Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Wed, 15 May 2024
Paul Rosolie is a naturalist, explorer, author, and founder of Junglekeepers, dedicating his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest. Support his efforts at https://junglekeepers.org Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - ShipStation: https://shipstation.com/lex and use code LEX to get 60-day free trial - Yahoo Finance: https://yahoofinance.com - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/lex to get $350 off - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/paul-rosolie-2-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Paul's Instagram: https://instagram.com/paulrosolie Junglekeepers: https://junglekeepers.org Paul's Website: https://paulrosolie.com Mother of God (book): https://amzn.to/3ww2ob1 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (12:29) - Amazon jungle (14:47) - Bushmaster snakes (26:13) - Black caiman (44:33) - Rhinos (47:47) - Anacondas (1:18:04) - Mammals (1:30:10) - Piranhas (1:41:00) - Aliens (1:58:45) - Elephants (2:10:02) - Origin of life (2:23:21) - Explorers (2:36:38) - Ayahuasca (2:45:03) - Deep jungle expedition (2:59:09) - Jane Goodall (3:01:41) - Theodore Roosevelt (3:12:36) - Alone show (3:22:23) - Protecting the rainforest (3:38:36) - Snake makes appearance (3:46:47) - Uncontacted tribes (4:00:11) - Mortality (4:01:39) - Steve Irwin (4:09:18) - God
The following is a conversation with Paul Rosalie, his second time on the podcast. But this time, we did the conversation deep in the Amazon jungle. I traveled there to hang out with Paul, and it turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime. I will post a video capturing some aspects of that adventure in a week or so.
It included everything from getting lost in dense, unexplored wilderness with no contact to the outside world to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more. Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist, explorer, author, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the rainforest. For this mission, he founded Jungle Keepers.
You can help him if you go to junglekeepers.org. This trip for me was life-changing. It expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world I'm fortunate to exist in with all of you. So I'm glad I went and I'm glad I made it out alive. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
We got ShipStation for fulfillment, Yahoo Finance for investors, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, 8sleeve for naps, and Shopify for selling stuff on the internet. Choose wise, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. It's a software designed to save you time and money on fulfillment, shipping stuff that you sell on the internet.
It integrates with Shopify and wherever else you sell stuff 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 from point A to point B. Part of that is the theoretical computer scientist in me because when you simplify that problem and formulate it as a graph theory problem, then you can perform all kinds of optimizations on it, which takes me back.
to some of my favorite courses on the theory and the practice. So numerical optimization, when you're talking about nonlinear programming, and then the more theoretical stuff with convex programming. A particular kind of formulation of an optimization problem can be easy to solve or hard to solve.
When I look at this world of logistics and shipping stuff from point A to point B, where there's like a million point As and a million point Bs, combinatorial madness of that, it's really exciting that there is systems that enable that all to work. Anyway, I'm glad ShipStation exists and I'm glad they're solving this tricky but extremely important problem.
Go to ShipStation.com slash Lex and use code Lex to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Yahoo Finance, a site that provides financial management reports, information, and news for investors.
I use it for the cool little feature of it letting you add your portfolio and thereby letting you monitor it and get news about real agent things. So they have a TD Ameritrade account and mutual fund there, which I guess got switched over to Charles Schwab. So there's a really nice interface that lets you monitor that.
But of course, as part of that interface, you can also see news of the crazy stuff that's going on in the markets. It 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.
It's a nice lens that we should see the world, one that contrasts with a more kind of political and geopolitical lens, which I often look at, and also contrasts with the historical lens. You know, I read a lot of history books, and there, time is slowed down. The ephemeral ups and downs of every day are not as important.
But of course, when you're living in the moment, in the day, this week, the ups and downs of the world are extremely important. And especially if you have money invested in certain small slices of that world. So I use Yahoo Finance for monitoring that perspective on the world. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com.
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It works for individuals, it works for couples. I remember seeing numbers, crazy numbers, like 350 million messages, chat, phone, video sessions. Over 35,000 licensed therapists. over 4.4 million people that 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, exploring the collective shadow of our species. It'd 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 own mind, our own conscious mind and the subjective view that it provides of the world. So for that subjective view, It's good to clean the lens, so to speak, every once in a while, and that's what I think talk therapy does.
And BetterHelp is super easy, discreet, affordable, available everywhere, so you should definitely try it at betterhelp.com slash lex, and if you go there, you'll save it in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
As I was deep in nature, disconnected completely from the world, and the sounds of the urban world, no machinery, no people, nothing, just nature. You can hear water, you can hear the wind, you can hear the animals, the insects, the little and the big, and just that, no people. So, as I was in that, I got a chance to really think about the productive world, let's say, the world of companies.
And it is indeed, out of the many things that make me happy, it is one of the things that makes me really happy, and that is to build, to create stuff in this world that helps people, whether that is as an individual programmer or on a larger scale by starting a company. All of that makes me truly happy.
And somehow in the jungle, full of gratitude to be able to exist on this beautiful earth, I also was full of gratitude for all the cool things that humans have built. But running a company is tricky, and that's what NetSuite helps with. In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. You can take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex.
That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep, and its new and amazing Pod 4 Ultra. One of the things when I was in the jungle, I mean, there's a few creature comforts that are taken away when you're out in nature, especially when you're deep out in nature.
And of course, one of the things you remember is the ability to have a bed to go to that's not full of insects and all that kind of stuff, but a bed that can be cool. Man, it would be amazing to get the A-sleep bed out. into the middle of the jungle, because it's hot out there. And to be able to cool down, which I do, with Eight Sleep would be a really cool experience.
Anyway, they've upgraded from Pod 3 to Pod 4. So Pod 4 does 2x the cooling power. And they also added a super cool thing called Pod 4 Ultra, which has an extra base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. that can control the positioning of the bed so it can elevate you, say, to like a reading position.
That's a really, really cool idea on many fronts, including like you have this integrated system that does the sensing of the sleep time and the sleep phase and the HRV and heart rate and all that kind of stuff. It does the cooling of both sides of the bed separately, and now we can control the positioning of the bed. It's crazy. I really love it when products keep rapidly evolving, improving.
That's really exciting to me. Go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I used it in just a few minutes to create an online store, lexfreeman.com slash store, to sell a few shirts.
It can be a small store, it can be a gigantic store, and it all is super easy, and they have a lot of third-party apps that are integrated seamlessly in.
For example, including on-demand printing, so I can just add a shirt there, and then you have a bunch of companies that do on-demand printing that print the shirt and ship the shirt and take care of the fulfillment and all that kind of stuff, and all of it is seamlessly integrated, super easy to monitor.
Once again, there's 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 are available online to connect humans together and let humans do their human things and help them flourish and enjoy life in all the ways that life can be enjoyed in the 21st century. Thank you to Shopify and thank you for all the sponsors of this podcast that are helping create systems of that nature.
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosalie. Where are we right now, Paul? Lex, we are in the middle of nowhere. It's the Amazon jungle.
There's vegetation, there's insects, there's all kinds of creatures. A million heartbeats, a million eyes.
So really, where are we right now? We are in Peru, in a very remote part of the western Amazon basin. And because of the proximity of the Andean cloud forest to the lowland tropical rainforest, we are in the most biodiverse part of planet Earth. There's more life
per square acre per square mile out here than there is anywhere else on earth not just now but in the entire fossil record i can't believe we're actually here i can't believe you actually came and i can't believe you forced me to wear a suit that was the people's choice trust me all right we've been through quite a lot over the last few days we've been through a bit let me ask you a ridiculous question
What are all the creatures right now, if they wanted to, could cause us harm?
The thing is, the Amazon rainforest has been described as the greatest natural battlefield on Earth because there's more life here than anywhere else, which means that everything here is fighting for survival. The trees are fighting for sunlight. The animals are fighting for prey. Everybody's fighting for survival.
And so everything that you see here, everything around us, will be killed, eaten, digested, recycled at some point. The... jungle is really just a giant churning machine of death and life is kind of this moment of stasis where you you maintain this collection of cells in a particular dna sequence and then and then it gets digested again and recycled back and renamed into everything
And so so the things the things in this forest, while they don't want to hurt us, there are things that are heavily defended because, for instance, a giant anteater needs claws to fight off a jaguar. A stingray needs a stinger on its tail, which is basically a serrated knife with venom on it to deter anything that would hunt that stingray. Even the catfish have pectoral fins that have razor fins.
long steak knife sized defense systems then you of course the jaguars the harpy eagles the piranha the candiru fish that can swim up a 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 except for an exception of maybe mosquitoes Every other animal just wants to eat and exist in peace. That's it.
But there is, each of those animals, like you described, have a kind of radius of defense. So if you accidentally step into its home, into that radius, it can cause harm. Or make them feel threatened.
Make them feel threatened. There is a defense mechanism that is activated. Some incredible defense mechanisms. I mean, you're talking about... 17-foot black caiman, crocodiles with significant size that could rip you in half, anacondas, the largest snake on Earth, bushmasters that can grow up to be 9 to I think even 11 feet long, and I've caught bushmasters that are thicker than my arms.
So for people who don't know, bushmasters, snakes, what are these things? These are vipers. I believe it's the largest viper on Earth. Venomous. Extremely venomous, with hinged teeth, tissue-destroying venom, Like, if you get bitten by a Bushmaster, they say you don't rush and try and save your own life. You try to savor what's around you. Look around at the world. Smoke your last cigarette.
Call your mom. That's it.
So that moment of stasis that is life is going to end abruptly when you interact with one of those. Yeah.
I even have... Even this...
This seemingly... Can I just pause at how incredibly beautiful it is that you could just reach to your right and grab a piece of the jungle?
It's like even this seemingly beautiful little fern. If you go this way on the fern, you're fine. As soon as you go this way, there's invisible little spikes on there if you want to... Oh, I see. I feel it. See that? It's like everything is defended.
If you're driving on the road and you have your arm out the side or if you're on a motorcycle going through the jungle and you get one of these, it'll just tear all the skin right off your body. It's kind of doing that to me now. So what would you do?
Like we're going through the dense jungle yesterday. Yeah. And you slide down the hill, your foot slips, you slide down, and then you find yourself staring a couple feet away from a Bushmaster snake. What are you doing? You're, for people who somehow don't know, are somebody who loves, admires snakes, who has met thousands of snakes, has worked with them, respects them, celebrates them.
What would you do with a Bushmaster snake?
Face-to-face. Face to face, this has happened. I've been there. It's nice. I've come face to face with a Bushmaster and there's two things, there's two reactions that you might get. One is if the Bushmaster decides that it's vacation time, if it's sleeping, if you just had a meal, they'll come to the edges of trails or beneath the tree and they'll just circle up.
Little spiral, big spiral, big pile of snake on the trail, and they'll just sit there. And one time there was a snake sitting on the side of a trail beneath a tree for two weeks. This snake was just sitting there, resting, digesting his food out in 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 ready to defend themselves. And so I once came across a Bushmaster in the jungle at night and this Bushmaster turned its head towards me, looked at me and made it very clear, I'm going to go this way. And so I did the natural thing that any snake enthusiast would do.
And I grabbed its tail. Now, 11 feet later by the head, the snake turned around and just said, if you want to meet God, I can arrange the meeting. I will oblige. And I decided to let the Bushmaster go. And so it's like that with most animals. A jaguar will turn and look at you and just remind you of how small you are.
Like, what did you see in the snake's eyes? How did you sense that this is not the right, this is gonna be your end if you proceed?
His readiness. I wanted to get him by the tail and show him to the people that were there and maybe work with the snake a little bit. as an 11-foot snake, the snake turned around and made it very clear, like, not today, pal. It's not gonna happen. Is it in the eyes and the movement and the tension of the body? It was the movement and the S of the neck.
It was as if you pushed me and I went, let's go, make my day. Yeah. Like, he just looked a little bit too ready. Yeah.
he's like i love this okay all right so you know you just know you just know whereas like the snake you met last night yeah beautiful snake such a calm little thing he just focuses on eating baby lizards and little snails and things and that snake has no concept of defending itself it has no way to defend itself so even a even something the size of a blue jay could just come and just peck that thing in the head and swallow it and it's a helpless little snake so it's
It's really, it kind of depends on the animal. It depends on the mood you catch them in. Each one has a different temperament. The grace of its movement was mesmerizing.
Curious almost. Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing, projecting onto it.
But it was... The tongue flicking was a sign of curiosity. He was trying to figure out what was going on. He was like, why am I on this treadmill of human skin? You know? They're just trying to get to the next thing, trying to get hidden, trying to get away from the light.
Also, the texture of the scales is really fascinating. I mean, it's my first snake I've ever touched. It's so interesting. It was just such an incredible system of muscles that are all interacting together to make that kind of movement work and all the texture of its skin, of its scales. What do you love about snakes?
From my first experience with a snake to all the thousands of experiences you had with snakes, what do you love about these creatures?
I think it's, when you just spoke about it, that's 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 wondrous that happens in our brain. Maybe it's just this 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, but you look at it from a distance and you go, whoa. or it's a harmless little grass snake that you can pick up and enjoy and give to a child. They're just these strange legless animals that just exist. They don't even have eyelids. They're so different than us. They have a tongue that senses the air.
And they, to me, are so beautiful. And I've my whole life been defending snakes from humans. And they seem misunderstood. I think they're incredibly beautiful. There's
every color and variety of snakes there's venomous snakes there's tree snakes there's huge crushing anacondas it's just of the 2600 species of snakes that exist on earth there's just such beauty such complexity and such simplicity they're just they're just to me to me um i feel like i feel like i'm i'm friend with snake and and they rely on me to protect them from my people
Friend with snake.
Me friend snake.
Me friend snake. You said some of them are sometimes aggressive, some of them are peaceful. Is this a mood thing, a personality thing, a species thing?
What is it? So as far as I know, there's only really two snakes on Earth that could be aggressive because aggression indicates offense. And so a reticulated python has been documented as eating humans. Anacondas, although while it hasn't been publicized, they have eaten humans.
every single other snake from boa constrictor to bushmasters to spitting cobra to grass snake to garter snake to everything else every single other snake does not want to interact with you they have no interest so there's no such thing as an aggressive snake once you get outside of anaconda and reticulated python aggression could be trying to eat you that's predation but
For every other snake, a rattlesnake, if it was there, would either go escape and hide itself or it would rattle its tail and tell us, don't come closer. A cobra will hood up and begin to hiss and say, don't approach me. I'm asking you nicely not to mess with me. And most other snakes are fast or they stay in the trees or they're extremely camouflaged, but their whole MO is just don't bother me.
I don't want to be seen. I don't want to be messed with. In fact, all I want to do is be left alone. And once in a while, I just want to eat. And by the way, When you see a snake drink, your heart will break. It's like seeing, it's the only thing that's cuter than a puppy.
Like watching a snake touch its mouth to water and just, you just see that little mouth going as they suck water in and it's like, it's just so adorable watching this scaled animal just be like, I need water.
In a state of vulnerability. Yeah. But bro, there's nothing cuter than a little puppy with a tongue. A baby ball python.
All right.
Baby king cobra. What's it take you for? Baby elephant. So what are they? They're like at a puddle and they just take it in.
They can be at a puddle and they just take it in. Or one time in India, I was with a snake rescuer and we found this nine foot king cobra, this god of a snake. They're Ophiophagus hanna is their Latin name. And they're snake eaters. They're the king of the snakes, the largest venomous snake. And the people that call, called the snake rescuer, cause that's a profession in India.
Um, you know, it had gotten into their kitchen or their backyard. And so we showed up and we got the snake and the snake rescuer. He knew he looked at the snake and he went to me. He said, you know, why do you think the snake would go in a house? And he was quizzing me. And I actually went, you know, I don't know. Is it warm? Is it cold?
You know, like sometimes cats like to go into, into the warm, warm cars in the winter. And he was like, he's thirsty. He goes, watch this. He took a water bottle. poured it over. Now the snake is standing up. Snake stands up three feet tall. This is a huge king cobra with a hood, terrifying snake to be around. He leans over to the snake and the snake is standing there trusting him.
And he takes a water bottle and pours it onto the snake's nose. And the snake turns up its nose and just starts drinking from the water bottle. Human giving water to snake. Big, scary snake. But this human understood. Snake gets water. Snake gets released in jungle. Everybody's okay.
So sometimes the needs are simple. They just don't have the words to communicate them to us humans. Yeah. And is it disinterest or is it fear? Almost like they don't notice us? Or is it where the unknown aspect of it, the uncertainty, is a source of danger?
Well, animals live in a constant state of danger. Like if you look at that deer that we saw last night, it's stalking through the jungle, wondering what's going to eat it, wondering if this is the last moment it's going to be alive. It's like animals are constantly terrified of that this is their last moment.
Yeah, just for the listener, we're walking through the jungle late at night. So it's darkness except our headlamps on. And then all of a sudden, Paul stops. He looks in the distance. He sees two eyes. I think you thought, is that a jaguar or is it a deer? And it was moving its head like this. Like scared or maybe trying to figure it, trying to localize itself, trying to figure out.
Trying to see around. You're doing the same to it. The two of you like moving your head. Yeah. And like deep into the jungle. Like, I don't know. It's pretty far away through the trees. You can still see it.
30 feet or so, yeah.
That's the thing to actually mention. I mean, with the headlamp, you see the reflection in their eyes. It's kind of incredible to see a creature, to try to identify a creature by just the reflection from its eyes.
Yeah, and so the cats, sometimes you'll get like a greenish or a bluish glow from the cats. The deer are usually white to orange. Caiman, orange. Nightjars, orange. Snakes can usually be like orange moths. spiders sparkle. And so you have all these different, as you walk through the jungle, you can see all these different eyes.
And when something large looks at you like that deer did, your first thing is, what animal is this that I am staring back at? Because through the light, you kind of get, you see the reflection off the bright light off the leaves. And I couldn't tell at first, because actually those big bright eyes, it could have been an ocelot, could have been a jaguar, could have been a deer.
And then when it did this movement, that's what the cats do. They try to see around your light. I thought maybe Lex Friedman's here. We're going to get lucky. It's going to be a jag right off trail.
Your definition of lucky is a complicated one. Yeah. It's a fascinating process when you see those two eyes trying to figure out what it is. And it is trying to figure out what you are in that process. Let's talk about caiman. We've seen a lot of different kinds of sizes. We've seen a baby one, a bigger one. Tell me about these 16-foot-plus apex predators of the Amazon rainforest.
The big, bad black caiman, which is the largest reptilian predator in the Amazon except for the anaconda. They kind of both share that notch of apex predator.
They were actually hunted to endangered species level in the 70s because they're they're leather black scale leather But they're coming back They're coming back and they're huge and they're beautiful and I was I was walking near a lake and I never understood how big they could get except for I was walking near a lake last year and I was following this stream, you know, it's like when you found a little stream and it's just a little trickle of water and all of a sudden this river otter had been running the other direction on the tree on the stream River otter comes up to me and I swear to God this animal looked to me and went hey
And I went, hey, he was like, didn't expect to see me there. And he turned around, he like did a little spin, started running down the stream. Then he turned around and you could tell he was like, let's go. And I, you know, I'm not anthropomorphizing here. The animal was asking me to come with him. So I followed the river otter down the stream.
We started running down the stream and the river otter looks at me one more time is like, yo, jumps into the lake. And I'm like, what does he want me to see? Now in the lake, there's river otters doing dives and freaking out and going up and down and up and down. And they're very excited. They're screaming, they're screeching.
All of a sudden, and I've never seen anything like this except for in like Game of Thrones, this croc head comes flying out of the water. All of the river otters were attacking this huge black caiman, 16 feet, head half the size of this table. And she was thrashing her tail around, creating these huge waves in the water, trying to catch an otter.
And they're so fast that they were zipping around or biting her and then going around. And this otter, swear to God, interspecies, looked at me and went, watch this. We're fucking with this caiman. It was amazing. And I, for the first time I got to stand there watching this incredible interspecies fight happening. They weren't trying to kill the caiman. They were just trying to mess with it.
And the caiman was doing his best to try and kill these otters. And they were just having a good time in that sick sort of hyper intelligent animal, like wolf sort of way where they were just going, you can't catch us.
Yeah, like intelligence and agility versus like raw power and dominance. I mean, I got to handle some smaller caiman and just the power they had, you know, you scale that up to imagine what a 16 foot, even a 10 foot, any kind of black caiman, the kind of power they deliver. Maybe can you talk to that? Yeah. The power they can generate with their tail, with their neck, with their jaw.
Alligators and caiman and crocodiles have some of the strongest bite forces on earth. Think a saltwater crocodile wins as the strongest bite force on earth. And you got to hold about a, what was it? A four foot spectacle caiman. And you got to feel, I mean, you're a black belt in jujitsu. How do you compare the explosive force you felt from that animal compared to what a human can generate?
It's difficult to describe in words. There's a lot of power. And we're talking about the power of the neck. I mean, there's a lot. It can generate power all up and down the body. So probably the tail is a monster. But just the neck and, you know, not to mention the power of the bite.
And the speed too, because the thing I saw and got to experience is how still and calm, at least from my amateur perspective, it seems calm, still, and then from that sort of zero to 60, you could just go wild. Just thrash it. And then there's also a decision it makes in that split second, whether as it thrashes, is it going to kind of bite you on the way or not?
And that's where of the four species of caiman that we have here, you see differences in their personalities as a species. And so you can like, just like, you know, like generally golden retrievers are viewed as a friendly dog. Generally, not every single one of them, but as a rule. Spectacle caiman. Puppies. You released one in the river and it did nothing. Didn't bite one of your fingers.
It just swam away. We dropped one in the river and what did it do? It chose peace. Now I had a smooth fronted caiman a few weeks ago and this is probably about a three and a half footer, not big enough to kill you, but very much big enough to grab one of your fingers and just shake it off your body. Just death roll it right off.
And as I was being careful, totally different caiman than the one that you got to see. This one has spikes coming off it. They're like, like, like leftover dinosaurs. It's like they evolved during the dinosaur times and never changed. They have spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growths that you don't see on the other smoother caiman.
And I tried to release this one without getting bitten. And I threw it into the stream, gently into the water, just went, wah, and tried to pull my hands back. And as I pulled my hand back, this caiman in the air turned around and just tried to give me one parting blow and just got one tooth, whack, right to the bone of my finger. And a bone injury feels different than a skin injury.
So you instantly... And it just reminds you of, that's a caiman with a head this big. And it hurt. And I know that it could have taken off my finger. Now, if you scale that up to a black caiman... It's rib crushing, it's zebra head removing size, you know, just meat destroying. It's incredible, nature's metal sort of, you know, just raw power.
So what's the biggest crock you've been able to handle? We were doing caiman surveys for years and we would go out at night and you want to figure out what are the populations of black caiman, spectacle caiman, smooth fronted caiman, dwarf caiman. And the only way to see which caiman you're dealing with is to catch it.
Because a lot of times you get up close with the light and you can see the eyes at night, but you can't quite see what species it is. For instance, this past few months, we found two baby black caiman on the river, which is unprecedented here. We haven't seen that in decades. So it's important that we monitor our croc population. So I started catching small ones.
In Mother of God, I write about the first one that me and JJ caught together, which was probably a little bigger than this table. And probably mid-20s bravado and competition with... other young males of my species, led to me trying to go as big as I could. And I jumped on a spectacle caiman that was slightly longer than I am. And I'm 5'9", so I jumped on this probably six-foot croc
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 it took me one side, I barely had enough time to realize what was happening before it beat me against the ground. My headlamp came off. So now I'm blind in the dark, laying in a river in the Amazon rainforest, hugging a six foot crocodile.
And I went, JJ! As I always do. But in that moment, before I even let go, I knew I couldn't let go of the croc because if I let go of the croc, I thought she was going to destroy my face. So I said, okay, now I'm stuck here. If I just stay here, I can't release her. I need help. But I was like, I'm never, ever, ever, ever going to try and solo catch a croc this big again.
I was like, this is, this is, I knew in that moment, I was like, this is good enough.
So anything longer than you, you don't control the tail. You don't have, you have barely control. than anything really.
Yeah, and that's a spectacle caiman. A black caiman is a whole other order of magnitude there. It's like saying like, oh, you know, I was play fighting with my golden retriever versus I was play fighting with like, you know, what's the biggest, scariest dog you could think of? The dog from Sandlot, a giant gorilla dog thing, like a Malamute, something huge. What are they called? Mastiffs.
Yeah, Mastiffs. I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs. What do you admire about black caiman? They've been... here for a very, very long time. There's something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way of being, about their presence in this jungle.
With crocodiles, you're looking at this mega survivor. They're in a class with sharks where it's like, they've been here so long. When you talk about multiple extinctions, you talk about the sixth extinction, Earth's going through all this stuff, the crocodiles and the cockroaches have seen it all before. They're like, man, we remember what that comet looked like. And they're not impressed. Yeah.
They have this, they carry this wisdom and their power.
Yeah.
In the simplicity of their power, they carry the wisdom. Yeah.
And they're just sitting there in the streams and they don't care. And even if there's a nuclear holocaust, you know that there would just be some crocs sitting there dead-eyed in that stagnant water waiting for the life to regenerate so they could eat again.
It's going to be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches. And the cockroaches are just background noise. Yeah, they'll always be there. Sons of bitches. You know, we're talking about individual black caiman and caiman and different species of caiman, but whenever they're together and you see multiple eyes, which I've gotten to experience, it's quite a feeling.
There's just multiple eyes looking back at you. Of course, for you, that's immediate excitement. You immediately go towards that. You want to see it. You want to explore it. Maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Can you just describe that feeling when they're together and they're looking at you? So head above water, eyes reflecting the light.
Yeah. So the other night, Lex and I were in the river with JJ surviving a thunderstorm. We're in the rain and we had covered our covered our equipment with our boats. And the only thing that we could do was get in the river to keep ourselves dry. And so we were in the river at night, in the dark, no stars, just a little bit of canopy silhouetted with all this rain coming down.
It was such a din, you could hardly hear anything. And all the way down river, I just see this Cayman eye in my headlamp light. And I started walking towards it because I was like, this is even better. We can catch a Cayman while we're in this thunderstorm in the Amazon river. And when JJ went, Paul, it's too far. JJ very rarely, very rarely, like he'll make a suggestion.
Like he'll usually go like, maybe it's far. But in that situation, deep in the wilderness, unknown came in size. He went, Paul, it's too far. Don't leave the three of us right now. Yeah. We're too far out to take risks. We're too far out to be walking along the riverbed at night because then, you know, right here at the research station, if you step on a stingray, you get evac'd. Out where we went-
Nothing. So for me, seeing those eyes, I think I've become so comfortable with so many of these animals that I may have crossed into the territory where I feel so comfortable with many of these animals that they just don't worry me anymore. I mean, I looked at you in a raft while you had a sizable body. probably about 12 foot black Cayman right next to your raft.
I watched its head go under the bubbles. It was all coming up right next to your raft as he was just moving along the bottom of the river. Cause he looked at me, went under and then my raft passed and yours came over him. So now I'm looking back and your raft is going over this black Cayman and I'm going, I'm not worried at all. I was not worried. I was not worried that the Cayman would freak out.
I was not worried that he would try to attack you. I knew 100% that came and just wanted us to go. So you could go back to eating fish.
Yeah.
That's it. Man, it's humbling.
It's humbling these giant creatures. And especially at night, like you were talking about. And for me, it's both scary and just beautiful when the head goes under. Because like underwater, it's their domain. So anything can happen. So what is it doing that its head is going under? It could be bored. It could be hungry, looking for some fish.
It could be maybe wanting to come closer to you to investigate. Maybe you have some food around you. Maybe it's an old friend of yours and just wants to say hi. I don't know.
I have a few on the river, old friends. Okay. Um, no, when we see their heads go under, it's just, they're just getting out of the way we're, we're shining a light at them and they're going, why is there a light at night? I'm uncomfortable. Head under. So these caiman, again, you think of it as this big aggressive animal, but I don't know anybody that's been eaten by a black caiman.
And the smaller species, smooth-fronted caiman, dwarf caiman, spectacle caiman, they're not going to eat anybody. Again, at the worst, if you were doing something inappropriate with a caiman, like you jumped on it and were trying to do research and it bit your hand, it could take your hand off. But that's the only time.
I've been walking down the river and stepped on a caiman and the caiman just swims away. And so in my mind, caiman are just these, they're peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the river. And so to me, they are my friends.
And I worry about them because two months ago we were coming up river and on one of the beaches was a beautiful, about five foot black caiman with a big machete cut right through the head. The whole caiman was wasted. Nothing was eaten. But the caiman was dead. What do you think that was? Curious humans. Just committing violence? Yeah. Just loggers. People who aren't from this part of the Amazon.
Because a local person... would either eat the animal or not mess with it. Like Pico would never kill a caiman for no reason because it doesn't make any sense. So these are clearly people who aren't from the region, which usually means loggers because they've come from somewhere else.
They're doing a job here and they're just cleaning their pots in the river at night and they see eyes come near them because the caiman probably smells fish. And then they just whack because they want to see it. And they're just curious monkeys on a beach. And again, me friend of caiman, I protect from my type.
That said, you know, you protect your friends and you analyze and study your friends. But sometimes friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding. And if you have a bit of a misunderstanding with a black caiman, I feel like just a bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a bone crushing situation.
But not for a little five foot caiman. And I think that's incredibly speciesist of you. A ball of humans or a ball of caiman? No, like all my friends do the same thing. They go, you swim in the Amazon rainforest? You know, you swim in that river? And I go, yes, every day. We, you know, backflips into the river. We've been swimming in the river how many times?
With the piranha and the stingray and the candiru and the caiman and the anacondas, all 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 that, to do that knowing and having researched all the different things that can kill you, which I feel like most of them are in the river. What allows you to just get in there with us?
Well, I think it's something about you where you become like this portal through which it's possible to see nature is not threatening, but beautiful. And so in that you kind of naturally by hanging out with you, I get to see the beauty of it. There is danger out there, but the danger is part of it. Just like there's a lot of danger in the city. There's danger in life.
There's a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally, physically. There's a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of ways. We went on an expedition to the forest, just twisting your ankle, breaking your foot. getting a bite from a thing that gets infected. There's a lot of ways to die and get hurt in the stupidest of ways in a non-dramatic came and eating you alive kind of way.
Yeah. It strikes me as unfair because humans were still in our minds so... so programmed to worry about that predator, that predator, that predator. What predator? We've killed everything. Black caimans are coming off the endangered species list. We exterminated wolves from North America. I actually heard a suburban lady one time tell her son, watch out, foxes will get you. Foxes.
Yeah.
They eat baby rabbits and mice. Well, in the case of apex predators, I think when people say dangerous animals... They really are talking about just the power of the animal. And the Black Camel have a lot of power. A lot of power.
And it's almost just a way to celebrate the power of the animal. Sure. And if it's in celebration, then I'm all for it because my God, is that power. Like the waves of fury that you saw. Like when that tail, I mean, you saw the tail of the spectacle, that perfect, amazing thing with all those interlocking scales that works. So it's like a perfect creation of engineering.
And then when you have one that's this thick, And all of a sudden that thing is moving with all the acceleration of that power. Whoa, the volume of water, the sound that comes out of their throat. They're such, they're dragons.
We talked about the scales of the snake with like, they came in just the way it felt was incredible. Just the armor, the texture was so cool. I don't know, like the bottom one came in and had a certain kind of texture. And it just all feels like power, but also all feels like designed really well. It's like exploring through touch, like a World War II tank or something like that.
It's the engineering that went into this thing.
Yeah.
That like... The mechanism of evolution that created a thing that could survive for such a long time. It's just incredible. This is a work of art. The defense mechanisms, the power of it, the damage it can do, how effective it is as a hunter, all of that. You can feel that just by touching it.
Do you ever see the mashup where they put side by side the image of, I think it's a falcon in flight next to a stealth bomber, and they're almost the exact same design. It's incredible. What's the equivalent for a croc? Like you said, maybe a tank. Maybe a tank. More like an armadillo turtle. Yeah, like hippos. Yeah, there may not be a war machine equivalent of a crocodile.
It would have to have like a... big jaw element to it.
In the water, I mean, we talked also about hippos. Those are interesting creatures from all the way across the world. Just monsters. Yeah. Hippos and rhinos. Hippos are bigger, usually, or rhinos are bigger. Rhinos. Rhinos, after elephants, is the largest white rhinos. They can be terrifying too, again, when you step into the defense.
Absolutely, but I have to tell you, after being around so many rhinos, I have rhino friends, black and white rhinos, and they're all sweethearts. And I mean, I mean sweethearts. And I mean, when you look at a rhino, It's like a living dinosaur. I know it's a mammal, but somehow it screams dinosaur because it seems like Pleistocenic and from another age with the giant horn.
And they're so much bigger than you think. Like they're minivan sized animals. Like we're not taller than they are. at the shoulder and they have the strange shaped head and the huge horn and they sit there eating grass all day. So if a rhino is dangerous to a human, it's because the rhino is going, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. Don't, don't hurt my baby. And then they're like, you know what?
I'll just kill you. It'd be easier because you're scaring me right now. You're too close to that rhino.
Yeah.
And so like there again, I just think it's funny because humans were so quickly to go, which snakes are aggressive? There are no aggressive snakes. You know, rhinos can be dangerous. if provoked, otherwise they're peaceful, fat grass unicorns. They're really pretty calm.
We had these incredible giant animals and the largest animals on our planet, the black caiman, the rhinos, the elephants, all the big, beautiful stuff is becoming less and less. And it almost reminds me like in Game of Thrones, they're like, yeah, in the beginning, they're like, yeah, there used to be dragons. And it was like this memory. And it's like, yeah, we used to have mammoths.
And we used to have stellar sea cows that were 16 feet long, manatees. And there were things we used to have, the Caspian tiger that only went extinct in the 90s, our lifetimes. And that's mind blowing to me. That has haunted me since I'm a child. I remember learning about extinction and I went, wait, you're telling me that
I remember being a kid and going, by the time I grew up, you're saying that gorillas could be gone. Elephants could be gone. And because we're doing it. And then I just, that I remember, I remember looking at the nightlight being blurry because I was crying. Yeah. I was so upset. Oh, and it was Lonesome George, that turtle, the Galapagos tortoise where there was one left.
And they said, if we just had a female, he could live. And as a six, seven, eight-year-old, that destroyed me. We're all just starting to get laid, including that turtle. Including that turtle for a few hundred years. Dude.
So for young people out there, you think you're having trouble, think about that turtle.
Think about that turtle. Yeah. You know, there's a turtle that Darwin and Steve Irwin both owned. Yeah. Yeah. I heard about that turtle. Man, they live a long time. Yeah. They've seen things. They've seen things. There's a great like... internet joke where they're accusing him of being incongruous with modern times. They're like, he did nothing to stop slavery. He didn't fight in World War II.
Cancel the turtle.
Yeah, cancel the turtle.
Oh, shit. What a world we live in. So it's interesting, you mentioned black caiman and anacondas are both apex predators. So it seems like the reason they can exist in similar environments is because they feed on slightly different things. How is it possible for them to coexist? I read that anacondas can eat caiman, but not black caiman.
How often do they come in conflict? So anacondas and caiman occupy the exact same niche. And they're born at almost the exact same size. And unlike most species, they don't have sort of a size range that they're confined to. They start at this big. Baby caiman are this big. Baby anacondas are a little longer, but they're thinner and they don't have legs. So it's the same thing in terms of mass.
And... They're all in the streams or at the edges of lakes or swamps. And so the baby anacondas eat the baby caiman. Baby caiman can't really take down an anaconda. They're going for little insects and fish. They have quite a small mouth. So they, again, it's in their interest to hide from everything. A bird, a heron can eat a baby caiman, pop it back.
Mm-hmm.
And so they have to survive, but the anaconda and the caiman kind of joust as they grow.
Can you actually explain how the anaconda would take down a caiman? Like, would it first use constriction and then eat it, or what's the methodology?
Yeah, so anacondas have kind of a, I don't know, like a three-point... constriction system where their first thing is anchor. So like jujitsu. So the first thing is latch on to you. I like how I'm writing this down. Like, all right, this is jujitsu, like a masterclass here. This is for when you're wrestling an anaconda, just in case.
And you'd be like the coach on the sideline screaming.
You got him, Lex. Don't let him take the back. Yeah. All right. So one time me and JJ were following a herd of collie peccary and JJ's teaching me tracking. So we're following the hoof prints through the mud and we're doing this and I'm talking about no backpacks, just machetes, bare feet, running through the jungle. And we come to this stream and JJ's like, I think we missed him.
You know, I think they went. And I'm like, no, no, no, they went here. Look. And not because I'm a great tracker, because I can see, you know, a few dozen footprints, hundreds of individual footprints right there. And I'm going, no, no, they just crossed here. And JJ was like, you know what? We're not going to get eyes on him today. He was like, it's okay. He's like, we did good.
We followed him for a long time. And I was like, cool. And then I was trying to gauge, like, can I drink this stream? And I see a culpa. And a culpa is a salt deposit where animals come to feed because sodium is a deficiency that most herbivores have here. And all of a sudden I just hear like the sound of a wet stick snapping, just that bone crunch.
And I looked down and there's about a 16-foot anaconda wrapped around a freshly killed peccary, wild boar. And what this anaconda had done was as all the pigs were going across the stream, the anaconda had grabbed it by the jaw, swiped the legs, wrapped around it, bent it in half, and then crushed its ribs.
And that's what the anaconda do, whether it's to mammals, to caiman, it's all the same thing. It's grab on. They have six rows of backwards facing teeth. So once they hit you, they're never going to come off. You actually have to go deeper in and then open before you can come out. All those backward facing teeth. So they have an incredible anchor system.
And then they use their weight to pull you down to hell, to pull you down into that water, wrap around you. And then start breaking you. And every breath you take, you go, and you're up against a barrier. And then when you exhale, they go a little tighter and you're never going to get that space back. Your lungs are never going to expand again.
And I know this because I've been in that crush before JJ pulled me out of it. And so this pig, the anaconda had gotten it. And as the pig was thrashing and the anaconda was wrapping around, it had bent it in half. And I just heard those vertebrae going. And so for a caiman, it's the same thing. They just grab them, they wrap around it, and then they have to crush it until there's no response.
They'll wait an hour. They'll wait a long time until there's no response from the animal. They'll overpower it. Then they'll reposition, probably yawn a little bit, open their jaw, and then start forcing that entire... Now, here's the crazy thing. is that an anaconda has stomach acid capable of digesting an entire crocodile where nothing comes out the other side.
And when you see how thick the bony plate of a crocodile skull is, that that can go in the mouth and nothing comes out the other side. That's insane. And so it always made me wonder, on a chemistry level, how you can have such incredible acid in the stomach that doesn't harm the anaconda itself.
and someone said but it's able to digest oh it's some kind of mucus oh like the mucus there's a lot oh interesting there's levels of protection from the anaconda itself but it seems like the anaconda is such a simple system as an organism like that simplicity taking a scale it could just do the can swallow a caiman digested slowly i know but my question was how how on earth is it
physically possible to have this hellish bile that can digest anything, even something as, as, as horrendous as a, as a came in scales and bones and all the hardest shit in nature and then not hurt the snake itself. And I had a chemist explained to me that it's probably some sort of mucus system that, that lines the stomach and neutralizes the acid and keeps it floating in there.
But my God, that must be powerful stuff.
So what does it feel like being crushed, choked by an anaconda?
When an anaconda is wrapped around you and you find yourself in the shocking realization that these could be your last moments breathing,
you are confronted with the vast disparity in power that there is so much power in these animals so much crushing deliberate reptilian ancient power that doesn't care they're just trying to get you to stop they just want you to stop ticking and there's nothing you can do and there's i find it very awe-inspiring when i encounter that kind of power when you
even if it's that you see you know you see a dog run you know you ever try to outrun a dog and they just zip by you and you go wow you know or you see a horse kick and you go oh my god if that if that hoof hit anyone's head it'd knock them 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 we dream of doing it like imagine if like a muay thai kickboxer could could harness that sort of cayman power that smash
Um, and so it's, it's just awe inspiring. I think it's really, really impressive what animals can do. And we're, we're all, you know, we're all the same sort of makeup for the most part, all the mammals, you know, we all have our skeleton skeletons look so similar. We all have like, you know, if you look at like a kangaroos, biceps and chest, it looks so much like a, like a, like a, a man's.
And if same thing goes for a bear or you ever see a naked chimp, there's like chimps with alopecia. Oh, shit. Oh, they're shredded. It looks like a bodybuilder. It's got cuts and huge, huge everything. It's got pecs, and they got that face that's just like... Just let me in. What now? Where's your wallet?
Do something. But yeah, but there's the specialization of a lifetime of doing damage to the world and using those muscles. It just makes you that much more powerful than most humans because humans, I guess, have more brain, so they get lazy. They start puzzle solving versus using the biceps directly.
Well, yes and no. And I have this question, okay? So I, you know, that whole you are what you eat thing. Now, we one time here had two chickens. And one of them was a wild chicken, like from the farm, had walked around its whole life finding insects. And the other chicken was like factory raised. And so we cut the heads off of both of them and started getting ready to cook them.
Now, the factory raised chicken was like... a much higher percentage of fat, had less muscle on its body, was softer tissue, a lighter color. The farm-raised chicken had darker, more sinewy muscles, less fat, was clearly a better made machine. And so my question is, Is that what's happening with us?
You know, like if you go see a Sherpa who's been walking his whole life and pulling, you know, and walking behind musk oxes and lifting things up mountains and breathing clean air and not being in the city versus someone that's just been chowing down at IHOP for 40 years and never getting off the couch. Like, I imagine it's the same thing that you become what you eat.
Yeah, I mean like you and I were like half dead running up a mountain. Meanwhile, there's a grandma just like walking and she's been walking that road and she's just built different. With her alpaca on her shoulders. With a baby. They're just built different when you apply your body in a physical way your whole life.
Yeah. Like, you can't replicate that. Like, just like that chimp has those, from constantly moving through the canopy, constantly using those arms. Just like if you're, you know, if you see an Olympic athlete or you hug Rogan. Exactly the same. You just go, why is there so much muscle here?
That's exactly what I feel like when you give him a hug. This is definitely a chimp of some sort. How does that, just the constriction of the anaconda, just the feeling of that, are they doing that based on instinct or is there some brain stuff going on? Like, is this just like a basic procedure that they're doing and they just really don't give a damn? They're not like thinking, oh, Paul,
This is this kind of species. It would taste good.
Or is it just a mechanism to just start activating and you can't stop it? With an anaconda, I really think it's the second one. I do think that they're impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane. I think they're a very simple system, a very ancient system. And I think that once you hit predation mode, it's going down no matter what. This stupid mosquito. I'm going like this.
And every time he just flies around my hand, like I'm a big, slow giant. And he just goes around my hand and then he goes back to the same spot. Like, and I'm like, no. And then he comes right back to the same spot. It's like, it's like, he's just going, fuck you.
Now here's the question. If the mosquito is stupid and you can't catch it, what does that make you? Fuck.
and stupid dude i flicked a wasp off me the other day it flew back like 12 feet and in the air corrected and then flew back at my face it made so many correct like calculations and corrections and decided to come back and let me know about it and it was like that was probably went back to the nest said guess what happened today this bitch-ass kid from brooklyn tried to flick me and i showed him what's up i had him running they had a good chuckle on that one
You actually mentioned to me, just on the topic of anacondas, that you've been participating in a lot of scientific work 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 and their environment. So you're actually a co-author on a paper
on a couple of papers, but one of them is on anacondas and studying green anaconda hunting patterns.
What's that about? So the lead authors of that paper, Pat Champagne and Carter Payne, 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 been positioned just below a copa.
And then other people began noticing that anacondas seemed to always be beneath these culpas, where mammals were going to be coming. And that contrasted with what we knew about anacondas. Because what we understood about anacondas is that they're purely ambush predators and they don't pursue their prey. but what we began finding out here. And Pat led the process of amazing scientists.
He worked with Acadia University for a long time, worked with us for a long time. And he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an anaconda right around here and we were able to see their movements. And that's what these papers are showing is that they actually do pursue their prey. They do move up and down using the streams as corridors through the forest.
They actually do pursue their prey. They actually do seek out food. So, I mean, think about it. It's a giant anaconda. Obviously, it can't just sit in one spot. It has to put some work into it. And so they're using scent and they're using communication to use the streams. So you could be walking in the forest in a very shallow stream and see a sizable anaconda looking for a meal.
So in the shallow stream, it moves not just in the water, but in the sand. Yeah. So it also likes to borrow a little bit.
They borrow quite a bit. And so these large snakes operate subterranean more than we think. Interesting. Like there's times that you'll go with a tracker, you go with a telemetry set and it'll say, like, we'll be over the snake. Snake's underground. Snake has found either a recess under the sides of the stream. You saw it last night where all the fish have their holes under the side of the stream.
There was a six foot dwarf caiman right in the stream, right where we were standing. He had his cave. He goes under there. They know, they have their system. Yeah, we walked by it. We walked by it. And he stuck his head out because he thought we'd gone. And then we turned around and I just got a glimpse of him because I was in the front of the line and he just went right back into his cave.
You guys are not going to touch me. And so, yeah, with the anacondas, it's been really exciting. And in 2014, JJ and me and Mohsen and Pat and Lee, we all, we ended up catching what at the time was the record for Eunectes marina scientifically measured. It was 18 feet, six inches, 220 pounds, one of the largest female anacondas on record.
And since that time, these guys have been continuing to study the species, continuing to just, again, just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge we have of the species. And studying green anacondas in lowland tropical rainforest, you've seen how hard it is to move, to operate, to navigate in this environment.
And so when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about this species, you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them. and then finding out a way to keep tabs on them.
Because even if you get lucky enough to see an anaconda by the edge of a stream, to be able to observe it over time, to learn its habits, or to put a radio transmitter on it, or to take any sort of valuable information from the experience, is almost impossible. And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote about Mother of God, us jumping on anacondas and trying to catch them.
And at first it just seemed like something we were doing to learn, to just try and see them. But it ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would have scientific implications later on, because now it's allowing us to try and find the largest anacondas. And people used to say, there's no way there's 25 foot, 27 foot.
Well, there's just that video of the guy swimming with the 20 foot anaconda. And so now as we keep going, I'm going, well, maybe through drone identification, we could find where the largest anacondas are sitting on top of floating vegetation. And even then. How do we restrain them so that we could measure them and prove this to the world? It's sort of a side quest.
So by doing these kinds of studies, you figure out how they move about the world, what motivates them in terms of when they hunt, where they hide in the world, as the size of the anaconda change. So all of that, those are scientific studies.
Yeah. I mean, look, there's so much that we don't know about this forest. We don't know what medicines are in this forest. We don't know with a lot of the 1500, there's something like 4,000 species of butterflies in the Amazon rainforest. And of the 1500 species that are here in this region, all of them have a larval stage caterpillars, right?
And each of the caterpillars has a specific host plant that they need to eat in order to become a successful butterfly to enter the next life cycle. And for most of the species that fill the butterfly book, we don't know what those interactions are. I recently got to see the white witch, which is a huge moth. It's one of the two largest moths in the world. It's the largest moth by wingspan. Wow.
Huge. It looks like a bird. Big white moth. We still, I believe, I believe that we still don't know what the caterpillar looks like. It's 2024. We have iPhones and penis-shaped rocket ships. Like, we don't know where that moth starts its life. Yeah. We still haven't figured that out.
By the way, the rocket ships are shaped that way for efficiency purposes, not because they wanted to make it look like a penis. Speaking of which, I've ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring. Have you? And make me very... I know it's not just a figment of my imagination. I'm pretty sure they're real.
In fact, you explained it to me and they make me very uncomfortable because there's just a lot of penises hanging off of a tree.
Yes.
I don't know what the purpose is. I don't know who they're supposed to attract, but it certainly makes...
But certainly Paul really enjoys them. Yeah. Well, clearly you've done some research and you've noticed a lot of them.
I haven't even seen them. There was a time where I almost fell and to catch my balance, I had to grab one of the penises of the penis tree and unforgettable. Anaconda, the biggest, baddest anaconda in the Amazon versus the biggest, baddest black caiman. Because you mentioned they're like, there's a race. If there's a fight, this is UFC and Cage who wins underwater.
This is the biggest and the baddest. The biggest and the baddest. that you can imagine given all the studies you've done of the two animals, species.
You're talking about an 18-foot, several hundred-pound black caiman versus a 26-foot, 350-pound anaconda. Yeah. I think it's a death stalemate. I think the caiman slams the anaconda, bites onto it, the anaconda wraps the caiman, and then they both thrash around until they both kill each other, because I think the caiman will tear him up so bad. And the caiman's not going to let go.
The caiman's never going to let go, but then he's going to realize that he's also being constricted, so then he's going to stop, and he's going to keep slamming down on that anaconda, and the anaconda's just going to keep constricting, but if the caiman can do enough damage before the anaconda... Again, it's almost like a striker versus a jujitsu. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
You know, if you can get enough elbows in before they lock you.
How fast is the construction?
So it's pretty slow. No, it's incredibly quick. So it's you take the back and get me in choke hold. It's that. I have maybe 30 seconds, maybe on the upward side, if you haven't cinched it under my throat. But if you've gotten good position- It's over. Is there any way to unwrap the choke, undo the choke, defending? Not unless you have outside help.
Unless you have another human or another 10 humans coming to unwrap the tail, help you. But for an animal, like if a deer gets hit by an animal, no way. They don't stand a chance.
So the black caiman would bite somewhere close to the head and just try to hold on and thrash?
Yeah. I don't think a large black caiman... Here's the thing. Every fisherman knows this. The biggest fish, they're smart. Yeah. And more importantly, they're shrewd. They're careful. A huge black caiman that's 16 feet long isn't going to be messing with a big anaconda. They won't cross paths because while they technically occupy...
the same type of environment, that black caiman's gonna have this deep spot in a lake, and that anaconda's gonna have found this floating forest-like sort of black stream backwater where it's gonna be. And they'll have made that their home for decades, and they'll already have cleaned out the competition. So maybe if there was a flood, And they got pushed together.
They could have some sort of a showdown. But almost more certainly is that when they get to that size, that came in at any sign of danger, right under the water. It's almost like, what do you learn when you're a black belt? What do you do with a street fight? You still run away.
Mm-hmm.
There's no reason for a street fight. And I think the animals really understand that. There's no reason for this.
So like a giant anaconda and a giant black caiman, they could probably even coexist in the same environment, just knowing, using the wisdom to avoid the fight.
Or they would have a big showdown and one of them would either die or have to leave. They would have a territorial dispute. Yeah. Without killing either of them. Yeah. Dude, nature. Anything could happen.
One of the things that me and Pat wrote up was that I saw a yellow-tailed creepo, which is like a six-foot rat snake, eating an Oxiropus melanogenes, which is the red snake that we found last night. And just no one had ever, in scientific literature, we'd never seen a creepo eating an Oxiropus before. And so I had the observation in the field. I sent it to Pat Champagne.
pat writes it up paper and so it's like it's this really cool that's a really cool system because we're just out here all the time you end up seeing things jj's dad saw an anaconda eating a taper taper is the size of a cow damn and it's that guy didn't lie you know some people you trust your sources on that he he saw enough stuff he didn't need to make up stories and you know how you know what i love now is when you go to so when you ask people when we were going up the mountain with jimmy yeah
JJ said to him, he goes, have you ever seen a puma up here in the mountains? And Jimmy goes, they're up here. And JJ went, no, no, no. Have you seen it? And Jimmy went, no, never seen one. And you know how most people will go, yeah, I've seen it. That makes me trust a person when they admit, nah, I haven't seen it.
They're up here. I haven't seen it. And Jimmy has been living there his whole life. His whole life. There's pumas in the mountains?
You know, mountain lions, pumas, whatever the, you know, there's all different names for them. They're distributed from, I think, from Alaska down through Argentina. They're everywhere. It's an extremely successful species. From deserts to high mountains, everything.
I think you're saying pumas have a curiosity, have a way about them where they, like, explore, like, follow people. Like, just to kind of figure out, like, just that curiosity, as opposed to causing harm or hunting and that kind of stuff. Like, what is this about?
I think it's based in predatory instincts, but I also think there is a playfulness to higher intelligence animals that you don't see in lower intelligence animals. And so... Something like a rabbit, for instance, you're never going to see a rabbit come in to check you out. You just, you just, you can't even think of it like that. Like a rabbit's just going to either eat or run away.
There's really two settings. When you think of something like a river, giant river otter or a Tyra, which is a, they call it Manco here. It's a, it's a huge arboreal weasel and they'll come check you out. I woke up. at my house the other day and there was a tire climbing up the side of the house and he was looking down at me sleeping. And it's like, he came to check me out.
Like, it's like, they're smart enough and they're brave enough. Here's the important thing. They know that they can fend for themselves. They can fight, they can climb, they can run. And so they're like, let me, I'm curious. I got time. Let me check this out. Yeah.
They're gathering information. I wonder how complex and sophisticated their world model is. Like how they're integrating all the information about the environment, like where all the different trees are, where all the different nests of the different insects are, what the different creatures are by size, all that kind of stuff. I'm sure they don't have enough,
you know, storage up there to like keep all that, but they probably keep the important stuff. You know, so sort of integrate the experiences they have into like what is dangerous, what is tasty, all that kind of stuff.
I think it's more complex than we...
realize you go back to that friends to wall book are we smart enough to know how smart animals are there's so many incredible examples of controlled studies where the researchers weren't understanding how to shed being so insurmountably human and understand that there are other types of intelligence and whether that's elephants or cats so big cats for instance they're
We just saw a camera trap video from last night where you see one of our workers walk down the trail and then five minutes later, a cat behind him.
By the way, we're walking just exactly the same area, also exact same time. Yeah.
So we're out there and there's deer and there's cats and there's a jaguar and there's a puma and there's all these animals out there. And we're out in the night, in the inky black night, in this ocean of darkness beneath the trees. And we're just exploring and getting to see everything. And there's all these little eyes and heartbeats. I love the jungle at night, man. It's the most exciting thing.
One of the things you do when you turn off the headlamp, complete darkness all around you.
And just the sounds. Everything you hear, the cicadas, the birds, they're all screaming about sex all the time. So they're just trying to get laid. So all of them are making mating calls. Now the trick is to make your mating call without attracting a predator.
But at night, what amazes me is that for us, it's so, from the caveman logic of it's hard to make fire here, it's hard to even light a fire here, to having this incredible beam of, all of a sudden we can look at the jungle and walk through that darkness, then we're seeing the frogs on those leaves and the snakes moving through the undergrowth and the deer sneaking through the shadows.
It's like, it's almost, as supernatural as skydiving. It's a strange thing to be able to do that technology allows us to do. We're doing something really complex and we're walking on trails that have been cleared for us that we've planned out. And so walking through the jungle at night, you just get this freak show of biodiversity and I'm addicted to it. I truly love it.
Except for the times over the last few days when we walked on through jungle without a trail. And that's just a different experience.
How would you categorize if somebody said, Lex, I think I'm going to go for a hike through the jungle, not on the trail. Yeah. What would you tell them?
Every step is really hard work. Every step is a puzzle. Every step is a full possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude of ways. You're just a wasp nest under a leaf, a hole under a leaf on the ground where if you step in it, you're going to break a knee, ankle, leg, and going to not be able to move for a long time. There's all kinds of ants that can hurt you a little or can hurt you a lot.
Bullet ants. There's snakes and spiders. Oh, yeah. My favorite that I've gotten to know intimately is different plants with different defensive mechanisms, one of which is just spikes. So sharp. I don't know if you brought it, but there's... I didn't bring it.
I didn't bring it.
Where's my club? There's an epic club with the spikes, but there's so many trees that have spikes on them. Sometimes they're obvious spikes, sometimes less than obvious spikes. And, you know, it could be just an innocent, as you take a step through a dense jungle, it could be an innocent placing of a hand on that tree that could just
completely transform your experience, your life, by penetrating your hand with like 20, 30, 40, 50 spikes. And just changing everything. That's just a completely different experience than going on a trail where you're an observer of the jungle versus the participant of it.
And it truly is extreme hard work to take every single step. Now, just think about this. I think scientifically, because people like to summarize, people like to get really, really sort of cavalier with our scientific progress. And they go, you know, we've already explored the Amazon. It's like, well, have we?
Because in between each tributary is, you know, let's say just between some of them, let's just say a hundred miles of unbroken forest. Who's explored that? Maybe some of the tribes have been there. Maybe. Yeah. Some areas they haven't been.
Now, when you're talking about scientists, whether they're indigenous scientists, Western scientists, whatever, so many of the areas in this jungle that is the size of the continental US still have not been accessed. And the places where people are doing research, See, I've been down here long enough. I see all the PhDs come down here and they all go to the same few research stations.
They're safe. They have a bed. If you get hella dropped into the middle of the jungle in the deepest, most remote parts, you're going to find micro ecosystems. You're going to see little species variations. You're going to see a type of flower that JJ has never seen before, like what happened the other day.
As you start walking through new patches of forest, you start finding new species and everything here changes. You just go a little bit up river and the animals you see differ. You go on this side of the river versus on the north side of the river, there's two other species of primates there that don't exist here.
And that's in the mammal paper that we did with the emperor tamarins and the pygmy marmosets that the rangers found.
Yeah, the mammal paper is looking at the diversity of life in this one region of the Amazon. Can you talk more about that paper? Mammal diversity along the Les Piedras River.
Once again, the mammal paper, Pat Champagne, the prodigy. He was sort of leading on this with a bunch of other scientists who have worked in the region, including Holly O'Donnell out of Oxford. Myself, I really just made a few observations. The Jungle Keepers Rangers got featured because they're the ones that spotted a pygmy marmoset that had previously been unrecorded on the river.
I got to contribute because I had the only...
photograph that i believe anyone has of an emperor tamarin on this river it's the first proof of emperor tamarin on this river and that's exciting it's exciting because um you know you'll you can post post a picture or share a scientific observation or write about something and then what happens is you get these these like couch experts these armchair experts who who will come and say you know no no you don't get blue and
And they'll tell you you're wrong. No, you don't get woolly monkeys there or emperor tamarins. But we have proof. And so we're coming together to try and add to that knowledge.
My general sort of amateur experience of the species I've encountered here is like, this should not exist. Whatever this is, this is not real. This is CGI. Like what? Just the colors, the weirdness. I mean, there's, I think I called it the Paris Hilton caterpillar because it's like furry. It looks like one of those little- Sounds like Paris Hilton's dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like really furry and it's transparent and sort of, it's transparent. All you see is this white, beautiful fur and it's just like this caterpillar. It doesn't look real. Do you think there are species- Like how many species have we not discovered? And is there a species that are like extremely badass that we haven't discovered yet?
If you look up how many trees are in the Amazon rainforest, it's something in the order of 400 billion trees. There's something like 70 to 80,000 species of plants, individual types of plants here, 1500 species of trees. It's, it's, So vast that it's comparable, like the scale is like only comparable to the universe in terms of stars and galaxies and for the sheer immensity of it. 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 and has the scientific eye ever seen that spider before? Has it been documented? Do we know anything about its life cycle? There's still so much that's here that is completely unknown. You know, we have pictures of all these butterflies.
Somebody went out with a butterfly net and caught these butterflies, took a picture of it, gave it a name, put it in a butterfly book. What do we know? What host plant do they use for their caterpillars? What's their geographical range? What do we actually know? Not that much. So are there creatures out here that haven't been described? Absolutely.
And some of them could be extremely effective predators in a niche environment.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, certainly in the canopy, 50% of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy. And we've had very limited access to the canopy for all of history. You know, if you wanted to get up into the rainforest canopy, you basically have to climb a vine or what scientists, when I was a kid, I always used to see them with like the slingshots or the bow and arrows.
They would, they would shoot a piece of paracord over a branch, pull the rope up and then, you know, do the Ascension thing. And then you're up in this tree getting swarmed by sweat bees, getting stung by wasps. You're trying to do science up there in that environment. It's incredibly hostile. And so. having canopy platforms.
I actually met a guy at a French film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over the canopy of the Amazon and then lay these big nets over the broccoli of the trees. And the nets were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets and then reach through and pull cactuses and lizards and snakes, whatever, just take specimens from the canopy.
That's how difficult it is that scientists have resorted to using hot air balloons.
Mm-hmm.
And so having a tree house, having canopy platforms, it's starting to get, there's starting to be more and more access to the rainforest canopy. And so we're beginning to log more data. We've even observed in our tree house, which is supposed to be the tallest in the world, we're seeing lizards that we don't see on the ground, lizards that have never been documented on this river.
Like we're seeing snakes where they're saying, we saw the snake inside a crevice on that tree in the Strangler fig, and we don't know what it is. It's just people haven't been up there.
And that's where a lot of the monkeys are. That's where there's just a lot of dynamic life up there.
Yeah. I mean, when you wake up in the canopy in the morning in the Amazon rainforest, as soon as the darkness lifts, as soon as that purple comes in the east in the morning, the howler monkeys start up. Yeah.
and then the parrots start up, and then the tindamus start going, and then the macaws start going, and pretty soon everybody's going, and the spider monkey groups are all calling to each other, and it's just the whole dawn chorus starts, and it's so exciting. So you're saying when they're screaming, it's usually about sex? Sex or territory, usually.
Sex and violence, or implied violence, or the threat of violence. Yeah.
I mean, howler monkeys in the morning, they're letting other groups know, this is where we're at. We're going to be foraging over here. You better stay away. And so it's a little bit respectful as well. There is order in the chaos.
So just speaking of screaming, macaws are like these beautiful creatures. They're lifelong partners. They stick together. Monogamous. They're monogamous, so you see two of them together. But when they communicate, their love language seems to be very loud screaming. Yeah. What do you learn about relationships from a cause? That it can be loud and rough and still be loving. And still be loving.
But is that interesting to you that there's like monogamy in some species that they're lifelong partners and then there's like total lack of monogamy in other species?
It's all interesting. I mean, there's the anti-monogamy crew who's like, you know, we were never meant to be monogamous. We're supposed to just be animals. And then there's the other side of the crew that's like, We were meant to be monogamous. We are monogamous creatures. That's what God wanted between a man and a woman.
And then other people are like, yeah, but I know about these two gay penguins. And so that's natural too. And so then everyone tries to draw their identity. They're trying to justify their identity off of the laws of nature. So the fact that macaws are monogamous really doesn't have anything to do with anybody except for that... it's beneficial for them to work together to raise chicks.
It's difficult. They rely on ironwood trees or aguaje palms, and it's difficult to find the right hole in a tree. There's only so much macaw real estate, and so they need to use those holes. And each one of those ancient trees, it's usually 500 years or more, is a valuable macaw-generating site in the forest. And so if those trees go down, you lose...
exponential amounts of macaws, and that's how you get endangered species, and so that's why we're trying to protect the Ironwood trees. Another ridiculous question. Tell me.
If every jungle creature was the same size, Oh boy. who would be the new apex predator, the new alpha at the top of the food chain?
Dude, that's like Super Smash Brothers of the jungle. That's incredible. Like bullet ants. If you had a bullet ant that was the size. Yeah. Can it be like a tournament? So everyone is pound for pound ratioed. Yeah. For efficiency. So you have basically like a six foot bullet ant versus a huge black caiman versus an anaconda versus ocelots are the size of jaguars versus.
Yeah. Well, let's go bullet ant versus black caiman. Same size.
But they're comparable size.
Yeah.
I don't know, man. I never thought about it. I mean, a bullet ant has these giant, giant, giant mandibles. It could probably grab the black caiman, and then at that amount of venom, you're talking about a bucket of venom going into that black caiman. Black caiman's going to get paralyzed immediately.
Well, insects have just a tremendous amount of, like, strength. I don't know how they generate what the geometry of that is. The natural world can't create that same kind of power in the bigger thing, it seems like. It seems like. It seems like ants and... like just these tiny creatures are the ones that are able to have that much strength. I don't know how that works, what the physics of that is.
Yeah, so like a leafcutter ant lifting that leaf, that doesn't make any sense. Yeah.
It doesn't make any sense.
I don't know if that's a limit of physics. I think it's just the limit of evolution of how that works. One of the most interesting limits that I heard somebody talking about recently was the reason that dinosaurs didn't get bigger
even bigger because the conditions on Earth were favorable towards it, was that at some point, their eggs reached... There's physical limits that their eggs reached a size that the eggs were so big that eggs need to breathe for the embryo to survive. And their eggs reached a limit where...
in order to have a shell that could hold the mass of the liquid and the young dinosaur, if they got bigger, it wouldn't be permeable anymore. And I thought that was so interesting because the entire size of physical creatures was determined by how thick shell can be before it breaks or before it can't pass air through it.
Yeah, there might be a lot of the like... biophysics limits, you know. Fascinating stuff. Just like the interplay between biology, chemistry, and physics of like a life form. Because like this thing, there's a lot involved in creating a single living organism that could survive in this world. And bigger... Being big is not always good.
Being a big creature, for many reasons, like you were saying, the big creature seems to be going extinct for many reasons. But in the human world, it's because they seem to be of higher value.
Given the current size of the jungle, I think that the MVP, the pound for pound goat is ocelots. You're talking about like a mid-size 40, 50 pound cat that can climb, that does unlike a jaguar. A jaguar, every time it hunts, it's going after a deer. It catches a deer. The deer could hit it with its antlers. It could tear it with its hooves. It's risking its life for that meal. An ocelot.
Ocelots walk around at night and they climb a tree, eat a whole bunch of eggs, eat the mother bird to kill a snake, maybe mess around and eat a baby came and they can have whatever they like. And they're they're sleek enough and smart enough to get away from predators. They don't really have predators. Mm hmm.
And so they sort of occupy this perfect niche where they can hunt small prey in high quantity without taking on big risks. And so if you had to choose an animal to be, it'd probably be like an ocelot or I would say giant river otters, which are so damn cool because they're,
The locals call them lobos de rio, river wolves, because they're so tough and they're so social and they're so like us because they're intensely familial groups. They live in holes by the sides of lakes and they swim through the water and they catch fish all day long, piranhas. They eat them just like, the scales go flying as they eat these piranhas.
and they're so joyous in the way they swim and they have friends and they have family. And they, I think it would be, I think we could relate to being a river otter really. Cause I can't picture being a cat and being so solitary and just marching along a 15 mile route and making sure there's no other cats and coming in on your territory and marking that territory.
It seems, it seems very solo and very, um, It's a lonely existence. Lonely existence.
And we humans are social beings.
We're so social. And so to me, River Otters is like having a big Italian family. You're like constantly eating, you're freaking out, you know, just like causing problems with the Black Caiman. Take down a Black Caiman. Yeah, start a street fight.
Yeah, it's a family thing. You mentioned piranhas.
Yeah.
What do you think, you know, they're a source of a lot of fear from people. What do you find beautiful and fascinating about these creatures? They're also kind of social, or at least they hunt and operate in groups.
Yeah, not in the mammalian way though. Piranhas are in large schools, but fish are so different. Like if you, I can talk to you all day about how much I'd love to be an otter also, going back to the fighting thing.
otters and weasels muscle a day tend to be very loose in their skin so if you grab an otter it can still rotate around to bite you so it's like if i grab you by the back you're stuck you know like we can't you grab them by the skin yeah they can rotate around and just shred you apart so they're they're really cool fighters um piranha fish fish i don't i don't you know i don't identify with fish in terms like that i think living out here has made me think of fish as um
kind of rapid food that can or can't be gotten. To me, a piranha is just... When I see a piranha, I think about how I want it to taste.
Yeah, so fish is a food source for so many creatures in the jungle. So they're primarily a food source. But piranhas are...
I mean, they're predators. They're serious predators. They are serious predators. I found a baby black caiman not that long ago and he was missing all of his toes because the piranhas had eaten them off. It was really sad. He just had these stumps and he was swimming around the water and I was like, you are not going to make it. He was like eight inches and he was such a cute little puppy.
He had those big eyes. And I was just like, man, you already are missing all your toes. I was like... It's just a matter of time. Now he can't get away. So some big agami heron is going to come and just nail him, pop him down his throat. And that's the end of that for the caiman. I mean, nature is metal. Nature, sure as shit, is metal.
Bite off a little bit and then makes you vulnerable. And then that vulnerability is exploited by some other species. And then that's it. That's the end.
Yeah, but humans are brutal too. Like 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, cut a piece of the stingray off so he could use it for bait, and then threw the live fish back in the river. To me, that is incomprehensible amounts of cruelty with flawed logic in every direction.
If you're going to use the thing as bait, use it as bait. If you're going to remove its tail, well, then just kill it altogether. Or if you want to save the animal and not kill it, then don't maim it before you return it to its... It was such a weird...
So if you kill an animal, you want to use it to its fullest by using it as a food source, by cooking it, by eating every part of it, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah. So we've been eating paco in your time here. Fried paco is great. Amazing. It's delicious. Full of nutrients. You could tell it makes you healthy. I feel like we have better workouts so that we can go harder in the jungle. And so a few months ago in August, when the river was down, there was a day that the river was clear.
And a friend of mine, Victor, who's married to a native girl, he said, it's time to go Paco fishing. And at the time we were stuck out here and we had no resupply. everybody was busy. And so everyone was demoralized. The staff was hungry. We were hungry. And it really became this thing of like, Hey, go catch us some Paco. They were working on the trails. They were installing the solar.
We were working hard and we didn't have food. And so we went out to the river and what we did was we went up river, we camped on the beach. And in the morning, Victor's wife was, was canoeing with the, with the paddle dead quiet. Don't let the paddle touch the wooden boat. Nikita was balanced in the middle of the thing. Victor's on the front with this huge fishing rod.
And I'm sitting there and he goes, I'll catch the first one, you catch the second one. And he's got this huge fishing rod and a piece of half rotten meat from the day before. And he's smacking it against the wall, 6 a.m. He's just letting it smack against the water. And I'm going, and we're floating down the river. And I'm going, this is not going to work.
And we're floating and we're floating and a half hour passes and I'm going, it's dawn. I want to go back to sleep. I'm such an, I'm just not a morning person. And all of a sudden a fish hits that line, almost pulls this man off of his feet. And he swings the thing in, the fish comes on the boat. And then I realized he's got a big metal mallet on the boat so that you could try to shut that fish off.
And it's this huge or shaped thick, muscular Paco. And as soon as I saw that fish, I just thought, wow, the strongest of this species for millions of years have been swimming in this river.
And suddenly we've, through this incredible combination of the boat and the cord and the hook, none of which we made, and the skill that he had from knowing how to fish a paco, because otherwise there's no chance that you're getting that fish. They hide, they're very, very suspicious of what you're doing.
We had gotten this fish onto the boat and ploom, you hammer it like a caveman, boom, doesn't die, boom, you have to crush its skull. And now you have this fish and you're holding this genetic material, this sustenance for your life that has been developing since the dinosaur times. It's so beautiful. The act, the sacred act of eating that, of the fish, of the competition with the fish.
And we spent the morning fishing. We got three pacos, three huge giant vegetarian piranha. And I just remember touching them with so much reverence, thinking about...
the incredible history and how that before these rivers existed, those Pacos were, were swimming through the water and, and, and, and trying to survive through, through, through history, through history, through history until this, until we, we took just a few and we did it respectfully and we did it,
when we needed it most, not at a time when it was just for fun, and it was really, really special.
Well, humans using them for sustenance, there's a collaboration there. That's something also that I've seen in the jungle, that there's creatures using each other, and it's like a dance of either mutually using each other, or it's parasitic, or symbiotic, It's interesting. There's a medicinal plant you grabbed that was full of ants that were trying to murder you by biting.
They were defending the plant that they were using for whatever purpose. There's a clear dance there of the ants using the plant and the plant existing there for... other applications and other use for humans. And there's that kind of circle of life happening, but the ants were a defense. So the, the plant didn't have its own defense mechanism.
The ants, the army of ants was there to protect the plant.
And did you actually, when you remember, we put our backpacks down at that one spot and it was like the ants got on your backpack. And I said, Oh shit, this is that tree. Did you actually get bitten by one of those? Because they're incredibly painful. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, surprisingly painful. Because they're small. There's nothing like... Luckily, I've not been bitten by a bullet ant yet.
But it's just... It's amazing because they live inside the tree. The tree comes standard with holes in it that allow the ants to move and to exist safe. And it protects their eggs. And they protect the tree. And so we saw that spot where there's a perfect circle around the trees because the ants had... excavated the other vegetation so that those trees could have no competition to grow.
incredible calculation of how ants know to guard come programs to garden that tree and the tree somehow has been genetically informed to have ant habitat within itself it's 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 yeah well one of the things you mentioned that's also
a source of a lot of existential confusion for me is ants and the intelligence of different creatures in the forest. There's these giant colonies, there's just giant systems, but even just looking at a single colony of ants, them collaborating, leafcutter ants, is an incredible system. So individually, the ants seem kind of dumb and simplistic, but taken together, there is a vast intelligence
It's able to be robust and resilient in any kind of conditions. It's able to figure out a new environment. It's able to be resilient to any kinds of attacks and all that kind of stuff.
What do you find beautiful about them? Like, as you said, just leafcutter ants in this jungle. That's forgetting all the other hundreds of species of ants that are in this jungle. But just the leafcutters apparently... digest roughly 17% of the total biomass of the forest.
Everything, all these giant trees, all that leaf litter, 17% of that, almost a fifth of this forest cycles through leaf cutter ant colonies. So they're constantly regenerating the forest. They're a huge source of of the driver of this ecosystem.
And so to me, when you see them working, it's, again, like I said, you see your friends as you go through the jungle, you see all the Kapok trees, you see Kenea tree, you see all those, there's leafcutter ants doing what they're supposed to do. And it's just so beautiful. I find them very beautiful. Army ants, they're so tough. They're so ready to fight. They have the huge mandibles.
They're just ready to, they're just, they're transporting their eggs. They're moving from here to there. Anything that's in the way is getting eaten. They're just savage. And they're kind of cute for that. Unless you're tied to a tree. The savagery is cute. I find that, yeah, it's kind of reassuring, you know. You want certain things to be tough.
That's their part. Oh, that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the nature mechanism.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The powerful play. Yeah, yeah. But the army ants are so savage. You know, like if you... if you step on army ants, they will all kamikaze, just attack onto your feet and they'll just sacrifice 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 kind of reassuring again, unless imagine if you're going through the jungle and you slip and you fall and you twist your knee and you fall in just the right way, but you can't get up. You can't, you're stuck there. And then army ants find you.
Yeah.
They will take you apart. There are records of horses that have been tied up and army ants come and they'll take out the whole horse. Imagine the pain of that. It might be raining on us very hard, very soon. You want to pause? Nope. I think we'll stay here until the ship goes down.
We should mention that there's this one source of light and we're shrouded in darkness.
And now the night shift is going to take over soon and we are in the Amazon rainforest. What does the rainforest represent to you? When you zoom out, look at the entirety of it. Carl Sagan's pale blue dot.
resonated with a lot of people, that everything you've ever heard of, all the heroes, all the villains, all of your ancestors, every achievement, tragedy, triumph, everything has happened on that one spot, this one tiny, tiny little rock that has life on it. And to me, the rainforests represent the crown jewel of that.
as far as we know and to the best of our knowledge and with our shrewd scientific brains at their fullest capacity, this is still the only place that we know that has life. And given that, the fact that there are still these tropical, towering, complex ecosystems that we barely understand, crawling and full of the most incredible life, it's just, to me, it's so wonderful. It's so incredible.
The waterfalls and the birds and the macaws and the jaguars, it's barely believable. Like if you were to...
theoretically tell a hypothetical hypothetical alien i live on this planet and there's just these places where everything is interconnected everything means something to something else and the whole thing is this system that keeps us alive and each tree is pumping air into the river and there's an invisible river above the actual river and the whole thing goes into stabilizing our global climate and each little tiny leaf cutter ant somehow contributes to this giant biotic orchestra that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible that is beautiful
I love that. And so the rainforests to me are the greatest celebration of life and probably the greatest challenge for us as a global society, because if we can't protect the crown jewel, the best thing, you know, the most beautiful part, then then we're really, really missing the point.
Yeah, the diversity of organisms here. is the biggest celebration of life. That is at the core of what makes Earth a really special thing. That said, you and I have been arguing about aliens for pretty much the day I showed up here. All right, you brought a machete to this fight. Luckily, the table is long enough. I can't reach. You can't reach me. See, to you, Earth is truly special. Yeah.
You don't think there's other Earths out there, millions of other Earths in our galaxy. When you look up, you know, we're sitting in the Amazon River. Okay. At dark, the storm rolled over. Yeah. And you started counting the stars.
Yeah.
One, two. And that was, once you can count the stars, that was a sign that the storm will actually pass. Eventually it will pass. And that's what you were doing. Three, four, five. And it's going to pass. You're not going to have to sit in that river for like all night. So just a couple hours to keep yourself warm. Okay. Each of those stars, there's Earth-like planets around them. Okay.
Why do you think there's not alien civilizations there?
You can write down a calculation on a napkin. You can cite different Hollywood movies. You can point up to the pieces of light in the stars. But if I talk about show me a single cell that's not from this planet, it's still not possible. And so I agree with you that the likelihood is there. All indications point to it. It would be fascinating.
Especially if it was done in, especially, you know, imagine finding a planet of alternative life forms, not necessarily even intelligent. Imagine just a part of a planet of butterflies, whatever, you know, something else that would be amazing. But, but I'm concerned with the reality that we have in front of us is that this is the spaceship. This is life.
Yeah.
And so right now, given that reality, maybe that's, maybe that's the case. Maybe, maybe there are other planets or. Or maybe we are the first. Maybe life originated here. Maybe God, the universe, whatever. Maybe this is it. 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, we're, we're, we're taking an assumption into reality without, I mean, you know, aliens right now are about as real as Santa Claus. We think they're out there, but we're not sure maybe a little more real because, you No one has an alien. No one's seen an alien. No one's even seen cellular life.
And so I'm not, again, if they showed up tomorrow, great, let's study them. But right now we have this very simple threat going on where we can't stop killing each other and our living environment.
And so while some people can specialize in looking to the stars and to other planets and talk about being an interplanetary species, I'm very much concerned with the fact that here in our home turf, our living environment where the air is good and the rivers are clean and the trees are big and there's macaws flying through the sky and salmon in the rivers,
Not only do we have a responsibility to each other and to our children to protect this incredible gift that is our entire reality. Seems kind of weird to, at some point, 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 we have this incredible thing where there are fish in the ocean and in the rivers. They come standard with life on Earth. And we're harming the ability of Earth's ecosystems to provide for that life. And we are the generation that's going to decide if those systems continue to provide life to all the people on Earth and all the generations.
And by the way, all the other animals that exist for their own reasons.
other consciousnesses that we're just beginning to understand elephants humpback whales whatever families of giant river otters you not everything can be seen from a human perspective these are other species that have their own stories and so i'm i'm more biocentric than anthropocentric in 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 with you. There's some degree to which when you imagine aliens, you forget for a moment how special and important life is here on Earth. Yes.
But it's also a way to reach out
through curiosity and trying to understand what is intelligence, what is consciousness, what is exactly the thing that makes life on Earth special. Another way of doing that, and I see the jungle in that same way, is basically treating the animals all around us, the life forms all around us, as kinds of aliens.
That's a humbling way, that's an intellectual humility with which to approach the study of like, what the hell is going on here? This is truly incredible. Are the animals we've met over the last few days conscious? What is the nature of their intelligence? What is the nature of their consciousness? What motivates them? Are they individual creatures or are they actually part of the...
large system and how large is the system? Is Earth one big system and humans are just little fingertips of that system? Or are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything else is in the emerging complexity of the system?
So I think thinking about aliens is a necessary, I like my Tom with a little drop of poison from Tom Waits, is a necessary perturbation of the system of our thinking To sort of say, hey, we don't know what the fuck's going on around here. Sure. And aliens is a nice way to say, okay, the mystery all around us is immense. Because to me, likely, aliens are living among us.
Not in a trivial sense, little green men, but the force that created life. I think permeates the entirety of the universe, that there is a force that's creative.
Now, the force that created life is a big one. And then the other thing is, what do you mean by that? There's aliens living among us. You mean extraterrestrials?
Yes.
Living among us?
Yes.
You believe that? Not like 100%, but there's a good percentage. I don't understand how it's possible for there not to be a very large number of alien civilization throughout just our galaxy.
But that's different than saying that they're living among us. If you tell me that there's aliens living five galaxies over and that they're just out there somewhere, I'm kind of more on your side than that. they're here because just like Bigfoot, like we have camera traps, we have DNA sequencing through, through water. Now, like we can, you're telling me no one.
found one wingnut of a ship in all, like the Egyptians up until right now, no one in Russia saw like a crashed ship, took a picture, tweeted that shit real quick and you know.
I think there's no Bigfoot, there's no trivial manifestations of aliens. I think if they're here, they're here in ways that are not comprehensible by humans because they're far more advanced than humans are. They're far more advanced than any life forms on Earth. So even if it's just their probes, we cannot just even comprehend it.
I think it's possible that they operate in the space of ideas, for example. That ideas could be aliens. Feelings could be aliens. Consciousness itself could be aliens. So we can't restrict our understanding of what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that...
operates via natural selection on this particular planet it could be much much much more sophisticated it could be in the space of computation for example as we in the 21st century are developing increasingly sophisticated computational systems with artificial intelligence it could be operating on some other level that we can't even imagine
It could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand. We barely understand quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is a way we use to make very accurate predictions, but to understand why It's operating that way. We don't. And there's so many gigantic, powerful, cosmic entities out there that we detect. Sometimes can't detect dark matter, dark energy.
But it's out there. We know it exists. but we can't explain why and what the fuck it is. We give it names, black holes and dark energy and dark matter, but those are all names for things that mathematical equations predict, but we don't understand.
All of that is just to say that aliens could be here in ways that are for now, and maybe for a long time, going to be impossible for humans to understand.
So aliens in the strict biological sense, like horseshoe crabs, we agree that we haven't found physical aliens.
The only way I can imagine finding physical aliens is if alien species are trying to communicate with us humans or with other life forms and are trying to figure out a way to communicate with us such that we dumb humans would understand. Like, let's create a thing
Yo, there's a moth the size of a small eagle. Let's try to get us 15 minutes of attention. It just might. Big fan of the podcast. Okay.
Lex, I love you.
All right. So wouldn't it be interesting? It would be really fascinating to me.
if we found out that there were aliens living among us and we couldn't see them, and what some of the people were calling aliens, the scientists, the religious people were calling angels, and then everybody had this realization that whether you call them aliens or angels, there are these other, there is way more to the universe than we're realizing. I just, for me,
the fact that there's... There's a skull on the table. Yeah, there's a skull on the table. There's now a skull in your hand. There's now a skull in my hand of a monkey with a bullet in its head that I found on the floor of an indigenous community where they eat monkeys. I didn't kill the monkey, so save your comments. But, you know, in terms of
of the animals, I think that when I see space, my feeling, and I'm not requiring anybody else to have this feeling, but because we know, because this is the only place that we know that there's life and we have no idea how it started, I just think it's so important to protect it.
And for me, it's just as much about our children as it is about the little spider monkeys and the little baby caiman that are in the river right now, because life is so beautiful.
And I think that there's a huge amount of intellectual responsibility that we can transfer off of ourselves if we go, yeah, the rivers are filled with trash, and yeah, extinction is happening, but we have to be an interplanetary species anyway, because at any moment, this could all end from an asteroid, and everything's going to shit anyway. And so it's like, we're fucking up this planet.
And it's like, we're just being angry teenagers who are going goth for a while. And it's like, what if you just... rolled up your sleeves and said, holy shit, wait a second. You know, we can pretty much do whatever we want. We can fly all over the world. We can do heart transplants. We can watch Netflix and the Amazon if we wanted to. Like we could do all this amazing stuff.
We can capture on video our adventures and go back and watch them again and again and again. There's so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to do. And we're the richest in history. I mean, we can do everything. We could cross the whole planet in a second. And it's like, that's an amazing time to be alive.
And if we just don't fuck up the ecosystems and kill all the other animals, we got it made.
Yeah, so it is true that we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, but it also is true that that snake that I got to handle yesterday is like one of the most beautiful things Earth has ever created. And in that little organism is encapsulated the entire history of Earth. And it's beautiful. So both things are true.
We should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through the weapons we create. And we should become... multi-planetary species as a backup for that purpose. But also remember that this place is 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. If you ever hold a human skull, it'll give you... Uh, it'll, it'll, it'll, it'll weigh on you for a sec. Cause you look into this, the hollow eyes of this face and suddenly you go, you feel your own teeth. You go, you feel your own skull and you go, holy shit. You go, what is going on? It's like taking acid. You just go, oh boy.
I forgot that I'm a ghost inhabiting a meat vehicle on a floating rock. But even, even a monkey.
Yeah. It's like looking at a ancestor.
You know, not a direct ancestry, but there's a, it's like a, you know, like you're looking at a puddle at a reflection. A little blurry, but it's still there. It's still there. And like the roots of who we are is still there. And it's all kind of incredible. Do you ever think of the tree of life? Just kind of like where we came from? Yeah. The jungle is ephemeral.
It's a system that just keeps forgetting because it's just churning and churning and churning and churning. It has, in some ways, no history. But to create the jungle, to create life on Earth, there's a deep history of lots of death, sex and death. A festival of sex and death. Life on Earth.
That's what I see in the skull.
Yeah.
There's something kind of terrifying about that image to me. Like when I hold that every now and then at night, you hold that skull and it just reminds you that you're temporary. Yeah, both you and I will one day have one of those.
Yeah. Mine will be bigger.
The male competition continues.
The silverback slaps the lesser male once again. Uh, do you have a lighter? Yeah, bro. You want to light this blunt? What are your favorite animals to interact with? I mean, my favorite, absolute favorite animal to interact with is 100% elephants, which there's no elephants here, but I've been incredibly privileged to spend some time with elephants, both in India and in Africa. And
I think that they're so smart and so complex that we do a really bad job of understanding what an elephant really is. I think that most children probably think of elephants as something kind of cuddly. Most adults probably have a similar misconception of them.
When you see an elephant, when you see a 12 foot tall bull elephant with bone coming out of its face with huge tusks and those giant, it's a, it's an octopus faced butterfly eared behemoth. That's a survival machine. And it'll look at you and just go. do I have to kill you to keep safe? And it's just, they're so tough.
And they have dirt on their back and they have flower petals and their little hair, you realize they have hair all over their body and the power to throw a car over, to flip it. Just one of the most impressive animals on earth. And I think that... I've gotten really good at interacting with wild elephants in a way that's respectful to them.
And I think that when an elephant allows you to be in its space, it's because you're showing submissiveness and respect for the elephant space. And they're so intelligent that they're communicating with seismic vibrations through the earth, that they have a matriarchal society, that they can remember the maps of their ancestors, and they know how to find water, that they can solve problems.
They're such beautiful animals, and they're so... Talk about aliens. They're so alien-looking. These big, weird heads in the trunks with all those muscles, and they're so different than us. But yet, I actually think that we grew up together. You know, they kind of raised us sibling species that we've inhabited the same epoch in history. And we've relied on the ecosystems that they've created.
And I think that they have a deep understanding of humans, elephants. And I think I see them more like humans.
aliens more like non-human beings that we share the earth with so i don't see it as we're humans and they're animals i actually see human elephants as as sort of a separate society along with humans as one of the dominant species on the planet so almost every species especially the intelligent ones especially the big ones are their own societies that overlap and sometimes co-develop
yeah i think whales i think elephants i think there's there's those higher you know no one's suggesting that sardines are you know somehow need human rights or something but i think the elephants need representation in governments because they're they occupy they influence their landscape they engineer their environment they have emotions they have families they have burial rituals they're so like us
And yet we treat them like they're just oversized cows that we have to be scared of. They're not the same as domesticated livestock. They're one of the treasures of earth. I mean, look, let's just say little green men showed up and they said, well, what's earth? It's like, well, there's mountains, there's rivers. It's like, well, how do I do this? There's mountains, rivers, there's elephants.
It's like one of the first things a baby learns is elephant. Even if he's never seen one, it's just so iconic on earth. Like you said... Darren Aronofsky. Darren Aronofsky. The elephant walking over the camera. I haven't seen it. You said it's incredible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So at the sphere, the postcard from Earth, I mean, it's a celebration of Earth. Yeah. In all forms. And one of the critical big creatures in that film is an elephant. And it steps over the audience and the whole sphere reverberates that power. I mean, some of it is size. Yeah. Some of it is like, how did Earth create this?
It is a weird looking creature, but we take it for granted because we've accepted that this Earth can't create this kind of thing, but it is weird, beautifully weird.
Oh, it's
I mean, I mean, elephants, there's something really impressive and wise about them. There's also beautiful, weird that isn't so that doesn't come with so much grandeur.
Like to me, a giraffe is beautifully weird, but they're just, you know, they're 18 foot tall camel deer things with, you know, giant necks and they're strange and they're, they're absolutely serenely beautiful, but they don't, they don't have that. deep intelligence that elephants have. There's something that elephants have. You see in their eyes? How does the intelligence manifest itself?
Well, this is the thing. A lot of people, a lot of the, when I was reading Franz de Waal's book, a lot of what he was saying was that, you know, people give elephants human problems to solve in controlled environments and call it, you know, a study on elephant intelligence. Whereas if you're watching wild elephants and you're in the wild,
you're gonna be watching them in a way that they're looking, you've pulled up in a safari vehicle or you've pulled over to the side of the road and the elephants are wary of you, so they're not acting natural. But as soon as you start watching wild elephants, truly in the wild and comfortable with your presence, you see how they start caring for their babies or how they can get annoyed.
I once watched elephants around a water hole and there's this warthog and I don't know why, but this warthog decided he needed to get in And there was this young male elephant and he kept turning around to this warthog and just being like, don't make me do it. Now this elephant did not need to hurt the warthog. And the warthog was just like, I need a drink. I need a drink. I need a drink.
Much simpler brain. The elephant was like, you could just tell. He was like, watch this. And he just went and crushed the warthog like it was a big beetle and crushed his pelvis. And the warthog dragged itself away on its front legs and probably went off to die. But this young elephant was, put out his ears and he like paraded around with his tail off and he was like, look what I did, destruction.
And it's like, that's a very relatable type of, he was annoyed with the warthog. And so you see them do these things. I mean, the most magical thing, and I've spoken about this many times, was that I was walking with a herd of semi-wild elephants that were crossing through a village in India because...
elephants have lost a lot of their territory because there's so much population in India, and so we're crossing through a village, which is very delicate because the matriarchs are leading the babies, and there's villagers who have no idea what an elephant is, and they're watching the elephants cross. And the matriarchs backed this girl up against a wall.
And she was terrified standing there with her back against the wall. And the elephant just put her trunk out and touched the girl's stomach. And then the other elephants came and they all started touching her stomach. And the ranger there explained to me, just went... She's pregnant. They know she's pregnant. They can smell, they can tell, and they're curious.
And they, all the, all the female elephants came to investigate the pregnant girl and she had no idea what was going on.
And so it's like that stuff, that stuff.
Yeah. And it's cool to hear that, you know, with the crushing and the pride of the young elephant, that there's a complexity of behavior. It's just like with humans. I mean, you know. Yeah, it's not always pretty. That's the thing, man. Humans are capable of good and evil. And sometimes we attach these words. I love that there's just... It's an orchestra of different sounds.
Yeah. And that one is sexy, which... That's a bamboo rat calling out for a mate. A mate.
All right. Good luck to you, buddy. Good hunting. You know, humans are capable... Evil things and beautiful things and I wonder if animals are the same You think there's just different personalities and different life trajectories for animals like as they develop in their understanding of social interaction of Survival of maybe even primitive concepts of right and wrong within the social system
Do you think there is a lot of diversity in personalities and behavior? Just like different people?
Is there different elephants?
Of course.
And what I really like is that you said, is there a perception of what's right and wrong? Because elephants have a code of ethics. Hmm. And so as the, for the simplest example is that as young males begin to grow, they start developing these tusks and those tusks are a tool and they use them. So for Indian elephants, the females don't have tusks and the males do.
The females kick the males out of the herd. The females keep all the sisters and the aunts and the cousins together, but the males are their own thing. And so here's the thing. If you have, so what you get is these, these crews of male elephants that
And the older males will, you know, this play fighting that goes on around, you know, two young males can play fight, but the older males, they'll kick some ass. They'll show them how to behave. They'll explain who gets to talk to the females, who gets to interact, who gets to mate, who gets the best vegetation to eat. And so there's an order established.
And so young male elephants have to be taught how to act. Just like a teenage human has to be taught, you can't just haul off and break another kid's nose. There's going to be consequence. Maybe you'll get suspended. Or maybe that kid will get his friends and beat the living shit out of you. Whatever it is,
society regulates your behavior and elephants have a very strict very predictable sort of like the males teach the males how to run things and the females which which really have the final say they're matriarchal They're the ones leading the herd where to go. The males follow where the wise females tell them where to go.
So that regulation mechanisms from that emerges a kind of moral system under which they operate. What's right and wrong.
For an elephant, yeah. For an elephant. Right and wrong for an elephant is not the same as what's right and wrong for a grizzly bear. If you're a male grizzly bear and you see a female with cubs, you just kill those cubs and then you can mate with her and put your own cubs in there. It's a whole different type of... Ethics.
Yeah, the value of child life is different from species to species. Some of them hold the sacred, some of them not at all.
And that's why I think I resonate so much with elephants because I think that we are kind of matriarchal, at least I grew up matriarchal, like women were the force in my life. Um, my family and most of my friends' families and women kind of have the final say. And, uh, I feel like that's the way it is with, with, with, with elephants.
Like you might be bigger and stronger, but it doesn't really account for much if you're not smarter and, and more emotionally intelligent and you know how to take care of the group.
Just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions, as we were talking about aliens, there's a lot of people trying to understand, trying to study the origin of life. Oh, I love this. First of all, what do you think is life versus non-life? Like when you look at like ants or even like the simplest of organisms, we saw a frog in a stream yesterday. That was like a leaf frog.
It was like as flat as a sheet of paper. And it does a lot of weird things. And it found a way to exist in this world. But that's a single living organisms with a bunch of components to it. But there's a life form that exists in this world. What is the difference between that and a rock? What is the essence of that life? This might be an unanswerable question.
There's probably a chemistry, physics, biology way of answering that. What to you is that?
I think to me, life is something that grows in response to stimuli. Like in basic biology 101, I think... And I'm fine with that. I don't need it to be more romantic than that. But I think it's actually comical how... how do you get from a rock to an orangutan? You know, and our answer for that is primordial soup.
Maybe there was just stuff on earth and then the stuff just got up and started walking. Maybe there just, there was nothing happening and then there was, all of a sudden there was a cell and the cell had function and then it complexified and then it started reproducing and found male and female parts and what? !
Like, we are so under-equipped to understand how the hell we got here, let alone ants or even bacteria.
I see this so many in very simple mathematical models, like something called Game of Life, their cellular automata. You could see from simple rules and simple objects, when they're interacting together, as you grow that system, complex objects arise. Like that emergence of complexity is not understood by science, by mathematics at all.
And it seems like from primordial soups, you can get a lot of cool shit. And the force of getting from soup to like two humans on microphones. Yeah. not understood and it seems to be a thing that happens on Earth. I tend to think that it's a thing that happens everywhere in the universe and there's some deep force that's pushing this along in some way.
That there's something we, I don't want to sort of simplify it, but there is something that creates complexity out of simplicity that we don't quite understand. And that's the thing that created the first organism, living organism on earth. That like leap from no life to life on earth, that's a weird one.
That's a weird one. Because you can imagine, I think that what the earth is four, 4.5 billion years old. And you can imagine just this. this rock of a planet with like rain and storms and elements and iron and granite and like just random stuff. It's pretty easy to imagine that. But then I remember that book there. We think we all have the same book when we were kids.
And then like, they show this like fish, like animal crawling out of a, out of the primordial soup. And it's like, bro, you just missed the most important part author of that book, bro. And. And I think the first bacteria came in around 3.7 billion years ago. So there's like at least like, you know, a bunch of billion years where there's just nothing. There's just a planet.
And then we start seeing fossils of the first bacteria.
And the bacteria stuck around for a long time. A billion, two billion years. It's just very, very long. Just bacteria. Just bacteria. But a lot of them. A lot of them. There's probably a lot of innovation, a lot of murder, a lot of interaction. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, there's, there's a bit, a few big leaps along the history of life on earth.
Yeah.
You know, the predator prey dynamic, that was a really cool innovation. It's almost like innovations like featured on iPhone. It's like, it's nice. Like a predator prey, uh, eukaryotes. So complex multicellular organisms, uh, emerging from the water to land. That was weird. That was an interesting innovation. Whatever led to humans, there's a lot of interesting stuff there.
See, I can't even get that far. I can't get from rock and sand to cells. Yeah. That's a huge... I mean, everything around us that has... It's just, it's wild. And I could imagine being on another planet and how incredibly valuable this thing would be. It's impossible to replicate.
I'm looking at it through the candlelight right now and I can see all of the structures in this leaf, the incredible structures in this leaf that look exactly like the veins in my arm, which look exactly like the rivers that are flowing across this landscape. And it's like life has this overwhelming pattern that it uses and it's so beautiful. I just think it's Yeah.
When you imagine the days of the lightning and the volcanoes and the primordial soup, there's a big gap there. And 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 any spoilers, but Postcard from Earth, Darren Aronofsky's film, the idea there is there's probes that are sent out from Earth to all these other planets. And each probe contains two humans, a man and a woman. And those two humans are in love. So think of a couple in love.
They're sent there with all the information, basically a leaf that holds the information of what it takes to create life on other planets, to recreate on Earth and other planets. And the two humans hold all the information together. for the things that make life on earth special, especially in human civilization is love, consciousness, the, the, the social connection.
So all that information is sent in the probe and the postcard from earth is, uh, those humans waking up, remembering all the information that is earth, that more like a celebration of, all the things that make Earth magical throughout its history, all the diversity of organisms, all of that.
You're loading all that in to create life on that new planet, which is something I think alien civilizations are doing. They're sending probes all throughout the galaxy, and they just haven't arrived yet.
But anyway, that's another... That's so beautiful. And one of the things that I think I want to see that so much. And one of the things that I love about Aronofsky's work is the fountain. And what I find so beautiful about that is that now here he's saying, okay, we're sending probes out to other worlds, alien civilizations.
And in the fountain, it was sort of what I thought he did so beautifully was braid together those three stories where in one... I don't remember if he's in a spaceship or if that's supposed to be like his soul. The other one, he's a scientist in sort of like comparable times to ours, and then he's the Spanish explorer. But either way, there's the tree of life.
And it sort of braids together all of the major religions. And it made me think of that quote that you hear where it says, you know, oh God, what was it? Christ wasn't a Christian and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and Muhammad wasn't a Muslim. They were all just teachers who were teaching love. And it's like the fountain...
The Fountain sort of says nature is that driving force and it's our job to understand that the game is love. And that's what the main character in The Fountain needs to learn is that it's nature that's going to carry your soul through this thing and that there's so much you don't understand in the epiphany at the end. God, I love that movie. God, I love that.
Among many things, you're also an artist who's trying to convert the thing that is nature into a thing that we humans can understand. The complexity, the beauty of it. That's what Darren Aronofsky tried to do with those couple of films. That's something that I hope you do. Actually, in the medium of film, too. That would be very interesting. And you do that in the medium of books, currently.
How much do you think we understand about the history of life on Earth?
I think we got it all wrong. No, I don't know. It seems like they change it all the time. You know, they say, they say that Easter Island, you know, when I was in college, they were big on telling you that Easter Island, they ruined their environment. And, uh, They had environmental collapse. And that's why there was nobody on Easter Island. It was a cautionary tale.
We could ruin our environment. And now it seems like they've changed their mind on that. And then when humans entered North America seems to be hugely up to speculation. And, you know, the Africa spreading that we all spread out of Africa and then the Pleistocene overkill extinction theory. And it's like...
it seems like every few years they update it and they change it and they say, oh, the guys, no, no, no, no, no. The guys from 10 years ago, actually my new theory is the best theory. Let's write some books and get me on Letterman.
And it seems like there's a new prevailing theory that's really always exciting and edgy about how, how we got here and where we came from and how we dispersed and maybe even has some political implications, like how we should use the Amazon moving forward. Like the Amazon was engineered by people. So fuck it. Let's just cut it down.
Yeah, I tend to believe that we mostly don't understand anything, but there is an optimism in continuously figuring out the puzzle. Sure. We offline talked about the Graham Hancock, Flynn Dibble debate on Rogan. I like debates personally. So Flynn Dibble represents mainstream archaeology. And I actually like the whole...
science, the whole field of archaeology, you're trying to figure out history with so little information. You're trying to put together this puzzle when you have so little. And you're desperately clinging on to little clues. And from those clues, using the simple possible explanation to understand. And now with modern technology, as Flint was trying to express,
that you can use large amounts of data that's like imperfect, but just the scale and using that to reconstruct civilizations. There are different practices from the little details of what kind of things they eat, how they interact with each other, what kind of art they create to when they existed, what are the timeframes, all that kind of stuff.
And that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding. But still, the error bars are large in terms of what really happened. And that leaves room for things like Graham Hancock talks about like lost civilizations, which I like also because it gives you have a kind of humility about maybe there's giant things we don't know about or we got completely wrong.
And that's always good to like remember.
It's confusing to me to imagine like what, I don't even know what, like what ended the, where'd the Egyptians go? Like what happened? It seemed like they were doing so good. They had so much cool shit.
um but i mean i was reading anthropological stuff in the amazon about about tribes that you know just through through their societal structures and through their hunting practices that that didn't really develop practices that worked and kind of bands of people that went extinct before they could turn into larger societies and and there's there's a lot of people that got it wrong you know for every explorer that that that
that leaves Borneo and arrives in South America, there's probably hundreds, hundreds more that just die at sea, get eaten by sharks, you know, avalanche. And it's just, it's so fascinating to me that we, all of us really past our grandparents don't really even know where we came from. Like, do you know who your great-great-great-grandparents are? Like, no.
I mean, there's methods of trying to figure that out, but really, again, the error bars are so large that it's almost like we're trying to create a narrative that makes sense for us. You know, that I'm 10% Neanderthal, therefore I can bench press this much, and therefore my aggressive tendencies have an explanation, when in reality there's so much diversity of personalities that they far overshadow
Any possible histories we might have. Your aggressive tendencies don't have any explanation. No, you need to... You listen to me right now.
I'm sorry.
Don't hit me again. Don't choke me out again. Yeah, man. One of the things you and I talk a lot about is different explorers. Yeah. Who do you think is... I'm just throwing ridiculous questions one after the other.
Who do you think is the greatest explorer of all time? Oh, God. I love Shackleton, but I hate the cold, so I can't even read about it. I hate the cold so much. I can't even go there for fun. I think Percy Fawcett in the Amazon 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 softie. I wouldn't want to like leave my family behind. I wouldn't want to like, even if you told me that I could leave earth and go exploring and I could go touch the moon, I'd be like, nope, Absolutely not. Like the 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 horrendous gear compared to the camping gear we have today. No headlamp. And just explored for years on end.
Well, let me actually push back. You have that explore.
There is definitely a thing in you, just me having observed you behave in the jungle and in the world, you're pulled towards exploration, towards adventure, towards the possibility of discovering something beautiful, including like a small little creature or like a whole new part of the rainforest, a part of the world that is like, holy shit, this is beautiful.
I think that's the same kind of imperative. So maybe not going out to the stars, but like- Like, I could see you doing exactly the same thing. So he disappeared in 1925 during an expedition to find an ancient lost city, which he and other people believed existed in the Amazon rainforest. So there's that pull. Like, I'm going to go into there with shitty equipment.
with the possibility of finding something.
And they said he ran into uncontacted tribes and started goofing off. I think he started dancing and singing. Like the tribes were ready to kill him and he started goofing and like doing a song and a dance and just being ridiculous. And the tribes were like, what now? And they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't shoot him yet. That's a funny one.
Yeah.
And they... They actually, he kind of like, on a human level, used humor to save his own life on multiple occasions. To the point where he de-escalated the situation and was like, look, we're not here to fight. We have a pile of maps. You know, all my guys have beriberi, dengue, malaria. Like, we're dying out here. If you guys just go on your merry way, we'll go on our merry way. And like...
Incredible. He was so tough. And then that guy from Shackleton's expedition ended up on one of Fawcett's expeditions and you go, oh yeah, he's a proven explorer. He's been through the Antarctic. And the guy was like, fuck the jungle. Absolutely fuck the jungle.
He was like, and there's a great quote where he says, without a machete and something, you know, I don't remember exactly the words he used, but he said, without a machete,
in this environment you don't last yeah and you know that now like you you in that tangle to just take three steps that way would i would immediately be taking on i mean i'm not wearing shoes right now yeah bullet ants venomous snakes spikes through my feet tripping over myself i don't have a headlamp unbelievable risk right there we're sitting on the edge of tragedy
Can you explain what the purpose of the machete in this situation is? What is a machete? How does it work? How does it allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense environment?
So this is the tool that I spend most of my life carrying. This is in my hand for 90% of my time. And in the jungle, you really need a machete. There's so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through. And like a jaguar, an ocelot, a lot of these other animals... that are more horizontally based and low to the ground.
They can make it like when we got stuck in those bamboo patches and we were just hacking through them and it's dangerous. And there's, as you hit the bamboo, it ricochets and there's spikes and then one piece falls and it pulls a vine that has spikes on it and that hits you in the neck and it just, the jungle is savage to humans.
But if you are an agouti, a little rodent or a jaguar or a deer, you can kind of slip through this stuff. And the deer have developed really small antlers. They can just kind of weave through low to the ground. And so for us being these vertical beings walking through the jungle, it really helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonally opposing your movement at all times.
So machete is just a very, very useful tool. It could help you pull thorns out of your body. As you saw last night, we can use it to find food. You went machete fishing.
You cut a fish head off with a machete by like, it was swimming. And then you basically, you know, macheted the water. And the other fascinating thing about that fish without its head, it kept moving.
That was amazing.
It was just using, I guess, its nervous system to swim beautifully. I mean, there's so many questions there about how nature works.
Well, let's explain it. Because the way the machete hit this fish, it kind of took just his eyes off and his lower jaw was still there. So it was really just like the brain and the top jaw that came off. And this fish, as the dust cleared in the stream, this fish was... I found it very haunting in a very like interstellar way.
Like it was just the programming was still there, but the brain was gone and the fish was just still moving and it was going to die, but it was still swimming and it looked like a live fish. And you're still trying to catch it, which is interesting to watch. And I still had to work to catch it because every time I caught it, it would freak out and then it would jump back in the water.
And I'm programmed here from years and years of living in the Amazon that everything can hurt you. So you actually become quite... If a moth lands on you, you flick it because it could be a bullet ant. And so even the fish here, a lot of the fish here have spikes coming out of them.
And so even though I know that fish, I know its name, I've eaten them many times, as I was holding it, when it would twitch with that explosive power, just like the caiman, I would... I would get that fear response and release it. And so that happened three or four times before I finally said, this is stupid. Even though he's slippery, he hasn't got a head. I can hold onto him.
I put him in my pocket. Yeah. You put him in my pocket. And then we fried him up.
And he was delicious. Yeah. And I'm grateful for his existence and for his role and for my existence on this planet, this brief existence, that I was able to enjoy that delicious, delicious fish. So the machete is used to cut through this extremely dense jungle. This is vines, by the way. This is rope-like things that are extremely strong. And they go all kinds of directions.
They go horizontal and all of this. I don't even... We have a tree right above us. That makes no sense. There's like a tree that kind of failed and then a new tree was created on top of it. It just makes no sense. It feels like sometimes trees come from the... uh, from the sky. Sometimes they come from the ground.
I don't, I don't really quite understand the, how that works because there's new trees that grow on old trees and the old trees rot away and the new trees come up.
Yeah. That whole mechanism. Strangler figs. And so strangler figs, as you go across the world's ecosystems, that whole belt of, you know, whether you're in rainforests in the Amazon, the Congo, Indonesia, all across the tropics, you have strangler figs. And the amazing thing that this,
that this species does it's become a keystone species across the planet with a hyper influence on its ecosystem wherever it is because they produce fruit in the dry season when the rest of the forest is making it hard for animals to find fruit to find food and so the bats the birds the monkeys they all go to the strangler fig they eat the fruit and the fruit of course is just tricking the animals the the plants are tricking the animals into carrying their seeds to another tree
And so they're getting free transportation. Monkey takes a poop on another tree after eating strangler figs, and then that strangler fig sends out its vines, gets to the ground, and then as soon as it begins sucking up nutrients, out competes that tree for light, grows hyperdrive around...
trunk of that tree and then eventually that tree will die and the strangler fig will win because it got a it got a boost up to the top whereas these little trees down here they're gonna have to wait their turn they have to wait until a tree falls until there's a light gap and then they have enough food to grow quick and so this whole thing is an energy economy everything is just trying to get sunlight and so strangler figs
Yeah, top-down 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 Percy Fawcett and exploration. What do you think it was like for him back then, 100 years ago? Goddamn.
Going to the jungle. See, the thing is, those guys didn't go with the locals. They came down here with, like, mules, and they tried to do it their way. Yeah. And so he's one of the people that wrote about the green hell here. the jungle as the oppressive war zone where there's nothing to eat and everything is killing you. And it's, I think that that image is so wrong.
Cause as you saw last night, we could go, if we went out with JJ right now, we would machete fish some fish. We could start a little fire. We do it all in shorts. Like to JJ, it's green paradise. And it's intense, but if you know what you're doing, which the local people surely do, well, then just beneath the sand, there's turtle eggs that you can eat.
And inside the nuts on the ground, there's grubs that you can eat. And if you really needed to, you could just jump on a caiman and eat that because their tails are pretty full of meat. And it's like, there's actually unending amounts of food here. Yeah. And so it's, they were pretty, you know, they were strange.
If you're able to tune into the, that frequency, I feel like you're, you and JJ are able to tune to the, to the frequency of the jungle that is a provider, not a destroyer of human life, right? Yeah. Like, I think to be collaborated with, not fought against.
Yes, but we're coming at 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. Yeah. So my dead ass...
Opinion of the jungle would have been overwhelming and collective murder as Herzog says and so Percy Fawcett was coming down here with this view of it's trying to kill us at all times where we are flying down here and coming out here with our superior medicines and our ability to survive infections and And so it's it is different for us. It is different.
We're coming at this very very different but Fawcett to me was like the last of like the real swashbucklers, like the really batshit crazy explorers that just went out into the dark spaces on the map. And it's very hard for me to identify with him, but with, for instance, Richard Evans Schultes from Harvard,
That's someone where you go, okay, now we're getting to the point where I can start to understand. I mean, just like the conquistadors. And they tell you the conquistadors showed up, you know, they killed, the Spanish killed 2,000 Inca on the first day. And then they marched to this city.
And they're like, when I hear about that, 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 tomorrow? I can't actually wrap my head around that. Yeah, it just seems like an entire different world.
No, like different world. Different value system. Different value system. Different relationship with violence and life and death, I think. We value life more. We value... We resist violence more.
Yeah. Like I just, I can't, like if we saw a car accident, I feel like if I saw a car accident, like, you know, or if you see a little bit of war, some violence, like it affects you. These people were so comfortable with those things. It was such a normal part of their, the Spartans, the Comanches, like they became so comfortable with war to the point that it became what they did now.
And they celebrated it too. They celebrated it. And direct violence too, like taking that machete and murdering me. Or if I got to the machete first, me murdering you. Not a chance, bitch. And then I would put it on Instagram and show off.
And the number of DMs I would get for murdering you with a machete. Meanwhile, half the world right now is messaging me saying, my DMs are filled with, take care of Lex. Don't lose Lex. Make sure Lex comes back safe. Lex is a national treasure. We love Lex. Make sure he holds a snake. Yeah. The amount of love that is out there.
Meanwhile, I emerge from the jungle of blood around me with a machete and I take over your Instagram account. He's very humble. He doesn't want to hear about the love. All right. So what do you think makes a great explorer? Whether it's Percy Fawcett, Richard Evan Schultes. By the way, say who Richard Evan Schultes is. He's a biologist.
So that's another lens through which to be an explorer is to study the... the biology, the immense diversity of biological life all around us.
Richard Evans Schultes, I know about him from reading Wade Davis's book, One River, which is this big, hefty, you know, five or 600 page tome about the Amazon. And it covers two stories. It's Richard Evans Schultes, and I think it's in the 40s. I think it's like pre-World War II era,
Where he's in the Amazon looking for the blue orchid and the cure for this and that and he's pressing plants and he's going to these indigenous communities where they still live completely with the forest and they drink ayahuasca and they talk to the gods and he learns about how they believed that the anaconda came down from the Milky Way and swam across the land and created the rivers and sort of he came down and even though he was a western scientist from Harvard he embraced
the indigenous perspective on the world, on creation, on spirituality. And he sort of resigned himself and gave himself fully to that and spent years and years traveling around parts of the Amazon that had hardly been explored and certainly never been explored
in the way he was doing it in the ethnobotanical spiritual way of of what medicinal compounds are contained in these plants and how do the local indigenous people use and understand them for example you know of 80 000 species of plants in the amazon rainforest and 400 billion trees in the amazon rainforest the statistics of likelihood that through trial and error that humans could discover ayahuasca
It's astronomical that one of these trees and a root when put together allow you to go access the spirit realm and see hallucinogenic shapes and talk to the gods. That's almost enough to inspire spiritual thought itself. The fact that Trial and error, it would take like millions of years or something. It's it's it's I forget what the figure is. It's incredible.
But Richard Evans Schultes was one of the first people that came down and saw that. And then one river is where Wade Davis comes back, I believe, in the 70s. And the heartbreak of the book is that all of these incredibly wild places with with naked native tribes and these these intact belief systems, Wade Davis comes back and a lot of the same places that Schultes went.
Now there's missionary schools and they're wearing discarded Nikes and, you know, whatever. I don't know if there's Nikes in the seventies, but like Western stuff has made it in. They've been contacted, domesticated, forced into Western society and.
You know, a lot of them then forget the thousands and thousands of years that have gone into creating the medicinal botanical knowledge that the indigenous possess about how to cure ear infections and how to treat illnesses from the medicinal compounds flowing through these trees is lost in a single generation with the modernization.
Yeah, he wrote The Plants of the Gods, Their Sacred Healing and the Hallucinogenic Powers. That is interesting. You mentioned how to discover that. How do you find those incredible plants, those incredible things? things that can warp your mind in all kinds of ways. Of course, physically heal, but also take you on a mental journey. That's interesting.
So you don't think trial and error is possible.
I was reading about ayahuasca and they were saying 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 species it would take tens and tens of thousands of years or perhaps even centuries before even the possibility it's like that thing you know a bunch of chips on a keyboard how could they write hamlet it's like astronomical odds to get to
oh wait, this and this dosed together. And so what the local people believe is that the gods revealed this secret through the jungle to us as a link to the spirit world. And that that's how we know this. Because if they didn't remember it from their ancestors, we would have no idea how to get this information from the wild.
So I will likely do ayahuasca therapy
What do you think exists in the spirit world that could be found by taking that journey?
I think that ayahuasca is, I can only speak from personal experience. And for me, it was as if your brain is a house you've lived in your entire life. And it's a big house. It's a mansion. And there's many, many rooms that you didn't even know exist. Hidden rooms behind the bookshelves, under the floorboards, rooms that you had no idea were there. And some of them are fantastic.
And some of them are terrifying basements. And ayahuasca takes you on a journey through that at, at its, at its, at its most effective. You sit in front of the shaman with the candlelight, with the sounds of the jungle and you drink the substance. And after that, what happens is the journey is all inside and, and that the shaman is supposed to be able to guide you through that.
But in my experience, you're you're so deep inside, like falling through nebulas out in space, no physical form or crawling through the jungle. Like it's like, it's really, really powerful. Like it's not like a, it's not like the recreational drugs that, that, that everyone does.
Like where you go, I did mushrooms and I could see, so I could see music like, and I was talking to my friends, but no, no, no, no. Like your face down on the floor, usually vomiting, sometimes shitting, um, um you know having dialogues with with the creator and that that that can be that can be traumatizing as well as amazing
It's a really good way of looking at it. It's a big house, and you get to open doors that you've never had before and discover what rumors are there inside you. You ever think about that, like that there's parts of yourself you haven't discovered yet, or maybe you've been suppressing? How much are you exploring the shadow? Oh, boy.
So say you, me, Carl Jung, and Jordan Peterson are in a deserted island together. Fuck, I didn't even make my bed today. There's no bed in an island.
Great. I want to see you and Jordan Peterson do ayahuasca together. I think, I think that's, that's the thing. Ayahuasca to me, you know, I've, 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's a benevolent force around us. But to me, ayahuasca was like a,
was a ride through the scariest parts of the universe to sort of be like, here's what it could be like. That's where I came up with my idea that 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 Ayahuasca, 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 this spot in the jungle where there was a big tree and all the animals were there and they were all, not in words, not in any language that we can understand, but they were all discussing what to do about the threat. And it was all, it was all leaving. It was all flying up and it was fire and the jungle was being destroyed.
And it was like, and then after that, it was just space and stars and silence, like crushing vacuum silence. For years. And that was terrifying. That was fucking terrifying. When I came back and I had hands, man, I can remember my own name.
You're grounded. Things are simpler. You're back inside the video game. What are the chances you think we're actually living in a video game?
When you say a video game, it implies that there's a player. Who's the player? Is it God?
No, there's a main player. Usually that's not going to be God. God is the thing that creates the video game.
Oh, so then we're just...
And there's somebody that's our NPCs. Like, I'm an NPC.
You're an NPC?
Jesus Christ. Yeah, you created me.
Is this like Halo where you can kind of kill the NPCs? I see how you put the machete behind you. Okay, I think... I'm just going to take a stand here. I think that because people... I'm just sick of fucking playing it halfway. I think that because people live indoors in climate-controlled... boxes in cities far away from nature. They've completely lost track of everything that's real.
And they've started to think that we're living inside of a simulation. Notice that nobody carrying an alpaca up a mountain thinks that we're living inside of a video game. They all know that it's real because they've had babies on the floor of a cold hut. They understand the consequences of life.
They understand the fish and how hard it is to get them and the basic rules of the wind and the rain and the river. And that we all have to play by those and that it's, and, and you talk to a, talk to a grieving mother and ask her if she's living inside a video game. And it's like the people, to me, this, this whole thing of, oh, are we living in a simulation?
To me, that's a, that's, that's the, that's the infirmary of, of society starting to, that's starting to, to, to. to, to, to parody itself. It's people going, I have no meaning in my life anymore. So is this even real? And again, go ask the Sherpa, go ask the Eskimo. They're not, they're not worried.
You forget what fundamentally matters in life. What is the source of meaning in a human life? Uh, If you talk about such subjects, nevertheless, you could for a time stroll in the big philosophical questions. And if you do it for short enough a time, you won't forget about the things that matter. That there is human suffering, that there is real human joy. That is real.
Our time in the jungle was very hard.
Did you suffer enough to know that it's real? Yeah. Man, I was hoping we're in a video game that whole time. So that's actually a really good way to... There was this moment that I watched where you were washing a shirt in this pathetic puddle because we had no water and because we had walked all day and tripped all day and gotten thorns in our hands and our feet and our legs and...
We were lost in the jungle and it was nighttime and we didn't know if a big tree was going to just fall on us and mousetrap 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. It wasn't even a flowing stream, so we couldn't drink it. And you were just trying to wash the sweat off of your shirt.
And you, you looked at me and you just said, the only thing that I care about right now is water.
Mm-hmm.
And I feel like in that moment we were united in the, in the simple reality of the fact that we were so thirsty that it hurt and that it was a little scary.
Yeah. Uh, it was scary, but also there's like a. A joy in the interaction with the water because it cools your body temperature down.
And there's like a faith in that interaction that eventually we'll find clean water because water's plentiful on earth. It's kind of like a delusional faith that eventually we'll find. And it was just like a little celebration.
I think the cooling aspect of the water, because the body temperature is really high from traversing the really dense jungle, and just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing else really is. Yeah, it was a little celebration of life, of life on Earth, of Earth, of the jungle, of everything. It was a nice moment. I think about that. Had a couple of those.
There's one in the puddle and one in the river. One was full of delusion and fear and the other one was full of relief and celebration.
Yeah, there's this thing that they say where all the pleasure in life is derived from the transitions. When you're cold, warm feels good. When you're hot, cold feels good. When you're hungry, food feels good. And when you're that thirsty, water becomes God. And it's all you want.
And also, and also the other thing is that when you're, when we're out there, it felt so good to be so lost and so tired. And so like we were doing level to like, like, how would you, how would you describe the physicality of what we were doing? The level of physical, like exertion?
Well, it's something that, I haven't trained, I don't even know how you would train for that kind of thing, but it's extremely dense jungle. So every single step is like completely unpredictable in terms of the terrain your foot interacts with. So the different variety of slippery,
that is on the jungle floor is fascinating because some things, I mean, the slope matters, but some roots of trees are slippery, some are not.
Some trees in the ground already rotted through, so if you step through, you're going to potentially fall through, so it could be a shallow hole or it could be a very deep hole with some leaves and vegetation covering up a hole where if you fall through, you could break a leg and completely lose your footing or fall rolling down.
And if you roll downhill, I'm pretty sure there's a 99% probability that you'll hit a thing with spikes on it. So there's so many layers of avoiding dangers of small dangers and big dangers all around you with every single step. So there's like a mental exhaustion that sets in, like just the perception. And you're just observing you.
You're extremely good at perceiving, having situational awareness of taking the information in that's really important and filtering out the stuff that's not important. But even for you, that's exhausting. And for me, it was completely exhausting, just paying attention, paying attention to everything around you. So that exhaustion was surprising.
Cause it's like, there's moments when you're like, I don't give a damn anymore. I'm just going to step. I'm just going to like.
And so that's it. You go, I don't care anymore. And you reach out and you, I'm just going to lean against this tree. And then what happened? Every time. Yeah. And then you have to care. Yeah.
And then there's just bad luck because there is wasp nests. There's just like a million things. And that is physically, is mentally, psychologically exhausting because there's the uncertainty. When is this going to end? It's up in our particular situation, up and down hills, up and down hills, very steep downward, very steep upward, no water, all this kind of stuff.
It's the most difficult thing I've ever done physically. but it's very difficult to describe what are the parameters that make it difficult. Because I run long distances very regularly. I do extremely difficult physical things regularly that on some surface level could seem much more challenging than what we did. But no, this was another beast. This is something else.
But it was also raw and real and beautiful because it's like... It's what the explorers did. Yeah. It's what Earth is without humans. And also just like the massive scale of the trees around us. was the humbling size difference between human and tree. It's both humbling in that, like, that tree is really old. It's the time difference, lifetime difference, and just the scale. It's like, holy shit.
We live on an earth that can create those things. It makes me feel small in every way. That life is short. That my physical presence on this earth is tiny. How vulnerable I am. All of those feelings are there. And in that, the physical endurance of traversing the jungle, yeah, was the hardest journey that I remember ever taking.
Every step. And then that made making it out of the jungle and then made it the swim in the water that we could drink. That was just pure joy. It was probably one of the happiest moments in my life.
Just sitting there with you, Paul, and with JJ in the water. full darkness, the rain coming down, and us all just laughing, having made it through that, having eaten a bit of food before, and the absurdity of the timing of all of it that it somehow worked out, and how we're just three little humans sitting in a river.
Just our heads emerged barely above water with jungle all around us.
What a life.
That was a real adventure.
That was a real adventure.
That was a real one. Yeah. I'll never forget that. So it's a real honor to have shared that. Of course, we had very different experiences. When you saw a caiman in that situation, you're like, I have to go meet that guy that's in front of me.
Well, I mean, we were in the river, in a thunderstorm, just our necks above. We're all laughing our asses off. And I mean, we're in the river with the stingrays and the black caiman and the piranha and all the electric eels and everything. And it's pitch black out. And then what were we doing?
We were holding our headlamps up and there was those swirling moths, the infinity moths, all making those geometric patterns. And it's like, we were just three ridiculous primates. Mm-hmm. Three friends in a river just laughing. Yeah. Because we were safer in that river than we had been in there.
And we were rejoicing that, that, that the thunderstorm was, was compared to the war zone that we'd been living in. The thunderstorm was safe and it was, it really was a beautiful moment.
And also that like very different life trajectories have taken these three humans into this one place.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's like what is this universe that would like, because we're kind of like those moths. You know what I mean? Like we come from some weird place on this earth and we have all kinds of shit happen to us and we're all pursuing some shit and some light and we ended up here together enjoying this moment. That's something else. It just felt absurd.
And in that absurdity was this like real human joy. And damn water tasted good.
Oh, water's good.
Man, water and those, those little oranges. Yeah. Those things. And then I would just say like, do you feel like, I feel like running, like no matter how much I run, I feel like the, like you run, you do a workout and then you stop. Like maybe people who do ultras feel this, but like, I felt like the, we would, we woke up, it was like, you know, wake up at dawn, 6 a.m.,
Let's start walking, you know, break camp, go. And it's like, pretty much you just don't stop all day. And it's level 10 cardio all day long. And you're sweating buckets and there's no water. It's like, you would never put yourself through that voluntarily. You couldn't, you'd never, you would never have the resolve to, to continue torturing yourself, except for that.
We were trying to make it to the, to freedom to get out. And it's like the obsession of that with the compass and the machete and the navigating.
Fuck. I think there's something to be said about like the fact that we didn't think through much of that and we just dived into it. I think there was like, we're like laughing, enjoying ourselves moments before. And once you go in, you're like, oh shit. Oh shit. And you just come face to face with it. Yeah.
I think that's what, you know, whatever that is in humans that goes to that, that's what the explorers do. And the best of them do it to the extreme levels.
Well, I think that what we did was to a pretty extreme level because we left the safety of a river of knowing where we were and voluntarily got lost in the Amazon with very little provisions. Now that we're back, now that we experienced what we experienced, I really can't stop thinking about how fucking stupid it was that we did that. Because if we had gotten lost, Pico was saying to me,
If one of you had broken your leg, it's days in either direction. Even if they had sent help for us. Help would take how long to scour all that jungle. Sound doesn't travel. Even a helicopter, even if they looked for us, they wouldn't be able to see us. How would we signal for help? Can't really build a fire.
And so it's like, if anything had gone wrong, if we'd gone a few degrees different to the West, it would have taken us two more days. If we'd gotten injured... It'd be Carrie through that. Yeah. And so somehow only afterwards am I really going, wow, thank God we got out of this. Thank God.
After I see so many people going, make sure nothing happens to Lex Friedman, I'd be the deadest motherfucker on earth.
It somehow works out. It does seem to somehow work out. Let me ask you about Jane Goodall, another explorer of a different kind. What do you think about her? About her role in understanding this...
natural world of ours i think that jane is like a living historical treasure like i think somehow she's alive but she's she's already reached that level where it's like einstein jane goodall like there's these these these incredible minds and Growing up as a child, my parents would read to me because I was so dyslexic I didn't learn to read until I was quite old.
My mom was a big Jane Goodall fan and all I wanted to hear about was animals. I would get read to about this lady named Jane Goodall, this girl who went to Africa and studied chimps and who broke all the rules and named her study subjects even though that wasn't what she was supposed to do. And
She became this incredible advocate for earth and for ecosystems and for, and she seemed to realize as her career went on that, that teaching children to appreciate nature was the key.
because they're going you know that thing where she says we don't so much uh inherit the earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our children we're just here we're just passing through and so if we destroy it we're we're we're dimming the lights on the lives of future generations and so she's been really really cognizant of that and she's been a light in the darkness she's sort of
In terms of saying that animals have personalities and culture and their own inalienable rights and reasons for existing and that human life is valuable. She's very big on that. Every day we influence the people around us and the events of the earth. Even if you feel like your life is small and insignificant, that you do have an impact.
And I think that's a really powerful little candle out there in the darkness that Jane carries. What do you think about her field work with the chimps? Badass. The fact that she did what she did at the age that she did, at the time that she did, is incredible. It's actually incredible. She has that explorer gene and she also has that relentless, relentlessness is like this incredible quality.
She just, you know, she travels 300 days a year, educating people, talking around the world, trying to help bolster conservation now before it's too late. Mm-hmm. And traveling 300 days a year is not fun. Traveling at all can be not fun.
So I started reading the River of Doubt book you recommended to me on Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah. So that guy's badass on many levels, but I didn't realize how much of a naturalist he was, how much of a scholar of the natural world he was. So that book details his journey into the Amazon jungle.
Um, what do you find inspiring about Teddy Roosevelt and that whole journey of just saying, fuck it, of going to the Amazon jungle of taking on that expedition?
Well, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, you could write volumes on what's inspiring about him. I think that, you know, he was, he was a weak asthmatic little rich kid that, that wasn't physically able, that had no self-confidence and he was very, and he, and, and he had pretty severe depression. He had tragedy in his life and, and,
He was very, at least for me, he's been one of the people, one of the first historical figures where he wrote about the struggle to overcome those things. And to make himself from being a weak, asthmatic little teenager to sort of strengthening himself and building muscle and becoming this barrel-chested lion of a guy who could be the president, who could be an explorer and...
one of the rough riders. And he's just, everything he does is so hyperbolically, you know, incredible. To come out of war and have the other people you fought with go, this guy has no fear. I mean, he must've just been a psychopath and had no fear. And then proving it further was that thing where he was gonna give a speech to a bunch of people and he got shot in the chest.
And it went through his spectacle case and through his speech. And even though the bullet was lodged in his chest, this man said, don't hurt the guy that shot me. I believe he asked him, why'd you do it? And then as he's bleeding and in the rain, said, no, no, no, I'm not going to the hospital. I'm going to keep going with the speech. What a badass. That's incredible.
But going to the jungle on many levels is really difficult for him at that time. There's so many more things even than now that can kill you. All the different infections, everything. And the lack of knowledge, just the sheer lack of knowledge. So that truly is an expedition.
a really really challenging expedition so there's lessons about what it takes to be a great explorer from that the perseverance how important you think is perseverance and exploration especially through the jungle i think it's all there is if you hear about the people and and i think that that is a tremendous metaphor for life because whether you hear about that plane that crashed in the andes and the people were alone and freezing and they had to eat each other and
Some of them made it out. Some of them kept the fire burning. And Teddy Roosevelt voluntarily, after being president, threw himself into the Amazon rainforest and survived. Came so close to dying, but survived. And so perseverance is all of it. I mean, I think that's our quality as a human.
So they also mapped. So on the biology side, it's interesting. But they mapped and documented a lot of the unknown geography and biodiversity. What does it take to do that? So when I see a move about the jungle, you're always like, you capture a creature, take a picture, write down, like, so you can...
find new creatures, find new things about the jungle, document them, sort of a scientific perspective on the jungle. But back then, there was even less known, much less known about the jungle. So what do you think it takes to document, to map that world and new unexplored wilderness?
I mean, they're clearly pressing botanical specimens They're probably shooting birds. And Roosevelt knew how to preserve those specimens. I mean, he really was a naturalist, so he knew exactly. So if he's seeing these animals, to them, whereas we'll take a picture and identify it, they were harvesting specimens, taking them with them, drying them out. For them, it was totally different.
And it could be the first, you know, there's... I don't know. I forget what JJ said. There's something like 70 species of ant birds here. And it's like, so how likely are you to be the first person to ever see this one species of bird? And so for them, you have this bird. And so perfectly preserving that specimen.
And I think a lot of non-scientific people don't realize that every species from blue whale to elephant to blue jay to sparrow, whatever, whatever it is, whatever species we have on record, There are scientific specimens and the first people to see them shot them.
And that's, there's museums are filled with these catalogs, preserved birds that these explorers brought back from New Guinea and South America and Africa, and then put into these drawers and. And now we labeled them and we said, this is red and green macaw. This is scarlet macaw. This is brown crested ant bird. And they're just categorized.
That book of birds you have, like encyclopedia of birds. Yo. What? The human achievement. In these pages. For people listening, Paul's just flipping through a huge number of pages. These are just, is this in the Amazon or is this in Peru?
This is just here. This is birds of Peru. Dude, pages on pages of toucans and orisaris and hummingbirds and ant birds and smoky brown woodpecker and tropical screech owl, which we just heard, by the way. It's endless. Who knew there were so many birds? I had no idea there were so many birds.
Documenting all of that. I mean, there's also, which we got to experience, and you're pretty good at also, is actually making, understanding and making the sounds of the different birds. What's your favorite bird sound to make?
Uh, undulated tinamou because in the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk, uh, they're usually the ones that make up what is considered by many to be the anthem of the Amazon. Can you do a little bird for us? That's what a undulated tinamou sounds like. And it's usually like, oh, it is getting to be afternoon. It's kind of, it's almost like hearing church bells on a Sunday.
It's like you just, there's something about it. You go, ah, there he is.
And like you were saying, it's a reminder, oh, that's a friend of mine. Yeah. Surrounded by friends. I have so many friends here. What does it take to survive out here? What are some basic principles of survival in the jungle?
Cleanliness. I mean, really, we talked about this, but like, you know, keeping, I have so many holes in my skin right now. Look, I have a mosquito. There we go. I have so many spots that I've scratched off of my skin because a mosquito bites me and then I scratch it. Or the other big one is that I worry that I have a tick.
Not deliberately, not with my thinking brain, but my simian brain just wants to find and remove ticks. And so I scratch and then if my fingernails get too long, I remove my skin and then... those get infected in the jungle.
And so staying hyper clean, using soap, like basic stuff, keeping order to your bags, order to your gear, things in dry bags, make sure, you know, we explained that we got in the river during a thunderstorm, We didn't explain why we did that because the thunderstorm came when we had eaten dinner, but we hadn't set up our tents.
And so we decided to cover our bags with our boats that we had been carrying, our pack rafts that we'd been carrying in our backpacks. So all of our gear would stay dry. So the only thing we could do is either sit in the rain and be cold or sit in the river and be warm. And so keeping our gear dry, momentary discomfort for future, you know, that to me was an incredibly smart decision.
calculation to make is you really just, you gotta be smart out here. You can't, you know, not running out of a headlamp while you're out on the trail and being stuck in that darkness. Yeah. It really takes just being a little bit on your toes. And I find that that... That necessity of being on your toes is a place that I like to live in. It's just the right amount of challenge here.
So keeping the gear organized and all that, but also being willing to sort of improvise. I've seen you improvise very well because there's so much unknowns. There's so much chaos and dynamic aspects that like planning is not going to prevent you from having to face that in the end of the day.
No, it's been really funny watching you sort of shed your planning brain. Like day, like day one, it was very much like, so are we gonna, and then I could tell, I could see your, I could see your brow sort of furrow when you, I would go, I don't know what time we're going to get there. And you'd go, well, we'll just tell me. And I'd be like, I,
I don't know what the jungle is going to let us do, you know, let's do, let's record the podcast tomorrow. Okay. But we, if it, if it, you know, if it rains, if it gets windy, if a free, I hate comes, if there's a, a Jaguar with rabies, like anything could happen. Landslide, like anything, literally.
I mean, the thing you mentioned, trees falling, that's a thing in the jungle.
That's a major thing in the jungle.
Holy shit. First of all, a lot of trees fall. Yeah.
And they fall quickly and they could just kill you. They fall quickly. They're huge. We're talking about trees that are like...
the size of school buses stacked and connected to other trees with vines so that when they fall this millennium tree this thousand year old tree boom it shakes the ground pulls down other trees with it so if you're anywhere near that for a few acres you're getting smashed that's the end of you and so the jungle at any moment that you're out there could just decide to delete you
And then the leafcutter ants and the army ants and the flies and everything, you'll be digested in three days. You'll be gone. Gone. No bones. Nothing.
Who do you think would eat most of you?
I would hope that a king vulture with a colorful face would just get in there right in the ass. Nature is metal. Just like when they walk in through the elephant's ass. I'd want that on camera trap. I think that would be a great way to go.
And we'll slowly look up and just kind of smile at the camera.
Yeah, just rip out your intestines and just shake it. Yeah. Victorious over your dead body. Well, but also honor a friend. That's another way to honor. Yeah, sure. But you know, you just, you'd look so, you know, your white naked ass laying there in the jungle. You'd be like face down and shit.
That's why you always have to look good. Any moment a tree can fall on you and a vulture just swoops in and eats your heart. That's right. We talked about it alone, this show, a bit. Yo. Rockhouse. Yeah. What do you think about that guy? Rockhouse, Roland Welker from season seven. He built the Rockhouse. He killed the Muscox with bow and arrow and then finished it with a knife.
Yeah. And had the GoPro to mount to document it.
That's really mind-blowing. I mean, so for people who don't know, that shows you're supposed to survive as long as possible. On season seven of the show, they literally said you can only win it if you survive 100 days. And there's a lot of aspects of that show that's difficult, one of which is it's in the cold. The others, they get just a handful of supplies, no food, nothing, none of that.
So they have to figure all of that out. And this is probably one of the greatest performers on the show, Roland Welker. He built a rock house shelter. So what does survival entail? It's building a shelter. Fire, catching food, staying warm, getting enough energy to sort of keep doing the work. It takes a lot of work. Like building the rock house, I read that it took 500 calories an hour from him.
So he had to feed himself, right? Quite a lot. You're lifting 200 pound boulders. And still the guy lost, I read, 44 pounds, which is 20% of his body weight. So that's survival. What lessons, what inspiration do you draw from him?
I think he was fun to watch because... he had this indomitable spirit. He was just, he wasn't there to commune with nature. He was there to win. And he was like, to me, that's the pioneer mentality. He just, he was just, he goes, I'm a hunting guide. I'm out here. I'm going to win that money. I'm going to survive through the winter. He wasn't worried.
I feel like so many people are like, they worry second guessing themselves. Am I in a video game? I don't know. What's my, you know, just questioning their entire existential identity. And this guy was like, you know what? There's a musk ox over there. I'm going to shoot it. I'm going to stab it. And then I'm going to make a pouch out of its ball sack.
And I'm going to live off that for the next few months and win a half a million dollars. And that's an amazing amount of pragmatic optimism that I just enjoyed. And every time he would go, we got to get back to rock house. And it became, even though he's all alone, it was, he had a big smile on his face. And what made that season so great was that it was him.
And then it was Callie and, and Roland had, uh,
know the muscle and could make rock house and then callie was was the opposite she was this girl who yeah she could hunt with her bow and she knew how to fish and and she wasn't using raw power but what was so endearing about her was that how much she loved being out there as hard as it was and as isolation isolationist as it was she was smiling every time every time the show cut to her
She was like, hey, everybody, it's morning. Can you believe the frost? Like, you've been out there for a hundred days. Amazing opt-in. I think it was really an amazing show of that the game is all here, the game of life, the game of Elowen and the game of life, because it's the same thing.
Yeah, she maintained that sort of silliness, the goofiness all through it when the condition got really tough. And she had a very different perspective as, you know, Roland didn't want any of the spirituality. It's very pragmatic. Yeah. And for Callie, it's a very spiritual connection to the land. She said something like she wanted not only to take from the land, but to give back.
I mean, there's this kind of poetic, spiritual connection to the land. It's such a dire contrast to Roland. Yeah. But she's still a badass. I mean, to survive, no matter what, no matter the kind of personality you have, you have to be a badass. I think she took a porcupine quill from her shoulder.
That was crazy because I think it went in somewhere completely different and it migrated to her shoulder. And the way they understood that is because they have, I said, that's impossible.
Yeah.
Cause I remember that she's like pulling up her shirt and she, she's like, there's something. And then she like pushes it out. Yeah. And I remember like, I was like, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. How? Yeah. And it was because the barbs, once it goes in, as you move and flex your body, it moves a little bit each time and it gets migrate like. I didn't even think of that shit.
Plus, if I remember correctly, I think she caught two porcupines. The second one was like rotting or something or infected. It had an infected body, whatever. It had the spots on it.
Yeah.
She chose not to eat it. No, and then she chose not to eat it at first, and then she decided to eat it eventually. I forgot that. Yeah, and that was an insane, sort of really thoughtful, focused, collective decision, waiting a day and then saying, fuck it, I need this fat. And that was the other thing, is like fat is important. Oh, yeah. It's like meat is not enough.
You learn about like what are the different food sources there. Apparently there's like rabbit starvation is a thing because when you have too much lean meat, it doesn't nourish the body. Fat is the thing that nourishes the body, especially in cold conditions.
So that's the thing. Yeah, she was incredible. And I thought as brash and sort of fun as Roland was, she represented a much more beautiful take on it. And it was really heartbreaking when she lost. And like you said, still a badass. It's kind of like Forrest Griffin versus Stefan Bonner. It doesn't matter who won. You guys beat the shit out of each other. Yeah.
And she didn't really lose, right?
No.
So she got evac'd because her toe was going. Frostbite. Frostbite. 100 days. You think you can do 100 days?
Honestly, I've done it. I'm 18 years in the Amazon, man. I just, at this point, it's... I could, I wouldn't sign up for another hundred days, you know, at this point, I don't, I don't have that to prove I've survived in the wild and, uh, I wouldn't want to voluntarily take a hundred days away from everyone I know. Yeah, the loneliness aspect is tough. We're not meant for that.
Yeah.
And they go, it's not worth it. They have this existential realization. They go, we only got, I only got so many years here. Like let's, let's, this is crazy. It's just some money. Fuck it. And they go home.
You know, it's funny. Cause you sometimes feeling yourself in the jungle and you're alone. And there's a, another guy, uh, Jordan, uh, Jonas Hobo Jodo. Uh, he's the season six winner. And he said that the camera made him feel less lonely. Yeah. I've heard of him from multiple channels. One of the things is he spent all of his 20s living in Siberia with the tribes out there. Herzog, happy people.
And so he actually talked about that. it's one of the loneliest time of his life because when he went up there, he didn't speak Russian and he needed to learn the language. And even though you have people around you, when you don't speak their language, it feels really, really lonely. And he felt less lonely on the show because he had the camera and he felt like he could talk to the camera.
There is an element when you have, in these harsh conditions, if you like record something, you feel like you're talking to another human through it, even if it's just a recording. I sometimes feel that like, Maybe because I imagine a specific person that will watch it, and I feel like I'm talking to that person.
I noticed that when things got especially hard, and they did get especially hard when we were out in the wilderness, that you would begin filming to share that struggle. But I also think that I've used that at times before. where, yeah, you go, well, maybe if I, because if you can tell someone else about it, then you're on the hero's journey. And then it sort of has to make you braver
And it changes how you, cause you, I'm cold and I'm tired and I'm, I'm hungry and this hurts and that hurts. And I don't know when we're going to make it. And how is this going to go? And all of a sudden you go, well, guys, we're, we're here and we're going that way. And, and, uh, and then you're like, well, I got to keep going. Cause you're like, they're still out there. If you forget.
You have to step up. That's one of the reasons I want a family. I think when you have kids, you have to be like, you have to be the best version of yourself.
Like for them. All my friends with kids. That I've seen them go through where until you have a family, you're just, you're just playing around, man. I mean, you could do important work. You can, you can have skin in the, in other games, but it's once you have a little tribe of humans that depends on you. Yeah. If you take that seriously, if you want to do that, right.
It's one of the hardest things you could do. And it, it just, it just changes everything.
How has your life changed since we last met? Speak about changing everything. So you've been, for people who don't know, pushing jungle keepers forward into uncharted territories, saving more and more and more and more rainforest. There's a lot, I could ask you about that. There's a lot of stories to be told there. It's a fight, it's a battle.
It's a battle to protect this beautiful area of rainforest, of nature. But since we last met, you've continued to make a lot of progress. So what's the story of Jungle Keepers leading up to the moment we met and after and everything you're doing right now?
18 years ago when I first came to the jungle, I was... a kid from New York who always dreamed since I was six years old, maybe even younger, of going to a place where animals were everywhere and there's big trees and skyscrapers of life.
And so being dyslexic and not fitting in in school and reading about Jane Goodall and having Lord of the Rings be one of the things I grew up on, I just chose to come to the Amazon and the first person I met
was this local indigenous conservationist named Juan Julio Duran, who was trying to protect this remote river, the Las Piedras River, which in history, apparently Fawcett referenced either the Las Piedras, but he called it Tahuamanu and said, don't go there. You'll surely die from tribes. Yeah. And so there's very few references to this river in history.
It's stayed very wild because it's been a place that the law hasn't made it, the government hasn't really extended to, like, you know, we're sort of past the police limit. And so JJ was out here ages ago trying to protect this river before it was too late. And when I met him, I was just a barely out of high school kid with a dream of just seeing the rainforest, let alone...
seeing a giant anaconda or having any sort of meaningful experience or contribution to the narrative and somehow over all the years that we began working together and sparked a friendship and began exploring and going on expeditions and bringing people to the rainforest and and asking them for help and manifesting the hell out of this insane dream that we had i mean we didn't even have a boat we would take logs down the river
we would have to cut a tree down every time we wanted to return to civilization. We'd have to cut down a balsa tree and float down the river. Float down the river on it, yeah. It's madness. Like, it's madness. It's pure madness. And I don't know what made us keep going, but along the way, people showed up who cared and who wanted to help.
And if it was a movie, it wouldn't even necessarily be a good movie because you'd go, oh, please. You're just telling me that you just kept doing the thing and just magically people showed up? But yeah, that's what happened. Mm-hmm. That's exactly the way it went. We kept doing the thing that we loved.
We said, it doesn't matter if we don't have funding or a boat or gasoline or friends or anything. We just kept going. And along the way, we found someone who could help us start a ranger program. And then we found... Dax De Silva, who helped us fund the beginning of Jungle Keepers.
And then people like Mohsen and Stefan who were there making sure that this thing actually took flight off the ground.
And then right around the time that we were wondering what was going to happen and if we're all going to have to quit and get real jobs and if we could actually save the rainforest from the destruction that was coming, Lex Friedman sends me a DM and honestly changed the entire narrative. Because up until then, we had been We've been playing in the minor leagues, pretending, trying real, real hard.
And the listeners of your show in the moments after you published your episode with our conversation, began showing up in droves and supporting jungle keepers, putting in five, 10, 100, 1,000. We started getting these donations. And the incredible team that I work with, we all went into hyperdrive. Everybody, everybody started going nuts.
We all started spending 16-hour days working to try and deal with the tidal wave that Lex sent towards us, just because so many people knew that we were doing this, that it was an indigenous-led fight to protect this incredibly ancient, virgin,
rainforest before it was cut and people resonated with that and so we we got this this this huge swell of support and this year we've we've protected thousands and thousands of more acres of rainforest because of that swell of support so current 50 000 acres what's the goal what's the approach to saving this rainforest since we printed this it's gone up to 66 000 acres it's
And as you know, in each of those little acres are millions and millions of animal heartbeats and societies of animals. And the goal here is that we're between Manu National Park, Alto Pudos National Park, the Tambopada Reserve. We're in a region that's known as the biodiversity capital of Peru. One of the most biodiverse parts of the Western Amazon.
And we're fighting along the edge of the Trans-Amazon Highway. And so it's just a small group of local people and some international experts who have come together and used these incredibly out of sight of the box strategies to sort of crowdfund conservation. To go, look, we know that this incredible life is here. We have the scientific evidence. We have the national park system.
If we can protect this before they cut it down. Mm-hmm. We could do something of global significance. All these jaguars, all these monkeys, all these undescribed medicines, the uncontacted tribes that we share this forest with could all be protected. And people have stepped up and begun to make that happen. And it's people from all over the world. And it's incredible.
But what's the approach? So trying to, with donations, to buy out more and more of the land and then protect it?
So the approach is that currently the government favors extractors. So if you're a gold miner... or an illegal logger, or you just want to cut down and burn a bunch of rainforests and set up a cacao farm, the government's fine with that. It doesn't matter. You're not really breaking the law if you destroy nature.
So as long as you're producing something from the land, they don't see it as a loss that the nature was destroyed permanently.
Yeah, it's just wilderness. It's sort of just beyond the scope of... It doesn't... Or the local people that technically own the land out here, the local indigenous people. For instance, we fought this year to help the community of Puerto Nuevo, who's been fighting for 20 years to have government-recognized land. These are indigenous people in the Amazon fighting to protect their own land.
And you know what it was that was holding them back? They didn't understand anything. how the system of legal documents worked to certify that titled land. They didn't really have the funding to go from their very, very remote community into the offices. And so Jungle Keepers helped them with that. And so really all we're doing is helping local people protect the forest that is their world.
That's it. If people donate, how will that help? If people donate to Jungle Keepers, what you're doing is you're helping... Someone like JJ, who's an indigenous naturalist, who has the vision, who has seen forest be destroyed, he's trying to protect it before it's too late. You're saving mahogany trees, ironwood trees, kapok trees, skyscrapers of life.
Just monkeys, birds, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, this entire avatar on earth world of rainforest that produces a fifth of the oxygen we breathe in the water we drink. This incredible thing, as far as I know, it's the most direct way to protect that. And so the fact that we've... You know, we have large funders who give us, you know, $100,000 to protect this huge swath of land.
And that goes through things like this and through Instagram. You know, it goes directly to the local conservationists who work with the loggers to protect that land before it's cut.
But one of the most impactful things that has happened this year in the wake of our last conversation was that I got an email from a mother and she said, you know, I'm a single mom and I work a few jobs and I can't afford to give you a ton of money, but. Me and my kids look at your Instagram often after dinner and they really want to protect the heartbeats.
They really want to protect the animals and the rainforest. And so we do, we give $5 a month to jungle keepers. And it was to me, that was so impactful because I used to be that little kid worried about the animals. And I saw how a few million raindrops can create a flood. Yeah. Yeah.
I ask that people donate to Jungle Keepers. You guys are legit. That money is going to go a long way. Junglekeepers.org. If you somehow were able to raise very large, so the raindrops would make a waterfall, a very large amount of money. I don't know what that number is, maybe $10 million, $20 million.
30 million, what are the different milestones along the way that could really help you on the journey of saving the rainforest?
if we did, if let's just say some company organization or if enough people donated it, let's just say we got that 30 million, that money would go directly into stopping logging roads, into creating a corridor, a biological corridor that connects the uncontacted indigenous reserves with other tribal lands, with Manu National Park, with the Tambopata, which establishes essentially the largest protected area in the Amazon rainforest.
And what makes this groundbreaking is that we're not doing this in the traditional way. We're doing this, take it to the people. And that's what's been so exciting is that, you know, when he started this, when JJ started this 30 years ago, he had no idea. His father wanted him to be a logger. He didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old. He grew up bathing in the river.
He had no idea that a bunch of crazy foreigner scientists were going to show up and
some guy in a james bond suit was going to come down here with microphones and and that all of a sudden the world would know that he was on this quest to protect this this incredible ecosystem and all those little aliens well that's all the important thing to remember that the the people that are cutting down the forest the loggers are also human beings their families they're they're they're basically trying to survive and they're desperate and they're doing the thing that will bring them money
So they're just human beings at the core of it. If they have other options, if they have other options, they will probably choose to give their life to saving 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 rainforest.
They grew up in the rainforest. Yeah. I mean, look at Pico. Yeah. Pico used to be a logger, full-time logger, long-time logger. Now he loves conservation. Yo soy muy conservacionista. It's like... Yeah.
You know? It's all about just providing people options. There's some dark stuff on the gold mine stuff you've talked about. You showed me parts of the rainforest where the gold mines are, and they're just kind of erasing the rainforest. Yeah. Sort of at the edges, that's when the mining happens. And it's this ugly...
this ugly process of they're just destroying the jungle just for the surface layer of the sand or whatever that they process to collect just little bits of gold. And there's also very dark things that happen along the way as the communities around the gold mines are created. So the entirety of the moral system that emerges from that
has things like prostitution where one third of the of the women that are drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution are minors under you know under 17 years old 13 to 17 year old there's just a lot of really really dark stuff i think that we have
a rare chance to do something against that darkness.
I think that this is an example of local people who have taken action, done good work, been good to the people that have visited, harnessed a certain amount of international momentum. And now we're on the cusp of doing something historic. And so for the children in the communities along this river, it won't be being a prostitute in a gold mine. It'll be becoming a trained ranger.
Like last month, our ranger coordinator and one of our female rangers went to Africa for a ranger conference. And it's like, we're beginning to, this is someone from a little tiny village with thatched huts up river. She went to Africa. to talk about being a professional conservation ranger. And it's like, that's changing lives. And her daughters then, she's married to Ignacio, the guy.
Their kids are going to grow up seeing their parents walking around with the emblem on and go, oh, I want to... And then people like Pico and Pedro and all these guys that work here are gonna go, well, we have to protect this forest. And then they start getting fascinated about the snakes. And then they start caring about the turtle eggs.
And then all of a sudden they have a way of life and nobody needs to go steal anybody's kids to be a prostitute in a gold mine. That's horrible. And so it's really a win-win for the animals, for the river, for the rainforest, for people. It's biocentric conservation. It's just making everything better.
Yeah, I've read an article that said an estimated 1,200 girls between ages of 12 and 17 are forcibly drafted into child prostitution around the communities in the gold mines. At least one-third of the prostitutes in the camp are underage. Wow. The girls had ended up in the camp after receiving a tip that there were restaurants looking for waitresses and willing to pay top dollar.
They jumped on a bus together and came down to the rainforest. What they found was not what they were expecting. The mining camp restaurants served food for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time, it was the girls themselves who were on the menu. Literally at the end of the road and without the money to return home, the girls would soon become trapped in prostitution.
It's interesting to me that the most devastating destruction of nature, the complete erasure of the rainforest burned to the ground, sucked through a hose, spit out into a disgusting mercury puddle, like the complete annihilation of life on earth goes hand in hand with the complete annihilation of a young life. It's like it's all based around the same thing. It's the light versus the dark.
It's the destruction and the chaos versus a move towards order and hope. And it is incredibly dark. And this region is heavy with it.
Well, I'm glad you're fighting for the light.
Is there a milestone in the near future that you're working towards financially in terms of donations?
There is. In the next year and a half, as you saw in your time here, there's roads working around the jungle keepers' concessions. All the work that the local people are doing to protect this land is trying to be dismantled by international corporations that are subcontracting logging companies here. And really what we need is $30 million in the next two years to protect the whole thing.
You've seen the ancient mahogany trees. You've seen the families of monkeys. You've seen the Cayman and the river. All of this is standing in the pathway of destruction. That road, they're going to come down that road and men with chainsaws are going to dismantle a forest that has been growing since the beginning. This is so magical. Do you see the snake over there? Yeah. Do you? There's a snake.
I'm just going to, 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 blunt headed tree snake. Snakes. I've been hoping that you would get to see this snake.
I have been praying. Oh boy. Okay. Okay. Let's just, let's just, let's just go right back into this. Okay.
Look at this little beauty creation. Let's keep you away from the fire. Look at this little blunt headed tree snake. Wow. Such an incredible.
So tell me about the snake.
Harmless little snake. If you put your hand out, he'll probably just crawl onto your hand. Just be real careful with the fire. So look, I'm just going to put them like this. We're going to. Yeah, let's just snake safety. So he's a tree snake. Yep. Nice and slow. Nice and slow. Nice and slow. So you nice and slow. Just really. So just be the tree. Be the tree that he climbs on.
And this is like, again, this is a snake that's so thin and so small. There you go. There you go. Nice and slow. Just, just be the tree. Let him crawl around. So he's going to try and do all this stuff. Let me see if I can just calm him down for a sec. Let me just see. He's very active little snake. So see like the snake the other night. Okay.
Just come.
Look at this. I can see the light through his body. To me, this is an alien. This is this strange little life form. His eyes are two thirds of his head. I'm not joking. You look at their skull.
He's so tiny. He's so tiny. People listening, there's a snake in Paul's hands right now. It's very... It's long, of course, but very skinny.
Very, very light. And also for everyone listening, the odds of that as we're sitting here doing this podcast that a snake would just be crawling by in the jungle might sound like something that would happen, but... the density of snakes in the Amazon rainforest makes this a very unique experience. Can you tell me a little bit about the coloration scheme? It's a little bit brown.
Yeah, just to describe this as we were talking here, it's just a sort of banded white and brown snake with this tiny little head about the size of my pinky nail. Um, two thirds of this snake's head is made up of its gigantic eyes. It's got a small mouth and it's, it's about, about a third as thick as a pencil. It's basically a moving shoestring. It's incredibly, incredibly thin.
The only thing I am thinking Lexo is if we have Dan come and just do some shots of.
Yeah, that's true. Dan! So what are we looking at here?
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 and wants to find something to eat. This is a blunt-headed tree snake, totally harmless, literally a moving shoestring, super beautiful little animal.
When you talk about aliens, to me, 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 being handled by these giant humans?
And as you were saying, it reaches up to the leaves.
Yeah.
The snake just naturally knows to go, look, you just put them anywhere near leaves. And he's like, I got this.
He just wants to go right up into that tree. I just want you to try holding them. And real gentle, just be the tree. Yeah. And just kind of do the same thing you learned last night. Just nice and gentle. Yep. And see, he's holding on to my finger right now. He's just going up. There you go. Perfect. Nice and easy. He's a little erratic.
Huge.
Oh. Jeez.
Hey, little moth.
traffic traffic in the jungle and then for everyone listening as we're as we're as we're handling the snake that we found that was crawling by us like literally by our shoulders as we're talking a bat flies through no joke eight inches from lex's ear like just zips past his head as he's holding a snake while we're sitting here in the jungle it's just we're just in it now now he's going to try and back up
And how do you- Yeah, why don't you- Let's encourage him to come back this way. He's weaved this way.
He's okay. He's just trying to back up. Yeah, there you go. Release.
Release. Okay. This is what I'm going to do. We're going to say, thank you, Mr. Snake. Thank you, Mr. Snake.
Thank you, Mr. Snake. Back up into the tree. Here we go. There you go. There you go. There you go.
And then we can resume normal podcasting now. We really are in the jungle right now. We really are in the jungle. That's one of my favorite snakes. That's one of my favorite little aliens on this planet.
Look at that. And it's going on some long journey. It's going to carry the rest of the night. So that little snake is one of the millions of life forms, heartbeats that you're trying to protect.
Exactly. To me, I... after almost 20 years down here, the people here have become my friends, the caiman on the river, the monkeys. When I fall asleep at night, I think about all the different heartbeats, all the different little creatures here that when they bulldoze this forest, when they chop down these trees, that they vanish, that we take away their world.
And in that very evolutionary historical sense of remembering the primordial soup, it's like 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 orchestral hole that creates climactic stability on this planet.
And the Amazon is one of the most important parts of that. And each of these little guys is playing a role in there.
So one of the other fascinating life forms is other humans, but living a very different kind of life. So uncontacted tribes, what do you find most fascinating about them?
What I find most fascinating about the uncontacted tribes is that while me and you are sitting here with microphones and a light, somewhere out there in that darkness, in that direction, not so far away as the crow flies, there are people sitting around a fire in the dark, probably with little more than a few leaves over their heads.
who don't even have the use of stone tools, who only have metal objects that they've stolen from nearby communities. They're living such primitive, isolated nomadic lives in the modern world, and they're still living naked out in the jungle. It's truly incredible. It's truly remarkable. And I think that it's because they can't advocate for themselves, they can't protect themselves.
It's sort of like, well, we can let them get shot up by loggers and let their land get bulldozed while they hide. They have no idea that their world is being destroyed. But they're sort of the scariest and most fascinating thing out there right now in the jungle.
What do you think they're, because you've spoken about them being dangerous. What do you think their relationship with violence is?
Why is violence part of their approach to the external world? So from the best I understand it, that at the turn of the century, industrial revolutions, we had sudden immense need for rubber, for hoses and gaskets and wires and tires and the war machine.
And the only way to get rubber was to come down to the Amazon rainforest and get the local people who knew the jungle to go out into the jungle and cut rubber trees and collect the latex. And Henry Ford tried doing Fordlandia, tried having rubber plantations, but leaf blight killed it.
And so you had this period of horrendous extraction in the Amazon where the rubber barons were coming down and just raping and pillaging the tribes and making them go out to tap these trees. And the uncontacted tribes said no. They had their six foot long, long bows, seven foot long arrows with giant bamboo tips. And they moved further back into the forest.
And they said, we will not be conquered. And since that time they've been out there and it's, it's confusing because in a way they're still running scared a century later. And their grandparents would have told them, you know, the outside world, everyone you see in the outside world is trying to kill you. So kill them first. So can you blame them for being violent? No.
Is this river still wild because loggers were scared to go here for a long time, for almost a century late? That's why this forest is still here? Yes. And so is it a human rights issue that we protect the last people on earth that have no government, no affiliation, no language that we can explain? We don't know what their medicinal plant knowledge is. We don't know their creation myths.
We know nothing about them. And they're just out there right now with bows and arrows, living in the dark, surviving in the jungle, naked, without even spoons. Forget about the wheel. Forget about iPhones. They got nothing. And they're making it work.
We don't know their creation myths. So they have a very primitive existence.
Do you think their values...
First of all, do you think their nature is similar to ours? And how do their values differ from ours?
This is complicated because the anthropologist in me wants to say that they have a historical reason for the violent life that they have. They experienced incredible generational trauma some time ago, and because they've been living isolated in the jungle, that has permeated to become their culture. They've become a culture of violence. But yet, the contacted modern...
indigenous communities that we work with that are my friends that work here just the other day we were speaking to one of them who was pulling spikes out of your hand while he was explaining that he tried to help them the brothers los hermanos he tried to help them he tried to give them a gift and what did they do they shot him in the head yeah he said there are brothers and he tried to give them a
bananas plantains plantains boat full of plantains and they shot at him they shot three arrows at him and one of them actually hit him in the skull and put him in the hospital and he got helicopter evacuated from his community And so he's brave for surviving, but he's a lucky survivor. They are incredibly accurate with those bamboo tipped arrows and those arrows are seven feet long.
So when you get hit by one, they come at a velocity that can rip through you. And the range on a shotgun is way shorter than the range on a longbow. You're talking about a couple hundred meters on a longbow. and they're deadly accurate. They can take spider monkeys out of a tree. And so there's stories of loggers, and I've seen the photos of the bodies of loggers who attacked one of the tribes.
And the tribes hadn't done anything, but these loggers came around a bend. They started shooting shotguns at the tribe, and the tribe scattered into the forest. And as the loggers' boat went around a bend, they just started flying arrows, took out the boat driver, boat skidded to the side, and then everybody was standing in the river, and you can't run.
And the tribe just descended on them and just porcupined them full of arrows. Shotgun versus bow.
There's a shotgun shell here, by the way. Yeah. From the loggers. Mm-hmm. Yeah, we picked that up yesterday. Was that yesterday? That was, I don't know. I don't know. One of the things that happens here is time loses meaning in some kind of deep way that it does when you're in a big city in the United States, for example, and there's schedules and meetings and all this kind of stuff.
It transforms the meaning, your experience of time, your interaction with time, the role of time, all of this.
I've forgotten time, and I've forgotten the existence of the outside world. And how does that feel? It feels more honest.
It also puts in perspective, like, all the busyness, all the, uh... It kind of takes the ant out of the ant colony and says, hey, you're just an ant. This is just an ant colony and there's a big world out there. Yeah, it's a chance to be grateful, to celebrate this earth of ours and the things that make it
Worth living on, including the simple things that make the individual life worth living, which is water and then food. And the rest is just details. Of course, the friendships and social interaction, that's a really big one, actually. That one I'm taking for granted because I didn't get a chance yet to really spend time alone. Hmm. And when I came here, I've gotten a chance to hang out with you.
And there's a kind of camaraderie. There's a friendship there. If that's broken, that's a tough one too. I mean, you spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle. You ever get alone out here?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the first 15 years we were doing this, there would be times that JJ would be busy in town with his family and I would... For sheer love of the rainforest, I would have to come alone out here. And we didn't have running water. I didn't have running water. I didn't have lights. All I had was a couple of candles in the darkness and a tent.
And I was 20 something years old living in the Amazon by myself. Your boat sunk. And yeah, it's incredibly lonely. I had to learn through experience because I thought there was a period, I think when you're, you know, you're young.
As a young man, I had this thing like I wanted to prove that I could be like the explorers I wanted to prove that I could Handle the elements that I could go out alone that I could have these These deep connective moments with the with the jungle and it's like I did that and that's great And you know what the kid from into the wild learned right before he died in that bus That if you don't have somebody to share it with It doesn't matter
But some kind of, like, even just deep human level. Like, even if you have somebody to share it with.
You ever just get alone out here? Just like this sense of like existential dread of like what, you know, the jungle has a way of not caring about any individual organism. It just kind of churns. It's like, it makes you realize that life is finite quite intensely.
Hmm.
For me, it's comforting being out here. Because I find the rat race, the national narrative, the need to make money, to worry about war, to be outraged about the newest thing that that politician said and what that actor did. And there's always just this unending sort of media storm. 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.
Nature has always, and for many people, been where things make sense. And to me, I think I'm a simple analog type of person that it makes sense that when it rains, you get in the river to stay warm. And... And you, you know, you wait for the dawn and you see a little tree snake and, and you say, it just, it just, it makes, it makes more sense.
And I think that the, the, the overwhelming teaming complexity that is inside the, the ant mound of society can be dizzying for some people. And I think that maybe it's the dyslexia, maybe it's just that I love nature, but, um, now if I, when I land in JFK, I, I feel like a frightened animal.
It's as if you released some animal that had never seen it into Times Square and you can just imagine this dog with its ears back running away from taxis and just cowering from the noise and it's just hustle and bustle and people are brutal and how much you want it for? Get in the car. Screaming over the intercom and just everything, everything, sensory changes. Let's get home. Okay, let's go.
You got a meeting. You got to get to the next place. You got to give a talk. You got to sign...
here when we finish up here what are we going to do we're going to eat some food maybe go catch a crocodile go walk around the jungle and i like it's slower it makes sense yeah and and there's that again there's that deep meaning of of of that here where we can be the guardians for good we can we can be we can hold that candle up and and know for sure that we're protecting the trees from being destroyed and it's that simple thing of just this is good
There you go. It's simple. In society, I feel like everyone's always losing their minds and forgetting the most basic of fundamental truths. And out here, you can't really argue with them. You know, when we needed water... It was like, shit, if we don't get water, we're fucked.
And that's, to me, that's where the camaraderie comes from because no matter what, we could go to the most fancy-ass restaurant through the biggest, most famous people in the world. It doesn't matter. We still remember what it was like standing around in the jungle going, fuck, we're scared. We don't have water. We got reduced to the simplest form of humans. And that's something. And we survived.
And that's cool.
And you take all those people in their nice dresses, in those fancy restaurants, and you put them in those conditions, they're all going to want the same thing, this water. Yes. It's all the same thing. All the beautiful people. How has your view of your own mortality evolved over your interaction with the jungle?
How often do you think about your death?
Well, I don't anymore, because the... I've come to believe that there is a benevolent God spirit creator taking care of us and. 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 scare me. I've come close to dying a lot of times.
And I just don't think... You don't want to have a bad death, first of all. You don't want to be a statistic. You don't want to find out. You don't want to try out a... be the first to try out a new product and oops, it crushed you. You know, that's a terrible way to go.
Or the people that used to, you know, in the gold rush, they were using mercury and they were all getting... Or lead, it was lead poisoning. And it's like, oh, you know, a few million people died that way. And it's like, you want to... You want a good death. You know, you want to staring down the eyes of a tiger or hanging off the edge of a cliff, saving somebody's life.
Something, something, something worthy. Warrior's death. But riding a 16 foot black Cayman, just boots on screaming. Yeah.
Um, that'd be fun. That'd be a good one. A lot of people say that you carry the spirit of Steve Irwin. in your heart, in the way you carry yourself in this world. I mean, that guy was full of joy.
If I have a percentage of Steve Irwin, I would be honored. But that guy, I think there's only one Steve. I think that he occupied his own strata of just shining light. Everything was positive, enthusiasm, love, and happiness, and save the animals, and do better, and let's make it fun. And that was so infectious that it sort of transcended his TV show. It transcended his conservation work.
It transcended business and entrepreneurship. It just, through sheer magnetism and enthusiasm, he just, I mean, everyone knew who Steve was. Everyone loved Steve. We still all love Steve. And so it's just amazing what one spirit can do. So if anybody, you know, makes that comparison, I get really uncomfortable because to me, Steve Irwin is like just the goat. And so I'm okay with that.
Well, I at least agree with that comparison. Having spent time with you, there's just an eternal flame of joy and adventure too. just pulling you, uh, a dark question, but do you think you might meet the same end giving your life in some way to something you love?
That is a dark question, but I, I think most likely I'll get whacked by loggers. I think that loggers or gold miners will take me out. I don't, I don't picture myself going from animals, but, um, That would be heartbreaking too. Yeah, it would. But yeah, at the same time though, like the Kurt Cobain value of that, if I died doing what I love to protect the river, I'd be worth so much more, a lot.
Like we'd get the 30 million if I died tomorrow, for sure. So we've already talked about this with my friends. I'm like, if I get whacked, do the foundation, make the documentary, protect the river, protect the heartbeats, call it the heartbeats, Jungle Keeper's the heartbeats. Be ready for it because these things do happen. People get pissed if you get in their way.
And as many happy people whose lives were changing, there's also going to be some jealous, shitty, upset people who are mad that they can't make prostitutes out of young girls and keep destroying the planet. And so they might just erase you. Me.
Well, I hope you, like a Clint Eastwood character, just impossible to kill. I like how you squinted your eyes. On cue. Who do you think will play you in a movie?
God, somebody with the right nose. Somebody who can live up to this schnozzle.
Yeah, all right. Italian? Yeah. It's funny. Do you think of yourself as Italian or human? American?
That's the thing. I don't... Ape? My life has been the United Nations of whatever. To me, I just... That's the other thing. You go back to society and everyone's obsessed with... With race, to me, I'm like, look, leopards have black babies and yellow babies, one mother. Like they're all leopards. And I'm so colorblind and race blind and everything else. I've lived in India.
My friends are Peruvian. My family, we got Italian, Filipino, just everything. And so I'm so immersed in it that when I find it very jarring and disconcerting how much time we spend talking about different religions and just the differences in humans. I'm like, dude, we're talking about whether or not our ecosystems are going to be able to provide for us. We're talking about nuclear.
We're talking about this pretty serious shit on the table. And we're over here arguing over like shades of gray. It's so trivial. And that shit drives me crazy. And as does the outrage where it's like, no, you have to care. I've been criticized for not caring enough about that. And I'm like...
i'm gonna i'm gonna who cares what the hell i am who gives a shit what the hell i'm a human we're all human yeah it's not that easy but it's kind of fun sometimes and and we're at a better time and hit like when you think about like the middle ages like even if you were a king you still didn't have that good you didn't have pineapples in the winter you didn't even know what the fuck a pineapple was we have pineapples whenever we want them mm-hmm
We can fly on planes to other countries.
Let's clarify. We, you mean a large fraction of the world. You know, I mentioned to you one of the biggest things I've noticed when I immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States is the... How plentiful bananas and pineapples were, the fruit section, the produce section of the... Didn't have to wait in line at the grocery store.
Could just eat as many bananas and pineapples and cherries and watermelon as you want. That's... Not everybody has that. No, that's true. Not everybody has that, but...
But everybody could be that king now. But a growing number of people today can feast on pineapple. Can feast on pineapple and have toasters and new distracting apps all the way until the grave.
That's the thing that I also noticed is I don't think so much about politics when I'm here. We haven't even talked about it. Don't talk about the stupid differences between humans. Nah.
Except to just kind of laugh at the absurdity of it on occasion. I've been too busy trying to survive glaciers and jungles and avalanches and all kinds of shit.
Do you think nature is brutal, as Werner Herzog showed it, or is it beautiful?
I think the brutality of nature is the chaos, and I think that we are the only ones in it that are capable of organizing in the direction of order and light. So yes, there are going to be hyenas tearing each other apart. Yes, there's going to be war-torn nations and poor starving children, but we as humans have the power to work towards something more organized than that.
So there is a force within nature that's always searching for order.
for good. It's kind of a unifying theory if you think about it. I mean, all of the chaos of history and the wars and the chaos of nature, we, through technology and organization, there's so many people, more people today than ever before, I think, who are so concerned, who realize that
the incredible power like what Jane Goodall says about 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. We can do incredible things. We are the masters. as humans.
And I think that, I think that we're on the cusp of sort of understanding the true potential of that. Like, I just think, I just think that more than ever people, people have harnessed this ability to do good in the world and be proud of it and, and, and just change the, the, the darkness into something else.
When you have lived here and taken in the ways of the Amazon jungle, how have your views of God, you mentioned, how have your views of God changed?
Who is God? I've come to believe that, again, back to that, that Christ wasn't a Christian, Muhammad wasn't a Muslim, and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist, that, like, the game, the game is love and compassion. And the universe is chaotic and dangerous and nature is chaotic and dangerous. But we, if, if this is some sort of a biological video game that 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 coworkers? Can it's so difficult. And we see how people can cheat and steal and hurt and destroy and, and the incredible impact that it has on the world, the returning exponential impact that one act of kindness, one act of good can do. And so I see nature as God.
I see the religions as different cultural manifestations of the same truth, the same creative force.
Maybe me and you have the same beliefs and your aliens are my angels.
Well, thank you for being one of the humans trying to do good in this world. And thank you for bringing me along for some adventure. And I believe more adventure awaits.
Thank you for being enough of a psychopath to... actually just sign on to come into the Amazon rainforest in a suit. And a year ago, when you told me that you were going to do this, I truly didn't believe you.
So for being a man of your word and for the incredible work you do to connect humans and to create dialogue and to do good in the world, and for all the adventures that we've had, thank you so much. Thank you, brother. Lex, thanks, man.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosalie. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Joseph Campbell. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.