarify we you mean a large fraction of the world. You know, I mentioned to one of the biggest things i've noticed when I immigrated from soviet union to the states is the how plentiful bananas and pineapples were the fruit section. The priority section of the didn't have to wait in line, have the grocery historic and just eat as many bananas and pineapples and Cherry and watermelon as as as one that's not everybody has that.

That's sure not everybody has that.

But but, but, but IT could be that king. no.

But a growing number of people .

today can .

feast on pineapple, can feast on pineapple and have toaster and new distracting apps all the way until the grave.

That's the thing that I I also noticed that I don't think so much about politics one here.

or do you haven't even talked .

about IT don't talk about the stupid differences between human, except to just kind of laugh at the absurd of IT on .

occasion trying to survive glaces and jungles and avalanches.

all kinds of should do think nature is brutal, has won of her, showed IT or is a 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 in light. So yes, there are gonna be hind as tearing each other apart. Yes, there's gonna a be retorted nations and poor, starving children. But we as humans have the power to work .

towards .

something more organized in that.

So there is there is a force of the nature is always searching .

for order for good. It's kind of a unifying theory. If you think about, I mean, all of the chaos of history and the wars and the chaos of nature, we we throw technology and and organization.

There's so many people, more people today than ever before, I think, who are so concerned, who realized that the incredible power, like what chain could all 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 were 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 harness this ability to do good in the world and be proud of IT and and and just change the, the, the darkness into something else.

When you are, have lived here and taking in the ways the amazon juggle how your views of god he mentioned, how your views of god change. Who is god?

I've come to believe that, again, back to that, that Chris wasn't a Christian, muhammad was in a muslim and butt wasn't a boodh. 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 to 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 coal? Is can it's so difficult and we see how people can cheat and steal and hurt and destroy and.

And the incredible impact that has on the world, the the returning exponential impact that one act of kind is 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 may you have the same beliefs in your alias 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 awaited.

Thank you for being enough of a psychopath too. 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, 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 very lux, thanks for thanks .

for listening to this conversation with paul rosey. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Joseph cambell. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a Hardy yes to your adventure. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.