Paul Rosolie is a conservationist, filmmaker, and writer. He's the founder of Junglekeepers, an organization protecting threatened habitat in western Amazonia, and the author of "Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon." www.paulrosolie.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day all right you're taking a selfie no i'm just making sure that there's nothing completely looking about myself right now What could possibly be different than the way when you walked in here? I have no idea. Dude, I'll tell you what. It's so much fun walking in here and not be ready to throw up out of nerves.
The first time I walked out of here and I went, holy shit, I was actually nervous. I don't get nervous, but the first time I was.
I'm not nervous now, though.
No. Good. Beautiful. Perfect.
It was good to see you again. Good to see you. Every time I see him, I'm like, I'm glad he's still alive. It's like, where you live is so crazy.
Let me tell you, man.
I don't understand why you continue to do it, but I guess you love it. I have to do it.
There's nothing else I can do at this point. How long do you think you're going to stay out there for? Until the mission's complete. Until the mission's complete. My whole life has been based around one goal. It's been protecting this river. And this year, we've just been experiencing miracles. What's happened in the last few months has been...
life-changing on a level that that like I didn't understand these things could happen when Lex came down and everything that happened we didn't think you you go out and you don't think that that miraculous things are going to happen and there's been there's just been there's just we've actually been making strides towards notching winds in protecting this river saving the Amazon it's wild
So is it because you've become more high profile, you've got more support? What has been the change?
Well, I mean, coming on here helped a lot. I mean, first of all, just coming over here, like three different people stopped me in the airport and were like, are you that guy from Joe Rogan? And I was like, are you serious? Like, I'm over there. Like, I'm not used to this. I live in the jungle, so I don't know. And then I come back here and then people are like, dude, I know you.
You're the jungle guy. And I'm like, oh, shit. Um, that's new for me. Um, but so really the, the thing that happened recently was that, you know, so I went on Lex's show a year and a half ago and he said, I'm going to come down to the Amazon, which everybody says.
You went on Lex's show, but Lex actually went on your show. He did it in the Amazon.
And to see Lex with his suit, his customary suit on, how hot was it? It was hot. If you watch that carefully, you can see him. Yeah. He looks glistening. I was doing fine. But we both covered ourselves in bug spray. And we sat down and we said, okay, we're just going to try it out. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. It's fine. But yeah, he came.
When he said he was coming down, I was like, yeah, you and everybody else. Everybody says they're going to come down. I didn't think he would actually do it. How long is the flight? I don't know. It's not long. To get to Lima from New York is eight hours. So from here, it's even shorter, I'm sure. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's really not bad. And he came down for two weeks.
The first day that he was... I was like, I want to show you the start of the Amazon rainforest. It starts in the Andes Mountains. So we're in the western edge of the Amazon rainforest. And so you have these glacial peaks up at 17,000 feet. So I was like, Lex, I want to take you up to 17,000 feet. I want to go from source to river.
And so his first day, he arrived, and then we drove five hours, got to the base of this mountain, and then we met up with these dudes that are experts, and they brought us up to the glacier where we can't breathe. Wow. Yeah. You're driving on roads where the cliff goes down 1,000 feet. Yeah, fuck all that. I've seen those roads.
Fuck all that.
And I was I opened the car door to try and goof around with Lex to be like, oh, I'm with Lex Freeman right now in the thing. And I look over and I see the wheel go over the fucking edge and skid back on.
Oh, it happens all the time.
So, yeah, we got out. We we we walked. We let the car. I was like, look, the car drive. And then what we did was we took a rock and I was like, yo, Lex, I was like, this would be us if the car flipped. And we threw a rock over the edge and this big rock was just spinning like this. And I was like, man, we would be chopped meat by the bottom. So we got up to 70,000 feet. We saw the glacier.
And whenever you bring somebody to the jungle, the thing is you don't know. Some people take to it. Some people don't. Some people get to the jungle and like their skin doesn't react well to the bug bites. They're overwhelmed by the fact that they're far from everything. Lex's eyes lit up. Like I didn't know he had that setting. He walked into the jungle and was like, I like this.
He got this grin on his face.
Lex is a secret savage.
Yeah.
Look at his face.
He wasn't fucking around.
Yeah. He could live out there.
Yeah. And if you notice, he came to the Amazon and he looked like Lex in his profile picture. And when he left the Amazon, he looked totally different. And that process is what happened. He said, I'm coming down. He's like, I want to do what you guys do. I want to go on a deep expedition.
And so me and JJ, who's the guy I work with down there, the local indigenous Esayaha native, who is the reason that I do the work I do, I support his work. And so we said, okay, what are we going to do? Let's find the wildest place we can think of. Let's go way up our river. So we're ready like two, if you take a boat from town, it's two days deep into the jungle to get there by river.
We said, let's go five more hours up river. leave the boat, and then we're going to go from our river up to this other tributary. And it's like 20 miles. I'm like, 20 miles, right? Fuck yes, it'll be fine. We got our backpacks, machetes. We get off the boat. And Lex is all good to go. The first five minutes we're out there, JJ machetes a branch that has wasps. Oh God.
His whole head and neck gets surrounded by wasps. He gets 30 stings on him and he runs. And so right away we're like, oh God, here we go. We had to use a stick to get his hat out from under where the wasps were attacking. We hike all day. And here's the thing. You think it's the rainforest. There's going to be water everywhere. There's no water.
So picture being in the sauna for eight hours straight and then no re-up on water. We drank all of our water thinking we're going to find a stream. We didn't find a stream. We camped that night, like dry camp, nothing. Fell asleep, woke up. We're like, we got to find water. And at this point, Lex is- How do you find water? Well, I mean, there should just be streams, right?
Were there that you just didn't run into? It was a weird section of forest. And this is integral to the whole story was that this part of the forest, unlike where we are, which is very, very flat. And there's all these like little streams. They're clear. This came in an anaconda in them, but they're clear. And the jungle works like the roots work like a huge filtering system.
So you can drink that water right out of the streams. Where we were, it was up and down and up and down and up and down. And so that's why we're sweating all day. We can't, we didn't have water. We start going the next day, no water. And Lex starts looking at me and he's like, dude, we can't.
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Can't keep doing this. We're slipping and sliding down slopes. We're hiking up slopes and just grabbing onto things. And when you grab onto trees in the Amazon, they have spikes on them. You're worried about stepping on venomous snakes. You're worried about twisting an ankle. It was brutal travel, like level 10 hiking.
And JJ made eye contact with me behind him and he was just going, this is not good. And so I think it was day three we're going.
Did you go a whole day without water at all?
We went with a whole day with no water whatsoever.
And what's the temperature?
99 degrees full humidity oh my god so you're like full dehydration yeah probably a little delirious completely delirious and so we're body's not working well and you start making errors right you start taking bad steps because you're tired so you go i'll just step on this thing and so you step on a route that goes down you slide you hit the ground you get tangled up in vines we had we had um pack rafts is this company alpaca rafts they we had paddles sticking out of our backpacks that kept getting stuck on vines
And what happened, though, was as we're going through this forest, we're going, God, this is so incredibly dense. And I see this tree, this huge tree the size of this room. And I go, JJ, what tree is that? And he smiles at me, teacher to student. And he goes, you know why you don't know what that is? He goes, you've never seen a mature mahogany tree.
Because the loggers down there, they took them all out. This forest has never been cut. Millions of years, the Amazon rainforest forming geologically has never been cut. Wow. And so we're going through this forest. We see jaguar tracks, ancient mahogany trees. We're seeing ironwood trees. No one's been there. It's not even signs of uncontacted tribes. This is forest that no one's been through.
And so right at the time, I remember we stopped for lunch. We stopped to eat the last food we have. And the problem that we were doing was I had a compass. And we were getting to the top of these hills. And you know when you look on the ocean floor and the sand makes like those geometric ripples and there's a pattern to it.
And so we were coming to the top of a ridge line and we were like, we don't want to go down again. And we don't want to hike up again. So we're staying on the ridge lines. And what that was doing was taking us a 30 degree tick
to the i think it was to the west but that what that was doing though was taking us about another 20 miles off course so we had to hit the river here but we were going to hit over there oh no so we had to correct for course we stopped we're eating the last of the food we have we drank water out of a puddle i have a video and we're going to release all this do you have a filtration system we went with nothing we had our we had our tents and our machetes jesus christ and i have a video a video of lex and he's looking at this why don't you bring a steripen or something
Uh, cause I do everything with the local guys and they were just like, oh, it'll be fine. There'll be water. And we just, we didn't anticipate this happening. And I, I, Lex was crouched by this wall, by this puddle with his backpack on. And he's like looking at the water and he looks at me and he goes, I'm going to drink it. And I said, do not drink that.
I was like, please don't fucking drink that. And he goes, I'm going to drink it. He goes, I don't care about anything else on earth right now except for water. And I was like, please don't drink it.
Jardia is no joke.
Nope. We stopped for lunch. Did he drink it? He did not drink it. Wow. No. I mean, we didn't want to. Because now we're going, if we get sick, we have no sat phone, no communication in the outside world. We're at least 30 miles from the nearest river, let alone help. That's 100 miles away.
deep in the amazon and the feeling of deep jungle that feeling of wilderness i know like you know when you're like elk hunting i'm sure you know this when you're out there and you get that feeling like this is this is out there yeah and uncaring uncaring yeah you start like the ocean where it's like it doesn't matter lonely it's very long even when you're with people it starts to press on you we started getting quiet like we weren't having like an awesome time we were
were feeling it and so we ate like some nuts and and we had nothing to wash it down with so we're just chewing on it and we got up and then we took a few steps and all of a sudden everything changed we came out onto a road and it's a logging road and jj's face fell i was heartbroken lex lex looked confused what we realized was in this ancient patch of forest
the progression of the metastasizing destruction that's moving through the Amazon forest comes in roads. This road, somebody had just cut a road and they hadn't cut the ancient mahogany trees and they hadn't cut the ironwood trees and the wildlife was untouched, but there's a road. So they're coming. We used the road. We hiked, we hiked out, we reached water.
And there's, this is amazing when we reached water, cause we just plunged into this river. We were drinking. We did have some iodine tablets. We put that in our water bottles. We drank as much as we wanted to. Um, And then we had to raft for an entire day back to the place where we got picked up.
But what happened was that now we know, and this is on our river, this is where we're trying to create this corridor with jungle keepers. And now we know that some of the most ancient forest on earth is about to be destroyed. And we get back to our base, to our research station.
And it just so happens that there was a client there and he was staying in that tree house, the Alta Sanctuary tree house. And we tell him this whole story and we're drinking and we're eating and we're all sunburned and bug bitten and dehydrated and our cheeks are stuck to our skulls. And we tell him this whole story and we go, it's going to be brutal watching this dismantled.
And he goes, well, I want to help. He goes, find out how we get that land. And it hadn't really occurred to me that we could do anything about it. And this dude, this guy's name is Jay, and he said, he goes, I'll start you off. He goes, whatever the land costs, I'll give you $150,000, do a fundraiser, put it public, and try and get matching donations and talk to the loggers.
So while we set up the fundraiser, JJ, local, called up his friends who happen to own that land. His friends don't want the land. They're contracting it to loggers to get the trees out to make some money so they could just sell it off. We put it up on Instagram. We raised $150,000 in 48 hours, talked to the loggers, bought the land.
And then the craziest part is that when we went there, we physically, with all the directors of drone keepers, we went to the land and the Peruvians, the Peruvian directors sat down with the loggers and they were like, look, we own this land now. It's for conservation. We're going to save this forest. And the loggers went, that's fine, but can we still work here? And we went, what?
And they said, we do this because we love it. And we went, what? They said, yeah, could we just be rangers? Like, we see you have rangers. Could we be rangers? And we were like, yeah, you could be rangers. Yeah, you could be rangers. These dudes are over here destroying the thing they love because they have no other opportunity.
So the fact that this is, that we now have this global network of people that care. The local people in the Amazon rainforest are trying to protect the Amazon. And now we have all these people all over the world because of stuff like this, because of all the work that we've been doing, that people know that
they just you know with people that give five dollars ten dollars a hundred dollars a month we have this huge network of donors and now we're able to get those wins we see a threatened patch of forest boom we grab it hire the loggers as rangers everybody wins and we're saving forest this year since the last time i saw you we went from 55 000 acres to almost 100 000 acres that's one third of the way to protecting the 300 000 acres that we have to protect so we're one third of the way through the goal
Wow.
That's all been happening in the last month and a half. That's incredible. Miracles.
So when you're navigating, you're not using GPS? You're just using a compass? Yeah. Why?
Commitment. What? Because, look, so I actually— Wouldn't you want the best tools for the job? I agree with you. And if you're in a really—so when we go out to really remote places when you just cannot fuck around, yes, we do bring like a Garmin GPS and we have the map. Well, that sounds like you cannot fuck around if you guys are without water for two days.
We thought we were going to go in the forest and go on a walk twice. 20 miles, a 20 mile hike is nothing. We do that every day. We did not, the reason this forest hadn't been cut was because it was up and down and up and down and denser than all the other forests because it's fucking ancient.
And so we discovered it and how hard it was and that's where I'm going, holy shit, we brought Lex Friedman out here. And he's gonna die. And he's gonna die. Of dehydration. And he was looking at me. I mean, there were so many times during the trip where he looked at me and you could just tell he was like, fuck you, dude. Just fuck you, man.
How do you find water? Do you just stumble upon it?
I mean, from our base, you walk five minutes back into the jungle and there's a beautiful clear stream and I drink straight out of the stream. No problem. Now, I wouldn't, for someone that comes to the jungle, I wouldn't say just start doing that. I'd say like take a sip the first day, see how your stomach goes. I've been down there 20 years, so I'm fine.
So is it just your gut bacteria changes? Is that what it is?
I mean, some people you take them, you know, you go to Italy and they get sick, you know, but like, you know, it's like people. Fragile folk. Fragile folk. You know, sunscreen and bug spray. But we, somebody said that too, because I posted a video of me drinking like monkey head soup and coffee out of a bowl.
What?
Monkey head soup? We went with the locals before everybody, all the PETA people freak out. I don't care, freak out. When you live with the locals, when in Rome, you know, if you go to someone's house and they're local, they eat monkeys. And so we were on a beach and some of the local guys hunted monkeys. And so we woke up in the morning and they heated up the food.
And what we had was bowl coffee because we didn't bring cups. We're on a canoe, right? You just bring, you cut your toothbrush in half to save weight. And so I posted it and I was like, here's, cause everybody messages me going, you know, how do I get your job? And I was like, here's one reason why you fucking don't want my job and think you do.
Monkey head soup.
Monkey head soup.
What does monkey head soup taste like?
Exactly what you think. At the same time, it's not as bad as you think. They prefer monkeys, though, right? They love monkeys. Part of the conservation strategy is just like we have deer tags to make sure that there's continually deer. For local indigenous communities, they want to keep eating monkeys. They love monkeys.
Yeah. So they want to keep the monkey population manageable? Is that the idea?
And they want to eat them. Eventually, yes. And so I would say it's kind of colonialist conservation to come in there and go, well, you can't eat monkeys because we think you can't. But then you go trout fishing and deer hunting. That doesn't make any sense.
Right. But it's like monkeys are too closely related to us. This is one thing that I've noticed. People that get upset about hunting don't necessarily get upset about fishing or don't get upset about a piece of fish. Like if you put a plate of salmon, you know, like, oh, this is my lunch today. Everybody's like, oh, that's healthy.
Salmon.
Yeah. But if you have a picture of a salmon, people get a little upset. But if you have like a steak, people don't get too upset. But if you have like a dead deer, people get very upset.
And forget, yeah. I mean, it's very weird.
Disconnected.
I think yesterday, sometime this week, I posted a video. We were out, and I was with, again, some Machiganga natives, and we caught a yellow catfish. And their daughter, who's three, three and a half years old, now, you're out somewhere where there's no refrigeration. You have a two-hour boat ride back. What do you do?
You put the fish in the bottom of the boat with a little bit of water, and you let it stay alive, right? Just enough to keep its gills going until you get back. Because if you kill it as soon as you catch it, it'll go back.
Right, it starts rotting. Yeah. Yeah.
And so this girl picked up the fish and she's hugging it. The comments on this, the vegans went crazy. People were like, I'm unfollowing you. That's disgusting. This girl's excited because she's going to eat. She lives out in the jungle eating nothing but rice and yucca. Like if she didn't get that fish, she's going to get malnutrition.
Yeah, well, people are just so accustomed to supermarkets. They're so delusional about where your food comes from. It's a fascinating thing. And vegans are probably the worst at it because if they really, on the ground level, understood monocrop agriculture, which is what supplies most of your food, they would be horrified.
They'd be horrified at industrial pesticides and herbicides and all the shit that we put in the soil and... How many small animals get murdered in the process?
Well, you got to clear space for a farm, right?
You not only have to clear space, you have to kill groundhogs and ground squirrels and anything that's in the way, anything that's going to eat your crops.
Well, in the jungle, that's what they're doing. All this burning, all this Amazon fires shit that goes on every year is people coming in and 60% of it is for beef. But the other percent of it is for papaya and corn and cacao. I see a lot of stuff where they're like, oh, sustainable cacao from the Amazon. I'm like... How is it sustainable cacao from the Amazon?
You cut down an ecosystem in trees that have thousands of species living on them. Right. It's not. It's not sustainable.
Sustainable is one of those words like organic. People like to throw it around.
Just slap it on the package.
I mean, that's like that appeal stuff. They call that organic. You know what that is?
No.
It's this coating that they put on vegetables and fruit to keep it organic.
from going bad the wax well it's some weird what's the ingredients of a peel so like part of it is quote unquote organic but they don't tell you what the actual ingredients are a peel is a plant based coating that's applied to fruits and vegetables to help them stay fresh longer seems normal right like yeah it's plant based but what's in there
It's commonly found in organic apples, but you're supposed to wash it off with soap and water. Like we were reading that if you have an avocado, so we were in elk camp and we were reading about this stuff because we had Starlink. Starlink is fucking amazing. That's how we do it. Dude, it's like the size of this cigar box. I know.
And you put it down on the ground, and you get fucking high-speed internet in the middle of nowhere. So we were reading that they were saying that to take it off of avocados, you dunk the avocado in boiling water for 10 seconds and then rinse it off. What are you talking about? What's in this stuff? Also, nobody knows that. I don't know that. Right. So I come up here, I'm eating that shit.
Exactly. Most people are just going to eat the apple. They're not going to wash it off with soap and water. But the thing is, they're saying it's plant-based and organic. That's the thing. Sustainable. These words that people use that make you feel okay about what's going on. But I don't even know what the fuck is in there.
A brush.
A brush?
Scrub it. Do you scrub your apples? It's a TikTok video. What the fuck are you talking about? Why are you putting something on the apple that I need to scrub? It says you can only remove it 100% by peeling it off.
Oh, my God. Of an apple? Because apples, like, you want to eat this.
Click on that, how to wash, remove, appeal coating, vegetable coating. Let's see if we can watch a video. It'll show us how to do it.
Let's see, which one do you want to pick?
Uh, let's go with the first one. That lady, she's, so she's peeling it.
Peeling it, yeah.
Why do you peel produce?
But isn't a lot of the nutrients in the skin?
We'll see the next slide. Wax and peel. So this is different though. This is wax. Yeah. This is, uh, that's cartonuba wax. That's like normal. But a peel is a new product. And it's one of those, yeah, okay, let's see what this lady has to talk. Let's talk about a peel. I don't like her earrings. But let's listen to her.
And reduce the use of plastic. This compound uses plant material to make monoglycerides and diglycerides, a.k.a. fats, a fat coating on fruits and vegetables. The intent, less plastic. Amazing. Longer shelf life. Fabulous. Fabulous. But at what human cost?
At what human cost?
These fats are extracted from plants using ethyl acetate and heptane. In the chemical process to make these fats, they add ingredients that contain heavy metals.
Oh, great.
Not all fats that come from plants are safe for human consumption. Generally speaking, olive oil comes from plants, and it's healthy. Canola oil, rapeseed oil, cottonseed oil are fats that come from plants, but not healthy. They cause a lot of inflammation. It all depends on how the fats were extracted and how the chemical compound was created.
At this time, there's no human trials to show what happens to humans who consume fruits and vegetables with a peel on them on a regular basis.
Oh, great.
Keep going.
Yeah, why would there be human trials on something that people eat and it's all over supermarkets?
But there's a lot of stuff coming out right now about the safety of our food. Oh, yeah. I keep hearing about this. It keeps showing up.
Yeah. Well, there was a big hearing in front of the Senate that Brigham Bueller, who was on yesterday, he was talking about it, you know, in front of all these representatives. And they're trying to explain what the system is and how fucked it is and how there's most of these European countries and Canada. There's a lot of ingredients, particularly dyes, that we use. Yeah.
He was talking about how Lucky Charms that you buy in America, you can't sell it in Canada. They have to sell completely different Lucky Charms in Canada because Canada doesn't allow all these dyes because they're toxic.
Oh, this is the super bright color thing.
Yeah. Those are toxic dyes, and we allow them. Because we want people to, and there's also a bunch of other ingredients that make the food more addictive. Those are in our food supplies, and some of them are illegal in other countries. It's not good. And there's, it seems like, the way he was describing it, it's like the FDA is just completely overwhelmed.
And they, you know, and then there's companies that are just pushing this stuff through. And it's kind of like, the way we described it yesterday, it's like a hoarder's house. Like, how do you clean this up? Like, you get into a hoarder's house, you're like, oh, God. Where do we fucking start? That's what our food system is like. Our food system is like a hoarder's house.
Well, I heard that guy. I don't remember his name. He's a venture capitalist. In the last week, you guys were talking about he was saying that when he travels abroad, he can eat whatever he wants. And then when he comes back to the U.S., he puts on weight.
Yes, that was Chamath.
Yeah, that was a great one. He was incredibly intelligent. And then I was looking up something else popped up where they were saying that the bread in Subway sandwiches is considered cake in Europe because of the sugar content.
Yeah, some countries consider it cake because it's mostly... It's fucking cake.
It's not really...
It's bullshit. We have bullshit food. And, you know, I don't eat most of that stuff. But if you do, you're going to be really unhealthy. And most people aren't educated. You know, it took me a long time to understand this stuff. And mostly, I mean, I tried to eat healthy before that.
But mostly through the podcast and talking to people, getting an understanding of how bad this stuff really is for you. And then experimenting with diet and watching how much better my body felt. And seeing my friends who don't do it. They just look like hell.
hell and you're mostly carnivore now yeah yeah mostly fruits and mostly meat and fruits yeah I mean I hardly eat any vegetables at all but I don't avoid them like if I want if I go out to dinner and I want to have a Caesar salad or something I'll eat it it doesn't seem to bother me but what does seem to bother me is pasta pasta and breads really hit home they really wreck me but not in Europe
Went to Italy last summer, had pasta, had pizza, no problem at all. There's a bunch of things that we do. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained a lot of it. So did Gary Brekka. He explained a lot of it. One of them is enriched flour, what's so-called enriched flour. It contains a bunch of chemicals like folic acid and a bunch of shit your body has a hard time digesting.
It's also they use heirloom wheat in Italy, and heirloom wheat is the original wheat. What we did was we changed wheat to make higher yield so that a smaller piece of land, you can get more wheat out of it. So because of that, it has more complex glutens, makes it more difficult for your body to process.
And then on top of that, the big one may be – there's a lot of speculation about this, but there's some serious evidence that most people – who eat the common American diet, what was the number of the people that had Roundup in their system? So glyphosate.
What?
Yeah, glyphosate is a really powerful pesticide that they spray on all kinds of different plants. I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of people tested had glyphosate in their system. Roundup.
Yeah. The stuff you spray to just kill everything.
Exactly. And it's illegal in some countries and should be illegal in America. But the problem is if you make it illegal, how are these monocrop agriculture companies going to function? Okay, it's 80%. That's 87% of children. 87% of children. So this is 2022. I would imagine this goes up every year. 80% of Americans have Roundup in their urine. That is so crazy. Crazy. That's so dangerous.
That's terrifying.
And it's also fairly new in terms of human history. I mean, I think Roundup has only been around since the, is it the 90s? When did Roundup, when did glyphosate start becoming ubiquitous on crops? It's fucking dangerous, man, because we're rolling the dice. A lot of the stuff that people eat causes long-term health consequences.
And so when you're dealing with short-term stuff, like stuff that's only been around for five, six years, it takes a long time before you figure out what's happening. So 74, Roundup, which contains active ingredients, glyphosate, was first introduced to commercial agriculture in 74. So scroll down so we can see when it ramps up. So 74, okay, wasn't widely used until 96. That's what I read.
So Monsanto began selling genetically modified seeds that were resistant to Roundup. This allowed farmers to spray their entire crop beds with Roundup without risking losing their crops. It's an herbicide, right? Yeah, okay. Not a pesticide, an herbicide. But it's fucking terrible for you. Terrible. And 80% of people have it in their blood.
Roundup, microplastics, DDT. And then, what was it? I think it was during the gold rush times that everybody was using lead to replug cans after they opened them. And then, you know, thousands of people died from lead poisoning before they figured it out.
Shane Gillis has a great joke about George Washington. George Washington's dentures were made out of lead. And that's why George Washington was such a fucking psycho.
He liked lead poisoning. He wasn't brave. He was just insane.
I read that when they were talking about the amount of plastic that people find. Most men have plastic in their sperm, plastic in their testicles. You have plastic in your brain. And a lot of that plastic is the plastic that's derived from PVC. So it's coming from water pipes. I thought our water pipes were metal.
Some water pipes are metal, but when I used to do construction, we did a lot of houses where they used PVC pipes. A lot of PVC pipes underneath kitchen sinks and stuff. So all that stuff, when water's going through that, you're picking up these little particles of plastic. And those little particles of plastic, you cook your food in it, you drink a glass of water from the tap.
All that stuff is getting you plastic. And then there's cooking in microwave. If you have one of those things you lift up and you have a piece of plastic over the lid and you cook microwave with that and it's in a plastic bowl, that's all fucking getting into your body. That's all getting in your blood.
Well, I scared myself with that because we had plastic cups on an expedition and we boiled coffee and then I poured it into the plastic cup and I was like, oh. It's like, we got to stop doing this. So we started bringing, like, metal and glass cups on expeditions.
Obviously, they make stuff for campers that you can get, you know, and that's why we switched these steel cups here. We used to just go through so many bottles of water. I was like, this is fucked. So we bought a filtration system and, you know, and started using steel cups. But it's like our...
This whole thing in America, one of the things we talked about yesterday with Brigham is the Make America Healthy Again movement, which is Robert Kennedy Jr. and a bunch of other folks that are involved in this. And it's exciting that this is gaining steam because people are concerned about their health and they are concerned about... All the different chemicals that are in your fucking food.
But the problem is now that's been attached to right-wing ideology. So people are calling people that are interested in that far-right people.
If you're worried about food safety?
Yeah, it's nuts, man. But it's just because it's attached to Trump. It's because the Trump administration, you know, make America great again and also make America healthy again with Robert Kennedy Jr. He's involved in that. So people are just labeling that as some sort of alt-right fuckery and woo-woo bullshit. And it's not. It's fucking dangerous for all of us. We really need to wake up.
Isn't it also true, though, that in America, at least, like the poorest people are usually the ones with the worst diets?
Absolutely.
So, I mean, like you, like you've naturally progressed towards going, okay, so I eat elk and I eat vegetables and I care about where I get my stuff from, but people that aren't able to make that decision, that would seem to me, there's certain things where you go, shouldn't we all agree on this?
Yeah.
You know, food safety. Shouldn't we just all agree with this? I don't understand how that becomes political when it comes to nature conservation. I never understood how that, you know, I'm like,
All these things can be solved. This is what's fucked. It's like we have so much money to solve other countries' problems and we don't have any money to solve our own health problems. That's very strange. It's very short-sighted and very bizarre. And we need to do something about it. We need to do something about it now.
It's really scary when you think that if this unchecked happens, these corporations will continue to sell you things that are very bad for you if they're profitable. As long as they're not penalized for it. And I guarantee you, those people that know that, the people that are, they probably don't eat any of that shit.
Well, it's like Steve Jobs. I don't know if it's true. I heard that Steve Jobs wouldn't give his kids screens. Yeah. They know.
People, you go to restaurants, you see little kids with an iPad sitting on a tray just standing there so their parents can have a conversation. The kid's just like hypnotized by some fucking cartoon.
Kids are swiping before they're talking. They know this motion. Oh, yeah. They got that finger out.
Yeah, they try to do it to magazines. You ever see little kids try to do that?
Yo, I saw a kid try to expand a magazine.
I think I did that once.
I was just hanging out with a baby, and I was like, look at this picture. And I was showing him a book, and he put his hands on it, and he went, wah. And I was like, nah, it doesn't work like that.
I think I almost did that once. I think I looked at a magazine, and I brought my hand up and went, what the fuck are you doing?
Yeah. My thing is, the worst thing that I've done recently is I didn't have, you know, I start doing activities without my phone on me. And I went for a run, and I saw something cool, and I was like, oh, I need to take a picture of that. And I was like, how? Just the idea that I couldn't take a picture of something had become something that I forgot about. I take a picture of everything.
I probably take 400 pictures a day. I'm like, I like that logo, bang. I like that street, bang.
It's cool to be able to do it, but now we're also inundated with images. all over the world, and a lot of them are horrific events, which is the things that people are trying to capture the most. So it's like every day, what's going on today? Right now, Iran is bombing Israel. So there's missiles. Do you know about this? Nope. It's fucking terrifying, dude. It's on like Donkey Kong right now.
See if you can get some of the footage. Iran is launching hundreds of missiles at Israel. And there was a mass shooting, some sort of a terror attack in Tel Aviv today as well. So there's some sort of coordinated attack on Israel. Obviously, Israel just did that stuff with Hezbollah where they blew up the pagers and blew up walkie-talkies and killed a bunch of people and then...
shot a bunch of bombs into Lebanon, and it's all getting very, very scary. It's all ramping up in a fucking terrifying way. But this video, it also shows that the Iron Dome, Israel's famous missile defense system, it doesn't seem to be catching all of them. I mean, if you have enough launched your way at the same time, some of them are going to sneak through.
So this is what it looks like right now. It's fucking crazy. These are all missiles, man, flying everywhere. At Israel. Jeez. Yeah, it's fucking terrifying.
And the Iron Dome... This isn't even the best video.
The video that I was seeing was them impacting...
And the Iron Dome is basically a system to shoot them out of the sky.
Yes. So this is where you see the Iron Dome is working. So when they blow up, that's the Iron Dome. So what it is is they find the trajectory of these missiles. The ones that are going to open area, they let them slip through because it's not going to harm anything. And then those, those are hitting down. But the ones that are going into the city area, they shoot down.
And, you know, I don't know how... many missiles they have to do this. I mean, you'd have to have fucking thousands on standby. Because if they just launch enough at you, you're not going to have enough missiles.
It's like... They launched 180 ballistic missiles.
Wow. You imagine being in a city, you see 180 missiles coming at you.
I don't know how people live continuously in areas where there's war zones. Like I know, like my friend Matt Gutman from ABC News, like he works there and I've seen him running through the streets and doing that hard hitting stuff. But there's also just people getting their groceries.
Yeah.
And they're like, yeah, man, this happens every day. Like I have friends that live in Israel.
Human beings are very adaptable, unfortunately. Well, fortunately, because that's why we're still here. But unfortunately, we get accustomed to some pretty horrific conditions. And that's what people are accustomed to. I mean, imagine living in Gaza. Imagine that. You were living in a place where literally a year ago today, it was fine. It was normal. And then now it's rubble.
And there's tens of thousands of people dead.
And that's an example of what you're saying about seeing these images all the time. I remember when that popped off. And I'm a big believer in you pick one thing for most people, unless you're Elon or somebody that can have a bunch of different things going on. But for most of us, you've got to live your life and you've got to pick one thing that you can help from a lot of people.
That's your family. For me, I've dedicated myself to protecting the Amazon. When it comes to everything else, like when I start opening my phone, I remember this. I was at my friend's house, and it was 7 o'clock in the morning, and I opened my phone, and it was a picture of a guy lifting his dead baby with a crushed skull. And I threw my phone across the room, and it ruined my whole day. Ugh.
It's absolutely horrific. And I have become a person that really shields myself from a lot of what's going on because the hysteria levels right now. I don't think like even World War II times, they go, okay, Pearl Harbor just hit off. And people are like, wow, this is crazy. But I don't think you were inundated with it all day long.
You read the newspaper, you talked to a few people, and then you're like, all right, well, cool. I got to go get Johnny from school and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right. You didn't see it on your phone 24-7 all day long.
Israel's popping off. The South is getting flooded. The Amazon's burning. Everything is happening all at once, and it's all coming through on the screen.
So it says Iran launches a missile attack on Israel, but Israeli military says no casualties reported. So I guess that was the thing that we're saying, that the Iron Dome, when they know that something's going to go to an open area where there's no one there, they don't even bother wasting a missile on that. A U.S.
defense official said the United States intercepted some of the missiles to help defend Israel. So we're over there, too, doing that? The IDF is doing and will do everything necessary to protect the civilians of the state of Israel. The Israeli military said in a statement warning people in the country to stay in shelters. The explosions you hear originate from interceptions or falls of missiles.
The air defense system detects and intercepts threats all the time. So what happened in Tel Aviv today, Jamie? There was some sort of mass shooting in Tel Aviv that coincided with this. Which is really scary. You know, it's like what they experienced on October 7th. Okay, fucking ads. At least eight dead and suspected terror attack shooting in Tel Aviv. So they even, oh, so Jesus Christ.
Let's scroll down to that image. So some dude's just gunning people down. Scroll up. The deadly ordeal unfolded when two gunmen jumped off a train in the central Israeli city of Jaffa and started firing at just 7 p.m. local, just after 7 p.m. local time, according to authorities. Eight killed, at least seven wounded. And, you know, a lot of people, look at that guy's dead right there.
A lot of people there are armed too, which is fucking crazy.
Civilians? Yeah. Just walking around just in case?
Have you ever seen hot girls in Israel? Like, you can see them at a coffee shop with a fucking... No. With an AR hanging off a rifle sling. Yeah. There's, like, a bunch of videos of them. Because so many of these people... You have mandatory military service in Israel.
Yeah, that I know.
So all the civilians have to... There's no civilians. Like, everyone is at least a former soldier.
Well, you gotta be ready, right?
Yeah, you have to be. If I saw shit like that in the skies... These hot girls walking down the street with machine guns... Hot girls with machine guns. How nuts. But that's just the world they live in. And they're just hanging out. Yep. As a baby. Right. And look, she has like cute shoes on. At any moment, it could pop off. And so they don't fuck around. They just stay strapped.
They don't just stay strapped. They stay strapped with fucking weapons of war. Those are no joke.
Yeah, those are no joke. That ain't a six-shooter.
No, she's got a gigantic magazine. She's probably got spare magazines. Yeah, and she probably knows how to shoot it. She was in the military.
Do you think she knows how to use it? Yeah. So it's men and women. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, women have to join the Israeli military as well. Look, they're surrounded. I mean, this is something that's very different.
It's very different than us. Well, I think that one of the problems that I see with us is I think that people have forgotten. Like, I grew up with the World War II generation. All my old uncles that I was growing up, Pauly, like, you know, these were guys that had, you know, either stormed beaches in the South Pacific or were in Europe. And so World War II was fresh on their minds.
It was part of the culture I grew up in. And I think when I look at kids born, you know, 9-11 and down or later, I think we've forgotten the fact that safety is a huge privilege.
Oh, yeah.
We grow up safe. Like some of the people, the things that they're screaming about or worried about or whatever else, it's like some unity would happen from remembering the fact that That that's that's a reality.
We've got so few attacks on American soil, you know, you have Pearl Harbor, which is kind of America You know Hawaii should be its own country.
I mean, it's kind of feel like it we own Hawaii I mean, I guess it's good that Hawaii gets the protections of the United States But it's kind of crazy that it's five mile five hours rather by airplane over the ocean in the middle until you get to Hawaii and that's considered America But, I mean, I don't know how they feel about it. I'm assuming they'd probably like to have sovereignty.
But the point is, like, that was World War II, so that was Pearl Harbor. That's an attack on American soil. What's after that? It's 9-11. 9-11. That's crazy. Like, we are so... used to being safe. Whereas you think of even Russia, what Russia went through, the losses that Russia went through during World War II, absolutely fucking horrific. And they've done that throughout history.
There's been conflicts throughout history in Russia. Now you go into any other part of the world. I saw something terrible today. Some fucking workers at the Great Wall of China, they didn't want to go the long way around the wall, so they broke down a section of the Great Wall of China so they could drive through it. Did they have machinery? Did they have sledgehammers?
Yeah, they were doing fucking construction work out there, so they just broke down the Great Wall. Jail. Oh, they're going to get worse than jail in China. Yeah. They're going to turn you into a fucking suitcase. That's terrible. They'll make you make iPhones for 20 years, and then they're going to turn you into a jacket.
That's terrible.
It's fucking horrible, man. People are just so gross. Imagine that mahogany tree that you saw. Look at these assholes. They broke through the Great Wall. Chinese construction workers accused of plowing a hole through the Great Wall.
Monsters. Dude, this reminds me. I hated this story. There was a beautiful tree between these two hills. I think it was in the UK or Ireland. I think it was the UK. And like a 16-year-old went out with a chainsaw and just cut this tree down. It was this iconic tree. And no one could figure it out for like two days. And he just went and cut it down. And it's just like, man, just...
Yeah, people are gross. People are gross, and people are also very short-sighted and sometimes don't even understand the consequences of what they're doing. They just do things, you know?
Normally, I would agree with you. I just think the world that I've been living in... The past year. So I've been in in rooms and out in the wild with so many incredible people. And I think that more than ever, people, I agree, we're moments away from disaster in any given capacity. But there's also we're also alive at a time in history where people are more considerate than they've ever been.
Yeah, I think so too. Right? Yeah, I think there's just, you're going to get everything, right? You're going to get people that are willing to launch missiles at Israel. You're going to get people that are willing to chop down ancient mahogany trees. And then you get people like you that dedicate your life to saving the rainforest.
It's one of the cool things about people because it makes people like you so much more exceptional. It makes people so much more interesting because it's rare. And then someone dedicating their entire life to doing what you've done is even more rare. And that's part of the cool thing about people. I think – and it's a horrible thing to say, but I think it's unfortunately true.
You need evil to appreciate good. You need hate to appreciate love. It's just a part of the way the human mind and our – just overall psychology, just the way we operate in the world. It's unfortunate, but it's a part of being a person. And I think –
Hate and anger and destruction actually motivates love and construction and progress and doing things correct and recognizing what can happen if you do things the wrong way. Let's do things the right way. Like organic farming, like people changing their farms to regenerative agricultural farms.
is coming out of people who are looking at these industrial monocrop agriculture farms and the waste that it produces, which is legal. The waste that it produces in river systems is fucking insane. There's a guy that we've had on. His name is Will Harris. And Will is from this farm in Georgia called White Oaks Pastures. It's a regenerative farm. He got this farm. It's a family-owned farm.
They've had it forever. And it took him years to change this farm from an industrial farm to regenerative agriculture. But there's a section of the river near his property where his property line meets his neighbor. So his neighbor has an industrial farm and he has regenerative agriculture. And you can see it in the river. There's a clear line of differentiation. Look at that.
I'm guessing his is the clear one?
Yes. Shit. All that stuff. So most of these farmlands, the topsoil is gone. There's no... Whoa, Jesus. There's no minerals. There's no nutrients. There's no nothing. And so you have to use industrial strength fertilizers. You have to lose all this garbage and bullshit. And so that stuff is... It just sits on the top.
And so when the rain comes and when they spray the crops and water the crops, the runoff goes right in the river. So these poor fish are just getting fucking choked to death on all this shit. And then there's the pesticides and the herbicides and whatever the fuck they're spraying.
And this guy is trying to turn it around. He's trying to do the right thing.
That's not Will.
Okay.
I don't know who that gentleman is. I think he works at Will. But he's explaining how bad the situation is that comes off of these other farms. So the left is what the creek is supposed to look like. The right is what happens. And no consequences. You should be in trouble for this, right? Like, hey, you can't run your farm this way. Like, is this what happens when you run your farm this way?
Stop the farm. Okay, we've got to figure out how to do this the right way. Is there a way for your water to look like the water is six inches away? Is there a way? Well, that's the only way you can make farming. So in Russia, organic, like they don't even allow genetically modified crops anymore.
Really?
No, no. Putin is like, this is bullshit. This should be illegal. When you're a dictator, you can do stuff like that.
But that's a fundamental thing. If you go to a building with a sledgehammer or to the Great Wall of China and you start messing with it, you're going to get in trouble. Yes. And it seems like you can cut down forests, pollute the rivers, dump shit in the ocean, and for the most part... It's okay. No one's really going to come after you.
And we can do a lot less of that, too. There's another issue. Commoditizing hemp. A lot of the stuff that we cut trees down for is paper. Let's Google in America how many acres of trees are cut down every year for paper. So the demonization of the recreational drug cannabis... came entirely from hemp, the commodity. It wasn't about the drug being bad.
No, people had consumed that drug for thousands of years. It's one of the safest drugs in terms of risk profile. The LD50 of marijuana is nuts.
What's an LD50?
LD50 is lethal dose at 50%.
Can you lethal dose yourself with marijuana?
I used to have a joke about it. The only way you die from marijuana is if they drop a bundle of it from a CIA drug plant and it hits you in the head. You can do stupid things that could wind up getting killed. You can abuse everything, right? You certainly abuse marijuana. And by the way, I want to say marijuana is not totally safe. Everybody thinks it's totally safe. No, it's not.
There's certain people that have a tendency towards schizophrenia, and high-dose marijuana has been proven to cause schizophrenic breaks in people. Alex Berenson wrote a book about it. It's called Tell Your Children, and I agree with him. I've met people that have had schizophrenic breaks from marijuana. 40% of the world's industrial logging goes into making paper.
This is expected to reach 50% in the near future. US uses approximately 68 million trees each year to produce paper and paper products. Worldwide consumption of paper has risen by 400% in the last 40 years, with 35% of the harvested trees being used for paper manufacture. That's crazy.
Crazy. And you're saying hemp could grow faster, kind of like bamboo could grow faster.
That's actually renewable. Like that term that people like to throw around, renewable, that's actually renewable. It grows like a weed because it kind of is a weed. My friend Todd used to have like a stalk of a mature hemp plant on his desk. And it's about this thick around. Like, if that was a piece of oak, it would be really heavy. But it's hard, like this table, which is oak. But it's light.
Like styrofoam. It's light like balsa wood. But it's hard. So it has incredible... Power, like in its fibers. Its fibers are extremely unusual. So they make the most durable clothing, like canvas. The word canvas comes from cannabis. But is this weed itself? No. Like if you have like a weed plant. It's not the same thing. No, well, you can. It's the same thing.
But you can also grow strains of it that are not psychoactive at all. It's just a similar, same family. So they weren't growing it as a commodity for drug consumption. They were growing it to make paper. See, this is what happened. I'm taking you down the dark conspiracy of marijuana road. What happened is in the 1930s, they invented a machine called the decorticator.
And what the decorticator did was it allowed you to effectively process hemp fiber easily and quickly. So when Eli Whitney came out with the cotton gin, now all of a sudden cotton became a very easy cloth to use and people started wearing cotton ubiquitously, right? Well, what they used to use was hemp because hemp is way more durable. I mean, crazy difference.
Like I have a hemp jujitsu gi made by Datsusara and you can't rip this motherfucker. Like you grab it and I've had one, one of my gis is like eight years old. But if I have a cotton gi, eight years in, that shit's torn apart. So the only thing that goes on those things are the threads. And, you know, I guess you could make hemp threads. I don't even know if they do.
But the point is it's, like, far more durable. As a paper, it's a far superior paper. Far superior like it's much tougher. It's tough to like I've had paper Demonstrate to me like it's harder rip man. Yeah crazy. It's weird.
It's a fucking alien plant it really is and When they invented this decorticator well William Randolph Hearst who also owned Hearst publications who also own paper mills and Scientific America had on the cover of their magazine hemp the new billion dollar crop And it was a show decorator to them. It was all when they invented this thing.
So the propaganda to stop the industry of hemp from exploding. DuPont came out with a chemical composition for nylon. They were going to use nylon for ropes. Hemp is what they always use for ropes. Hemp is what they use for sails. So that's a decorator. That looks like a modern one.
Doesn't look too complicated either.
Well, it's basically like a wheel with some teeth to it, and it grinds the shit out of the hemp. And what they used to use back in the day was slave labor. So slave labor and poor people would have to do all this incredibly back-breaking work to break down the fibers because they're so tough and durable.
Well, then they invented this machine, and once this machine got rolling, they're like, oh, shit, let's start using hemp because it's way better. Mm-hmm. So all this Forrest cutting down shit is completely unnecessary.
100%.
And a paper guy in the 1930s. And so he got together with Harry Anslinger, and they utilized all these people that they were using to make alcohol illegal to probe. Excuse me, the prohibitionists during the time where they were going after whiskey manufacturers and gin makers and these moonshine people, which is where NASCAR came from, by the way. NASCAR came out of moonshiners.
Driving quick.
Yeah, they needed a souped up car. So they took those people who were just arresting people all over the country for alcohol, and then they sicked them on marijuana. And marijuana was never the term for cannabis. Yeah. Marijuana was a slang term for a wild Mexican tobacco, a totally different plant.
So William Randolph Hearst starts printing articles in his paper about Mexicans and black guys who are smoking this new drug, marijuana, and raping white women. And then they fund Reefer Madness and they fund these movies, these propaganda films.
And that's where that comes from.
All that comes from hemp. It all comes from the commodity, from them having this interest in paper. Research suggests that hemp is twice as effective as trees at absorbing and locking up carbon. So hemp is one of the fastest growing plants in the world. It can grow four meters high in 100 days. Four meters high in 100 days. In 100 days, you have a new crop.
It's the best fucking thing we can grow for paper, which is 40% of all the trees we're chopping down. Have you ever been to old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest where they do logging? Well, you've been to the Amazon. You've seen the worst slash and burn art. But the point is, if you go to these cut places, these places where they cut the trees, they grow new trees.
They plant new trees there. But it takes forever.
It takes 20 years. How old is a sequoia tree? How old is a redwood?
Hundreds of years. Thousands of years.
I see those pictures. I can't remember this dude's name. He takes a picture with the trees before the loggers come through. I mean, trees, you know, double the size of this room. And then he has this picture with the tree after. And it's fucking heartbreaking. It's a horrible thing, man.
It's horrible. It's horrible that we can just walk up to something that's a thousand years old and make a fucking basket out of it. Like, this is unnecessary. It's totally unnecessary. Yep. And it could, well, it can all be mitigated. This can all be mitigated. All of it can. You know, the real problem is hardwoods.
You know, hardwoods are very, very valuable and people like them and, you know, and they're protected in some places and not others. Like, in California, if you have oak trees, you can't chop them down unless you get a permit. Like, we had a tree that was about to fall on our house. It was like, ugh.
It's on the way go and you know California the earth tends to shake a little bit a little bit things go sideways and your fucking house gets crushed by a tree, but you know you have to there's We have to figure out how our desire for hardwood like the source of that hardwood, if your desire for a beautiful mahogany table, they're beautiful, gorgeous, look at your desk, amazing.
But if you could go to the Amazon and see that someone chopped down a tree that you were describing, that massive tree that people had probably hadn't seen in a hundred years or whatever. Maybe ever.
Who knows? Some of these trees are 1,200 years old.
Maybe there's no one else dumb enough to walk through that place with no water.
We might have been the first people to ever see that tree.
When I was in Scotland, they were claiming this. I don't know if this is true, because there's a lot of really old shit in Scotland. They have these stones. Really? Yeah, we were in Scotland. There's these guide stones on the ground, and I go, what's that from? They go, we don't know. I go, how old is it? They're like, it's about 5,000 years old. I was like, what?
You just walk up to a 5,000-year-old stone. There's a stone circle out there. There's a stone circle that someone has constructed. It's similar to Stonehenge, but on a much, much smaller scale. And it's older than Stonehenge. And it's just on the street in front of this dude's house. So this guy said, do you want to see it?
It's not even like a heritage site. No.
No, it has a little plaque that's like that big. So we got out of the car and we walk over to it. You could walk on it. You could stand on it. I'm like, this is so weird. Like, how old is this? They're like, we're not exactly sure, but it's thousands and thousands of years old. Like the druids made these things.
No one knows where it came from.
They don't know. They don't know who did it. They don't know why. This guidestone was just on the ground next to this pathway. And I was like, what is this? That's a 5,000-year-old guidestone. I'm like, what is – what? Who put that there? Why isn't there a museum built around this fucking thing? That's crazy that it's just laying on the ground.
No, I mean, this is a meteorite?
Yes.
That is a meteorite.
So weren't they saying that, so they were telling me that the oldest tree in the world is in Scotland. I was like, I don't know how that's true. I thought the oldest tree was, has to be in Africa.
Mmm, wouldn't it be I thought it was in the Middle East somewhere. It was like one of those It's like, you know, like six feet tall and like super I don't know like predates Jesus like, you know, it's like ancient ancient really?
Yeah, what's the oldest tree? No, this is just I didn't want to tell the guy get the fuck out of here They said the oldest tree he was he was giving me a tour a tour of the land These are coos. These are coos. They're cows. They call the cows coos. I go, what are you saying, man? Scotland's oldest tree. So it's 3,000 and 9,000 years old.
Between three and nine. That's a big swing.
Yeah, they don't know. I mean, that's the thing about that area. There's a lot of just guessing. There's a lot of just guessing. So see if you can show me a photo of the oldest tree. Yeah, they're gnarly looking, like you're saying. It's not like a massive tree.
No.
You know, when you walk by it, you would think, oh, it's just a tree. You would never think that thing's 9,000 years old. But I'm curious what the oldest tree period is. I think that's the one. That's the one they were saying is the oldest tree. Well, this is just what this guy is telling me. What is that one? The oldest tree in the world. What's that one? Is it in the U.S.?
That one looks like it's in the Middle East. I don't think so. No. Couldn't be, right? I don't know. Bristlecone. Where's that one? Pine. Great base, 900 years. It doesn't say. Where's Bristlecone? California. California. So the oldest tree in the world is in California? No.
Hold on. It says something about Atlanta.
Oh, no, no, no. It says, yeah. I don't think they're saying it.
Trees, Atlanta is the website. That's kind of weird.
Is that maybe just like trees around the world that they're studying in Atlanta?
Wrong rabbit hole is all.
The oldest tree in the world. It looks like shit. It looks like you would expect the oldest tree. You wouldn't expect the oldest tree to look like those great redwoods. California. California. Doesn't have a single fucking leaf. So how old is that one? How is it alive? How old is the oldest tree in the world? 4,855 years old. Yikes. Methuselah. They have a name for it.
So some cocksucker, you know there's some dude that's thinking about turning that into a desk. You know, there's some fucking tech shithead. U.S. Forest Service doesn't tell visitors precisely where Methuselah stands, nor does the organization release photographs of the ancient tree. Someone's going to fuck it up.
Can you look up how old the General Sherman is? I'm curious about the Sequoias.
But this is interesting, Jamie, because I guess that other website's incorrect. Because the other website was saying it might be 9,000 years old.
This is the same tree right here, I think. The U from northern Wales, wouldn't that be?
Yeah, but that's not Scotland. Different country, but I'm sure they have some old shit, too. Prometheus. I think that's the thing about a lot of these old, old trees is it's kind of guesswork.
Yeah.
I don't think they really know. And I think it probably behooves them, behooves them to exaggerate a little. Hooves. You know, because it's kind of a good bragging point. Say, we got the oldest tree in the world. Yeah, it's a draw for your town, whatever. Sort of. There's no one out there. It was really cool. There's no one in Scotland, bro.
Scotland is like the whole country is like the size of Austin.
In terms of population. Single stem tree.
Not all complicated like the ones we just saw. This is like a pole. A lot of the rainforest trees are like this where it's just a pillar. General Sherman.
So is that a sequoia?
Yeah.
Yeah, man. Have you gone up to Northern California? Did that rain for us?
I haven't been up to Northern Cali, but where the General Sherman is, it looks, you know, like if you play like Super Mario 64, like when you go into like Giant Land, there was a sequoia tree that had fallen over. I mean, the thing was, you know, 36 feet thick. I don't know. But I was like, I couldn't climb on top of the tree. And it fell over and it went from here for like a city block. Yeah.
They have one that has a tunnel carved out.
Yeah. Where you could drive your car through it. They're so cool.
And people want to cut them down.
Yeah. There's people frothing to cut those things down.
Oh, yeah. People are gross. Especially some fucking psychopath who's on Adderall. Sherman tree contains more wood volume in its trunk than any other tree on earth. And you know that's not the biggest one. That seems like to make sense to me. Like, that's the oldest tree. You know, when I see that little ratty little fucking bush in the desert, I'm like, that's not the oldest. You lying, bitch.
Yeah.
See, I thought it would be somewhere on the side of a mountain where it's like high wind and they're growing slow over a thousand years. So no humans would have been up there.
And every year it's just adding a millimeter to its – Well, we know so much about the world in comparison to what they knew 500 years ago. But yet we still know so little. They still – like 2010, they found a new human species. Yeah. The Denisovans. They didn't even know the Denisovans were a thing until 2010.
And now they think that the Denisovans, like a lot of the Aborigine people in Australia, have Denisovan in them. And maybe possibly even Neanderthal in them.
They only described the fact that there was two species and not one species of fucking elephant in Africa in the 90s.
Well, wasn't a gorilla like a myth until they went – I think gorillas were like mythical creatures until like the 1800s. Like when did they discover gorillas?
I mean I think the first European to see a gorilla probably had some mental issues. Well, I'm sure Africans saw gorillas, but they couldn't get the word out. But like the first explorer with his chain mail to show up and look at a gorilla.
It wasn't until early 19th century that people native from the areas where they live, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Gabon, knew gorillas better. But among people outside of Africa, they were mostly mythological creatures.
There's human-like big 400-pound monsters. Insane.
Yeah.
Insane.
This is a really controversial one. It's the Bondo ape. And that's a particular area of the Congo called Bili. And Bili has this unusual strain of chimpanzees that have a crest on their head like a gorilla. So this is a normal chimpanzee skull. Okay. See how it's smooth on the top?
Gorillas have this big crest because their mandible muscles are so massive because they mostly just, they only eat plants. So they're mostly eating fiber. So they're just crushing roots and stuff all day.
It has to grab onto that.
Massive muscles. Well, these chimpanzees, they thought initially they perhaps were a hybrid between chimpanzees and gorillas because they're much bigger. They're like six feet tall. A hybrid between chimpanzees. And they're enormous. It's a really controversial thing. Some people think that it's just an unusual group of chimpanzees.
There's this area in Africa, there's a documentary on it called Relentless Enemies. It's an amazing documentary about this river changed course over the years and these lions got stuck on this island with nothing but water buffalo. So all the lions look like Yoel Romero. They all just look fucking Brock Lesnar lions. Female lions as big as male lions in other parts of Africa.
Super jacked female lions just fucking up these water buffaloes.
Well, they do all the heavy lifting.
Yeah, because they have to adapt to their environment. So there was some thought that maybe this was a particular strain of chimpanzee that had adapted and was just unusually large. But they're fucking huge, man. There's a guy named Carl Armand. He's a Swiss wildlife photographer. And he dedicated his life to exploring these animals and documenting them.
And he got photographs of them on a camera trap walking on two legs. Bro, you gotta see what they look like. Oh, yeah, they like nutty. They look nutty. I mean, they're hunched over a little bit But they look so much bigger than a regular chimpanzee.
This is a real thing. This isn't like Oh, no, no, no.
No, they have they have tissue samples. They have bones. So we have separate DNA Yep, plenty of videos of these things there It's an actual animal that the question is is this a subspecies? Is it a completely different species? It's like Right. You know they have bonobos. Can we be able to tell that from the tissue? Well, it's a novel tissue though, right? So it's a new thing.
So if it is, they're trying to figure out exactly what happened and how many of them there are. And it seems to be in this incredibly dense war-torn area of the Congo where these things live. But we know there's bonobos, right? Which kind of look like chimpanzees, but they're really different. They're not violent at all. They just fuck. Yeah, peace and love.
They have arguments and they fuck each other. And that's how they get over everything. They use hemp. Yeah, they probably do. They're probably stoner monkeys. I wonder what's in their diet. But these monkeys are, these chimpanzees, rather, are very different than the other chimpanzees, like from Chimp Nation, where they're super violent. And they kill monkeys all day.
And they, you know, they fight over fruit.
Chimp Nation is the show. Netflix.
Netflix document. Fucking amazing. That's the one where the scientists were embedded with these chimpanzees for 20 years. So the chimpanzees behave completely normal. When you say embedded, like what Goodall did, like sitting there, like right there. Yes, they lived with them. So they set up camp in these forests, and they had very clear rules. Number one, stay 20 yards away, always. Not much.
Not much. Pretty close. But when it gets close to 20 yards, get out of there. No food. Don't bring any food. Don't look them in the eyes. No fucking around. And so the chimpanzees, their whole life... Chimpanzee lives in the wild probably 15, 20 years or whatever. Their whole life they've been around these people. So they act completely normal. Those people are just like another tree.
Just another thing that's not of consequence. It doesn't steal resources from them. It doesn't try to intimidate them. It doesn't infringe on their territory. Never gets closer than 20 yards. No worries. So because of that, they've got this insane footage. It's one of the most incredible documentary series of all time. And they study the social behavior between the chimpanzees.
And I had the guy on who directed it. It was really fascinating. I'm like, how often do they eat monkeys? He's like, dude, we couldn't even show them all. They're just eating monkeys all day. That's their favorite thing to do. And they just rip them apart.
Yeah.
And they didn't even know that until the 90s. When David Attenborough went to the jungle to film chimpanzees, they caught them hunting monkeys and eating them alive. It's terrifying. It's crazy. It is terrifying. There's a monkey, and this chimp has it like his hand is around its waist, and it's just eating it from the hips down like this. And the monkey's going, Jesus!
It's just got this little monkey face that looks so much like ours. It's so close to us. And this chimp's just chewing chunks.
And so they have 20 years.
Pulling a leg off and handed it to this other chimp, and he's chewing it.
They share?
Oh, yeah, they share. They share. Well, that's a big part of this docuseries. Interesting. Is how they set up those social structures. Their social structures are so similar to ours. We think that the biggest chimpanzees, like the alpha male, it's not. Some of them it's not. It's a smart one who has made comrades and made a community and is very fair.
Chimpanzees have a very strong sense of fairness and being slighted. Like if one of the elders doesn't get a piece of the monkey, they get fucking furious. Like what have you done? Like you have to make right. Like you have to like sue people's or monkeys, chimpanzees, anger at being slighted.
Dude. Yeah, well, I always remember this as a kid. I was watching a nature show, and they had a, I call it the third beetle principle. The two male beetles were battling, and the female's watching. And while the two male beetles are battling, the third beetle comes and fucks the female. That's what happens with elk all the time. And it was just like, you know, be a third beetle.
Yeah. They studied white-tailed deer as well. Same thing happens. The big guys are fighting. When the big guys are fighting, the little sneaky ones are like, hey, you want some ladies?
Yeah. Yeah, ladies like that. They're smart.
See if you can find a photograph of that Bondo ape. Yes, please. Again, very controversial. Why is it controversial, though? Because people don't want to believe it's real. So that's one, yeah, that one's a dead one that they shot at an airport. Look at the size of it compared to those guys.
It's so much bigger than that.
I was just trying to get on a plane. You ever see that movie, The Congo? It's a stupid movie. I read the book. It was a cool book where the gorillas could talk. But those chimpanzees, the crazy chimpanzees, were based on these Bondo apes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the idea. Look at that picture up in the top right with the black and white one. Yeah. Well, find the camera trap photo.
Scroll down a little bit. It'll probably be one of the first photos that you see. There's a camera trap photograph of, no, that's a different one. That's one that, um, lived in America.
If I saw that in the forest, I would kill myself.
There's one, they, they called them humanzy and they thought at one point in time that maybe somebody had fucked a chimpanzee. Um, These are all cool. That's it. That's it. Where it says World of Carl Armand on the top shelf. Yeah, right there. That's the camera trap photo. That's not the best version of it. I've seen more clear version, but he's walking around and they're enormous.
These guys said they had a Land Rover and they had a Defender and they stopped or whatever the truck was. They stopped the truck in the road as one walked by and it was taller than the truck. What? So they're huge. They're enormous. Some of them are, like I said, they're like six foot tall chimpanzees. And just imagine how strong a regular chimp is. So that's definitely that one up there.
Click on that. Click on the gallery. So Carl Armand is this guy who was this wildlife photographer that when they became aware of this subspecies. See the photographs of the skull? Yeah.
See that ridge?
Yikes.
They're fucking huge, man. And there's not a large population of them, and it's not very well studied. Because it's so remote mm-hmm.
It's very fucking dangerous to get there But you see those two bones on the ground show that image again look at the size difference between the regular chimpanzee skull in the background and then the Bondo ape in the foreground and look at the crest on the head nuts The locals have two names for chimpanzees. They call them tree beaters and lion killers. Lion killers? Lion killers.
And the lion killers, first of all, there's no lions in the jungle. Lions are not king of the jungle. Well, there's no lions. Lions live in the savannah. So calling them lion killers is probably just a fun name. But they have found, they did video one that was eating a jaguar.
Or a leopard, rather.
A leopard. But they don't know if it found the leopard dead and ate it. They don't know what the fuck happened.
Could have cornered it. Did it really jack a leopard?
180?
Yeah.
180 pounds, and the strength of a 500-pound man. So you weigh probably close to it, right? You probably weigh about 180. So your weight, but the strength of a 500-pound man. Now imagine one that's not 5 feet tall, but 6 feet tall, and is not 200 pounds, but 300 pounds or 350 pounds. What? Get that guy in the octagon. Dude, fuck that. A regular chimpanzee would fuck a human up.
But that photograph of those two men that's sitting there with one that they shot, that's one that they think is confirmed to be one of these Bondo apes. And it's so much bigger than them. But you have to think like, okay, these guys, first of all, they're in the background. Just like when you catch a fish, you hold the fish out in front of you. It's a perspective thing.
This is an anaconda.
Exactly. But the guy does have his hand on his shoulder. There's some things you can't fake, like the size of his nuts.
I was going to say, the size of his nuts is the size of that guy's face.
And look at the size of his hand. His hand's massive. That's a massive chimpanzee. grab onto some serious branches with that. Google Humanzee because Humanzee was a weird one. These people had this chimpanzee and they dressed it up like a person and it had weird facial features where it looked so similar to a person. Yeesh. It looks weird.
Dude.
Along the way. That one right there to the left of that. Yeah, right there where you're at is good, too. So look at his face. I don't like that. Strange, right? Strange features. He looks like he could work at a bank. Very weird. So it led people to think that his name is Oliver. It led people to think that Oliver was some sort of a hybrid. But it doesn't seem like he is.
It just seems like he just had odd facial. But look, they put him in a fucking suit and tie and shit. And they're fine. But he became sexually attracted to his carer. And preferred humans over chimps. The problem with those things is they're horny. Just like, you know, and he doesn't even know there's other chimps because he doesn't get to see them. You look close enough.
He's like, I'll fuck you, lady. And, like, she's taking care of him. He's like, take care of this. He's a horny chimpanzee.
I've heard that orangutans do that, too.
I'm sure. They're primates. Well, this is, you know, that's that Chimp Nation show that's on. Have you seen that on Netflix?
I haven't seen. I've been obsessed with the 100-foot wave.
I'm serious. Not Chimp Nation. Chimp Crazy. Chimp Crazy is all about these people that are like the Tiger King people. Instead of having tigers, they have chimps.
Just crazy people with chimps in their house.
Yeah. Carl's up. He's like, what the fuck? Chimps? They'll eat you, Carl. In a goddamn heartbeat.
This... This article about Oliver has this photo we've used a lot. I don't know. Oh, that's not Oliver. No, that article is bullshit. He was taken.
Yeah, that's just another chimpanzee. That's not him. But I'm sure they took him from the Congo or wherever. Apparently, this is also something that we learned from the guys from Chimp Crazy that we're on. We're explaining how this trade works where they kidnap these babies from their mother. And then they start raising them in captivity in America. And some places, like Wyoming, it's legal.
So they all go to Wyoming. Or was it Missouri? Where was it that they buy chimps? Missouri, right?
I mean, the whole Tiger King thing. Fucking nuts, man. Dude, those people all are just normal people that have...
wild animals ligers dude they i don't know if i should say this they way before the tiger king thing one of one of the dudes not the main tiger king guy one of the other guys um and the myrtle beach guy invited me to his place and he's like is that the guy runs the sex cult yeah and he was like you gotta help me legitimize my shit i'm a real conservationist and so oh god
I'm sure you are, buddy.
Me and my friend Mohsen, we do all the photography, all the Amazon fire stuff together, and I was like, you want to go fucking hang out with tigers for a weekend? He was like, yeah, let's go. And so they were like, look, we're legit. You're a real conservationist. Come over here. Tell the world about us.
So what they do is they have people sit in a circle, and you can go with your date and pay for this, and they put a tiger cub in your lap. Great. Cool. But then what do you do with those 16 tiger cubs next year when they weigh 500 pounds? And that's the answer. They all have an incinerator on site. Oh, no. Yeah, so they're breeding tigers and incinerating them. Also, I was standing there.
So many weird things happened that weekend.
So when they get to be dangerous, they just shoot them and burn them?
I don't know how they euthanize them, but they have an incinerator on site. Wow. And they're producing tigers. And you go, where do the tigers go?
Oh, my God.
They go, well, you know.
Oh, no.
And they're going, save tigers, save the world. And there's animals everywhere. I was doing something, and the girl walks by with a liger. Oh, yeah. And I felt like I was on mushrooms. Yeah. The thing's fucking head is this big. Yeah, it's so big. You know in Sandlot when they see the beast and it's like an animatronic giant? It looked ridiculous.
This liger walked by and was as tall as I was and I just went, I don't like it here.
Well, it's a weird hybrid because... I think it's, is it a male tiger and a female lion or a male lion and a female tiger? I think it's a male tiger. So in the problem is in male lions, the gene that regulates size. Hmm. exists.
So when a male lion breeds with a female lion, I might be fucking this up, but I know that this is the problem with the liger, why they're so big, is because whether it's the male or the female, so it's a hybrid opposite, male lion and a tiger female. Okay. So in the female lion then, Or in the male tiger, one of them, there's this gene that regulates how big you get.
And it doesn't exist in the liger.
They don't look right.
They get so big. Their head. How big do they get, Jamie?
Jesus Christ. But a Siberian tiger, I think, can also get like 900 pounds. Like an Amur tiger. I think they can get pretty big. I think so, too. I think a liger is way off the charts. I think ligers might be bigger than that. Yep. Scroll down a little bit, Jamie. 800 pounds. There's the one I saw.
900 pounds.
That's the dude. That's the cat. That's the dude.
Yeah. So this one says it got to 922 pounds. Hercules, the largest non-obese liger. So he's non-obese, not fatso.
They try to cheat, give him donuts. That's some body positive bullshit. He's obese.
I bet he's not if he's 922. Wow. When he was three years old, he weighed 408 pounds. Oh, my God. 900 pounds. 408 kilograms. Oh, my God. And now it weighs. Oh, my God. Value the King's Animal Sanctuary in Wisconsin had a male liger named Nook who weighed over 1,213 pounds. Oh, my God. So lion and tiger in captivity are under 1,100 pounds. How big does a Siberian tiger get?
What's the largest Siberian tiger?
See, that I would say 900 pounds. I feel like that upper limit is 900 pounds, and I have from nose to tail about 12 feet. Those are my guesses.
That's such a big animal, the Siberian. 11 feet long.
Yeah, that book, The Tiger, is one of the best books.
It's 10 foot 11 inches long from nose to tail, weighed 932 pounds. Look at that face. Bro, they're so beautiful, too. That's what's crazy, that it's a cat that lives in the snow. Like, you think of tigers, you think of India. Jungles.
You think of the jungle. Yeah.
You don't think of a cat that lives in Siberia. Yep. And it's the biggest one. And messes up the bears. Oh, good. And controls the wolf populations.
Good Lord. Good Lord.
That paw. That paw.
Oh, my God. Yeah. And just, it's crazy that it's such a gorgeous thing that's killing you. They're so beautiful. Like, when you see them, it's probably part of the trick. Like, you're, like, hypnotized by how beautiful it is. Like, what?
Yeah.
Look at this thing.
Would you ever see in Life and Color, they show you the spectrum that deer see in? They don't see orange? Right. Because that was my question growing up as a kid. I was like, if you want to blend in, why the hell would you be orange and white and black? It seems like that's the most... It's like having a neon sign.
Well, that's because the most dangerous thing in the forest is people. Especially people with guns.
Yeah, no, no, no. But I'm saying before that is when they... But that's why they did it.
They do it so that you don't get shot by hunters.
That's the whole reason why you have orange on. Yeah. Sure, but I'm saying it stands out. But I'm saying, so my question was, why would a tiger, because deer see orange.
Because tigers live in the grass and there's a lot of shadows and stripes.
Yeah, they show you. They can move around. They show you deer vision and they literally don't register that color orange. So it just looks like more green shit. And a tiger vanishes. It's such a cool clip. It's on one of those.
I think that's also why zebras have those funky stripes.
I think it fucks with them. Yeah, it confuses them.
I think all those lines fuck with them because they're not seeing things like we're seeing this cup, we're seeing your phone, seeing writing. I don't think they see like that. A lot of it is edge detection and motion. I was just elk hunting and I got a video on my Instagram. See how they blend in? Yep. So they would not see all that stuff. They would just see what looks like branches.
Yeah, like squint and look at that image. And it's easy to see it for us. It's very difficult to see it for them.
And if they're in the jungle, densely foliated jungle, and there's all these trees and shit, they would just blend right the fuck in and just lay in wait for something that's slower than them.
But I was thinking what you were saying about the Bondo Ape. One of the things that we're doing now is we're using Starlink to deploy camera traps in areas. Because you just take a Starlink, put it up in the top of a tree. I have a guy on my team, Stefan, he figured this out. We take Starlink, you put it up in the top of a tree so it has access. Someone's got to climb the tree.
Do you put a solar panel attached to it?
You've got to have Starlink and a solar panel and just like a little box to run everything. And then you can deploy remote camera traps around. And so we're getting now, we haven't published this yet, but we're getting live feed from parts of the Amazon where there's no people.
And with the Starlink, you can send it back to you with Wi-Fi so you don't have to get the cards.
Dude, we get updates on our phones.
Oh, my God.
That's incredible. So if we did this in Bondo ape territory...
You probably find them. Yeah. But you probably get fucked up getting in there and putting that stuff up there. That's the problem. It's humans. Me and Lex could do it. The problem is the humans. I mean, it's essentially run by war zone. It's a war zone run by warlords. And then if you go into the Congo, you have the cobalt mines. You have all these things that are run by China.
There's all the slave labor operations that are going out there. And it's just the whole area. My friend Justin, he runs this charity, Fight for the Forgotten. He goes to the Congo and he builds wells. And we've had him on a few times to talk about his experiences over there. But getting to these people to try to build wells for them is fucking just fraught with peril.
You're dealing with just gunfights break out. People get robbed. People get pulled over and guns held to their head. Everything gets stolen from them.
It's like Blood Diamond. Yeah.
Yes, just lawlessness, run by warlords, different towns you go into are run by different people. You have to have translators. Sometimes translators are like, this is not good, this is not good. You're like, oh, fuck. And you're just over there trying to help people. So if you're going to study these chimpanzees, this ain't...
You know, this ain't like the fucking Pacific Northwest just going to the woods and like, oh, there's a deer. No, this is, you're dealing with humans, dangerous humans who are desperate and who have lived their whole life in these conditions.
When you go elk hunting, how long do you spend? How long is an elk hunt for you?
I give myself a week. I always have a week. But a lot of guys who have more time, they'll do 10 days. It depends on what kind of hunting you're doing. I'm doing it in places where it's private access. If you have public land, you're going to get a lot of hunters on that land, especially if there's elk. And it pushes the elk deeper and deeper into the forest.
And if you want to really find them, a lot of these guys, they'll put their – like my friend Aaron Snyder, he'll put a backpack on. He'll go two weeks, and they'll go 26, 30 miles in, and that's where the elk are. And so not only that, you have to pack them out. Oh, yeah. So if you kill an elk – 30 miles in. And it's 30 miles as the crow flies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 30 miles of terrain.
You're going up and down and up and down, thousands of feet of elevation, and it takes them days to get the animal out.
Yeah. I've seen the videos of that guy. You had this guy on. He's awesome. Donnie Vincent? Yes. He does a very good job of documenting his elk hunts. And he's always got the backpack with the antlers on. Yep.
Yeah.
Trekking poles are a must, and you're carrying something on your back that's almost what you weigh. You got a person on your back, and you're trying to go 30 miles.
Elevation.
And that's only one trip. Yeah. You're done. You drop it off. You have to get it on ice or do something, depending rather on what the temperature is outside. You have to preserve the meat. You have to put it somewhere, usually in a cooler. You lock it down. Whatever you do, you quarter it out, bone it out, and then you're going back. You're going 30 miles for load number two.
And if you're solo, there's a lot of guys that solo elk hunt, you might have to go in four times to get all the meat out. Because you physically can't carry it all 30 miles up and down the mountains without risk of dying. No, how much is an elk? I mean, an elk is gigantic. Hundreds of pounds of meat.
So I could tell you exactly because we shot these elk in Utah and then we brought them to this meat processing place that makes you sausages and all kinds of cool shit. And they weigh it. So they weigh your meat. It was 400 pounds of meat. of harvested meat.
Yeah, I mean, there's bones.
No, there's still bones in the quarters. But the bones aren't that much weight. Let's just say the bones are 100 pounds. And I don't think they are. But let's say they are. Yeah, I don't think they are. Because it's just a couple leg bones. It's quartered. So it's basically the femurs. It's, you know, like a rear hind quarter and a front quarter. Let's say it's 100 pounds.
It's still 300 pounds of meat you got to get out on your own.
Yeah.
You, 300 pounds on your back. So you've got to do it in 100-pound trips probably if you're smart, but some guys get crazy. 100-pound pack is a lot. I know it is. I know a guy who fucked his back up because he tried to do 180 pounds and he went like 25 miles. Oh, God. And his back's destroyed.
His back is so destroyed that one of his arms is atrophying because his nerves are getting pinched because his fucking discs are all bulged out and fucked up.
So you shoot an elk. Yeah. And then you let's say you're with two guys. I don't know. You take as much as you can and you come out. Now, in the meantime, that carcass is sitting there. You just try and get back as soon as you can? Like the meat doesn't go bad? No, it's cold out.
It's cold out. When I was hunting, it was hailing. Oh, okay. So it was like some of the days it was in the 30s, some of the days it was in the 40s. So it'll stay overnight? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It totally can, but we didn't have to wait overnight. We packed it out that day. I got very lucky that my friends came down and helped me. So we were in the bottom of this canyon. It's very, very steep.
This part that's extremely difficult to get to, which is why the elk go there. So it was like you have to be very physically fit just to get there. When I do cardio, getting ready for elk hunts, literally I get ready for it like I have to go into a fight or something.
You train for it.
I'm doing sprints on the airdyne machine just to pump my legs up. I'm doing box jumps and box steps with weights. I'm doing all these body weight squats. It's just to have strong legs. Just because you have to deal with this terrain. If you want to go where the elk are. Because they know where the cats are. And they know where they can hide. And they know where they can get away from people.
And that's in the areas that are hard to get to, which is the mountains. And the more hard to get to, and the elk go up it like it's nothing. Like... They just fucking run right up it like it's it's so wild to watch because you you're struggling to go like a mile an hour and these Motherfuckers are like running over the top of the hill like it's nothing.
Yeah, but that's why they're there They're there because they know that it's tough to get there and yeah people won't fuck with them there and you know They rarely get fucked with there. So that's how you have to get to so I got lucky that there was five guys in camp with me and everyone took a load and I think Cam Haynes has a photo of it on his Instagram of all of us packing it out.
It was in one of those multiple photo things. So that helped a lot because if it was just me and my friend Colton, who was my guide, it would have probably taken us... Fucking most of the day. Yeah, most of the day just to get it to the top of the hill where you can get a 4x4 to it So you're not worried about you don't have like camping gear also.
So you're no, okay.
No, that's good Yeah, but a lot of guys do and those guys the most effective hunters that go into public land which is a much tougher thing to do right because I said that because of pressure and And also because if you want to go where the elk are, there's a lot of people, there's pressure, and the elk are going to get the fuck out of Dodge. And so you have to find out where they are.
It's a lot more groundwork, and you're covering a lot more miles. So these guys, they put their camp on their back, and they chop the toothbrush in half, that whole deal.
Yeah, every ounce.
They know where the water is, and they use things like Onyx maps so that they chart their path. That's all of us. Nice. So we're packing out. That's all the elk quarters on different people's backs and that head up there, that's me carrying the head out with the antlers.
Nice.
You know, and it's, we were, like I said, real lucky that we had friends there to help us. But if you do that by yourself, if you're out there by yourself and you're 30 miles in, you got to be so strong. You got to be so strong. Whose shot was that? I think it was Adam, my friend Adam Greentree. He's an awesome photographer. That's incredible. Lives in Australia, who's with us hunting too.
But that's the kind of hunting that I do is the easiest kind of hunting as far as that goes.
As far as bow hunting in the wilderness goes, yeah.
In that-
I mean, you could do it with a gun, and it's 100 times easier.
No, but what I'm saying is, like, there's not going to be a lot of people there, no one's going to fuck with you, and you know the elk are there. So the much more difficult path is, like, the public land hunter who has to go deep into the forest to get away from all the people.
Like, my friend Adam told me he went 23 miles into the forest once, and he's like, no one's going to be here, and he found two tents. He's like, motherfucker. Yeah. These hunters, they're all realizing like, so there's like a category of hunter that's like these athletes. That love it. Yeah. But they're athletes. Like these guys are super physically fit.
So they can go 25 miles, 30 miles in and they can be by themselves. Yeah. Which is pretty serious. Oh, yeah, man. Yeah.
You did a great job of explaining to that one guy about why wolves and elk, because you're saying fundamentally God and the fact that animals eat each other. And you're like, because there's wolves, elk are mega athletes that can run up a mountain. And I was just like, I was listening to it. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, that's why they are the way they are. You can't take that out of the equation. Like people want, oh, let's have all the elk live in harmony where they never have to worry about getting eaten. That's not real. Just standing there. Yeah, what you're saying is not real.
So if you're saying you don't want hunting, you're saying you want these animals to die in a far more horrific way because we need population control. Some say we need it with people, but that's the World Economic Forum. But what I think is with animals, at least we understand. We have wildlife biologists that are incredible at this job, and they understand what the holding populations are.
They're like, this is how much food is there. This is how many deer are there. This is sustainable. We can give out this amount of tags, and so we keep the populations. But you have to also take into account wolves. When wolves move into an area, everything gets fucked. Everything gets fucked. They kill off a giant percentage of the calves. They kill off domestic animals.
They do surplus kills sometimes. Like in Wyoming, they found this crazy surplus kill where these wolves had killed like 100 cow elk. And they were just laying there because they can't help themselves, man. If they can do it, they're going to do it. Like if they're stuck in snow or something's going on or they can't get away, if they got them cornered, they just go on a slaughter fest.
Well, it's like that's like when we were in school and they were like, you know, the Native Americans only took, you know, and then like you read Empire of the Summer Moon and you're like, oh.
It's all lies.
Oh. It's all lies. The Native Americans were unbelievably brutal to each other. The Comanches were insane.
Oh, my God. That book changed my whole view of everything. They're going to do a movie. They better. They better do a movie. Is it a movie or a series? It's a movie, right? I hope that... No, I hope they do a movie.
But it's Taylor Sheridan.
Yeah?
So, yeah, he'll do it right.
Oh, I hope they do it right. He'll do it right. Because that book, I was reading that book on an expedition, and I was like... When did we stop being warriors never went?
No, I'm talking about going on right now It's not a but the mentality the mentality where they'd be like, oh, yeah Quan Oh was you know by this stream and they saw some other another tribe on that when they just went let's go get him Yeah, you don't need to do that. You might die. Well, they were just like let's go they went on raiding parties So they thought it was fun.
Yeah, that's what it was to them They'd go and find other native tribes and fuck them up and sometimes eat them
Yeah. But I'm saying like that to me, given the modern context, like we're raised to be so sensitive and so considerate. Yeah. And it's like these people you read about the I don't remember Quanah's mom's name, but the Cynthia Ann Parker, the woman that was.
There's a photo of her in the lobby.
Yeah. Yeah.
Breastfeeding her baby.
Yeah. She was kidnapped. And I think she had a baby that they killed. And then fast forward, like five years, 10 years later, and she only speaks command. She didn't have a baby when they caught her.
No, she was only nine.
Okay, I thought there was someone that they caught and she had a baby and they killed it on the rocks. But then she became a Comanche.
I think they killed her mother's other child.
Yeah.
I think that's when they killed her mother and they raped her mother. And they were unbelievably brutal. But they had a hard time with their population because they're riding horses so much.
So they're losing a lot of babies. Exactly.
So to mitigate that, they would take young kids. So they find young kids and they kidnap them and bring them into the tribe. So they kill the parents. Incredible. Oh, my God. Some of the stories are so. And the craziest thing is what our government did. Our government was like, hey, you want a homestead? Go out there. We'll give you a chunk of land. What was that?
They did it to bait people. The first scene of that book, the guy goes out there and he's like, hello, good friends. Good day to you. And they cut his head off and peel his face off.
And it's like, holy shit. They kill everybody. Well, you're on their land as far as they're concerned. What the fuck are you doing? And what the government was doing was saying, hey, you can go homestead out there. What? And it was baiting them. And so then they made these people fight off the Comanche. And if it wasn't for Jack Hayes and the Texas Rangers, Texas would have never been settled.
This was all the Comanche. Dude, there's so many arrowheads here. It's mad.
I would go nuts if I found an arrowhead in real life. Like if I was walking and I found an arrowhead, it would be the best day of my life.
I found one once in Nevada. You found it? No, I did not find that one. So this is a real Native American arrowhead. Absolutely. My friend Remy said that's probably one they use for fish because it's larger. He said the ones they use for deer are smaller because they don't have a lot of force on their bows and they have to penetrate. So they want a smaller diameter arrowhead. Ouchy, wow, wow.
That would do it. Oh, fuck you up. Oh, that's so cool.
And they used to have the ability to hold all their arrows in between their fingers. So they could fire off arrows one after another. This is why when they came up with the musket, they're like, this is not good enough. One shot. Yeah. And then they got to sit there and they're just filling you up with arrows. So when Colt developed a revolver, that changed the game. Yeah.
Because now all of a sudden these guys had cartridges. I think the initial one was five shots. And they could just pop the cartridge out, put a new one in, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Changed the game.
Yeah. The crazy thing is he was sitting over there in New Jersey, I think, developing that. And he was like, I'm tinkering. And he sent it to the, I think he sent it over there and everyone was like, what is this?
Not only that, the government didn't want it for soldiers. They're like, why do we need this? We don't need this. But the Texas Rangers used it. Figured it out.
Yeah.
And they're like, we need that fucking thing.
And so they were really the predecessor to our image of the cowboy. That's the birth of the cowboy, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, that whole image of like a dude with a hat on a horse, like that was the, to me, that's like, it looked like you were getting towards after the Comanche, like the end of the Comanche times into the, I don't think cowboys were around for long.
Like that period that we think of, like the Wild West. I think it was like a period of like. It's kind of funny, right?
Because it's such a genre in our history. There's not a whole lot of Civil War cool movies. No, because nobody likes the Civil War. But there's a lot of Western cool movies. Because it's romantic. Yeah. But the history of genocide in North America in terms of like what happened to the Native Americans has been so poorly documented in movies. Because nobody wants to watch that. Right.
So the movies are all just, you know, guys in saloons having shootouts with other bad Americans. And every now and then some Native American would get into the picture. You have to fuck that Indian up because he was trying to steal your goats or whatever.
Or be the cool tracker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they're running and they're like, oh, these guys have a Native American track.
Like, what a weird genre of films that only looks at it from one perspective, the perspective of the people that came over there. And not even the real thing that happened to people is exactly what happened to people in the Amazon. It's disease. That's the lost city of Z, right? You know, when they went there, the first people were like, this place is amazing. It's complex cities.
It's golds everywhere. It's gorgeous. And then so people made the trek back. And by the time they went there, all those people were dead. Yeah. From dirty, stinky European diseases. Like, here, you want some blankets? Yeah. Well, that blanket thing's not real. No? No.
The smallpox on the blankets wasn't real?
No, no. They think that, I mean, there might have been some instances where people knowingly gave people blankets with smallpox, but smallpox just spread. Just spread like wildfire, yeah. Because everybody was immune to it from Europe. Like, not immune, but they had some sort of antibodies, because smallpox was everywhere. Yeah.
So when they came over here, we brought a bunch of shit over here that just wrecked those people.
Yeah. I did an expedition right before Lex came. I did an expedition in March. And me and JJ went to the back. We basically picked a part of the Amazon that we'd never been to and went, let's go see what's over there. You just picked a spot. We picked a spot because it was around in a place that, like, on the map, there's no towns. There's no nothing. So we said, let's go there.
And it took us a week. We had to take a commercial flight to a smaller flight to a smaller flight, and then we had to take a boat for three days, nine hours a day, to get to the start of the expedition.
Now, when you do that, do you check to see if there's uncontacted tribes that have been reported in those areas? Yes.
We, what you do is you get to the last town and you go, what's that way? And they tell you. And the scariest thing, and this was one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life, was that there were these tiny little people there. So there was like normal Peruvians walking around like loggers, gold miners. They're chainsaws. There's people who had gasoline barges.
There's also prostitute boats that drive around like brothels that go up and down. On a boat? Yeah. And you can pay them in wood, surprisingly enough. Board feet of timber. No joke.
um yes you get to the real like this is a place where like you feel like you went in a time machine and you get out there and there's people with modern machines but then off in the corner there are these little people and they were still holding on to their bows and arrows and you look at them and as soon as you look at them they hide and we were like who are they and they're like those are the nawa and we were like what's going on with the nawa and it turns out
That the Nawa were shooting at the oil company guys that were trying to get into this deep, again, a part of the forest that never has been accessed before. Now it's starting. People are reaching deeper into the Amazon. And the problem is they'd be going up this river and there'd be arrows flying by them.
Oh, my God.
So how'd they solve that problem? They funded the missionaries, sent the missionaries out there to talk to the Noah and convince them to come back to the nearest town. So these are uncontacted tribes who are right there. Like we're standing there, like kind of talking to them. We're like, hola. How do the missionaries communicate with them?
The missionaries go like, you know, Bible up and they just hope. Are these the Mormons? Like what groups? I actually don't know. Mormons love to do that. I don't know what group it was. I know I saw the missionary and he gave me a dirty, evil look and walked away. Like, this is dark shit. It was dark shit.
The missionary gave you an evil look.
Oh, no, no. These are not people that are okay. And so these terrified... Think about this for a second.
So what are the missionaries up to?
They're working for the oil companies. They're clearing out the forest. They're clearing the way. They're just doing it peacefully.
But are they actual missionaries or are they acting as missionaries?
Whatever it is, they're going with the missionary protocol, getting these people to come in. So what they did was through two translators from Spanish to something to Yine to Nawa to something. We asked this guy and we had to stay away because we want to get them sick. And we had to say, like, what are you doing here?
And the guy was like, I'm trying to go back to my house, like where I live in my house, my jungle. And he said, these missionaries said, if I came here, that then they'd help me in the food. And they were very confused because the missionaries had brought back a boatload of them and kind of tricked them.
Because then when they got to the town, they just showed up to capitalist society, which even though it's super remote, they're like, you want food? You got to buy it. And these people have a bow and arrow, but there's no more animals around because they killed everything. And they go, but I want to go home. And the missionaries go, well, do you got gasoline? Now they're stuck.
Oh, my God. How far?
like three days of driving in a boat so like 70 miles by river oh my god and so these poor people are coming into modern society a thousand years late with their wooden bow and arrows they're this big they're tiny little people and they're terrified and no one's helping them oh my god and it's the edge of the world and it's exactly when i was reading this comanche book
on that expedition and I'm going this is the same thing it's that manifest destiny this is the end of their culture there's no one there's no one who's going to help them and they were just terrified sitting there at the edges of the streets and all these people are riding by on like motorcycles and rickshaws and this boat's going by and these people are trying to look for like a rat to shoot oh my god
it was terrifying oh my god it was terrifying i felt so bad for them because they had no i you could see they had no idea and they don't even speak the language they don't even speak they're two degrees separated with language so like like you could speak guinea which is the local tribal language there but these people don't even speak that they speak their language so you'd have to go from spanish to guinea to nawa oh my god and we were there and these people were going so how does someone know nawa that you talk to
because one of the Yine guys that I knew was, had been living there. So he'd picked up a few Nawa words. And so they were, they were, they were going.
So these people, how long have these people been there for?
I didn't get that, but they were, they were, they were literally living in a camp at the, like where the trees were. They stayed by the trees. They wanted to be by the trees. Oh my God. So there's people like you could buy a Coca-Cola there. Like this was like, you could, you know, you could buy gasoline, Coca-Cola, whatever. Um,
way out there there's a boat that has some like gasoline cylinders you can fill up your boat and then this this is where this is the law it's like during the gold rush in alaska it's like the last place before you go into the wild oh my god and these it was just it was really horrible to see and i think reading that the empire of the summer moon was made it even worse because that's so dirty so they trick these people and they go into the town and they just abandon them yeah oh my god
And these people, how could they know that someone would do that to them? They don't even know what a town is like, right?
They don't even know what a town is like. Oh, my God. They're terrified. And so they're still, you know, you see them, they're washing by the river and they're trying to feed their babies, but they're starving. And probably no one gives a fuck. And no one gives a fuck. And they're treated like dirt, too, because humans are humans. Right. No one wants to help them. Nobody can talk to them.
And then, of course, they're kind of frustrated, right? Right. They're not exactly friendly either. Right. Wow. Yeah, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy.
Have you seen that overhead? There's a view, like a camera is on the helicopter or something, and it's photographing these guys, and they're all fucking pointed, close, and arrows. This one. How wild is that?
You think that's wild. I can show you something that I can't show publicly, but look at this. Really? Yeah, I got something that no one's seen. This is from last week. I'm going to show everybody. No, you're not. This is from last week.
Oh, wow.
So what Joe is looking at right now is a bunch of uncontacted tribes standing in the rain. And again, they don't speak the language of the people that are trying to interact with them. So this is across a river.
Are these those same people that were in that town?
These are not the Nawa. This is a different tribe.
Oh, my God, man. This is wild. This is like imagining what it would be like to run into people hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Are you on the single guy yet?
Incredible, man. i mean that guy looks like someone from the past yep he doesn't look like someone from now yeah and so what they did was they sent them a canoe full of bananas now that guy's standing there in the cold shaking his head like he might just not know the word for blanket it's insane man this is incredible yeah and these are essentially some of the last people on earth like this
Yeah, and so there's a huge debate about how we protect them because there's two camps. There's some people that say they're running scared during the Industrial Revolution. They pushed further out and they're too scared to come in and get help. And then there's other people that go, no, they're noble savages and they live out there because they want to and they're the last free people.
But looking at these videos and seeing some of the stuff, they're trying to carefully –
interact with some of the most remote tribes and so there's people that live seven days from the nearest town that speak a dialect of native language in the Amazon and the tribes will come out and they'll you know they'll come out and they'll you saw they'll they'll come out and they'll just look they'll look at them they'll make gestures they'll do things but if you get too close to them they shoot you oh
So you can't really, you can't just go up to them and be like, hey, man, what's up? Do you want some eggs? Right. You can't do that.
Right.
So what happens is this standoff on either side of the river where you have people that live a remote lifestyle and are very, very indigenous, but that can still interact with us. The modern world have seen a dollar before, have seen a spoon, the wheel. Wearing an Under Armour t-shirt. Yeah, exactly. And then these people show up.
And they got their dicks tied to their stomachs, and they wear no clothes. And they're making sounds. Sometimes they're using animal calls.
They tie their dicks down so they don't get scratched up?
They tie them up. So if you look at this dude. Here, look. I'll just pause it on when he's.
That's so gangster. It's like, yeah, man, I got to tie it up. I mean, think about the stuff they're walking through. You don't want a dragon on the ground. Everything's got a thorn.
So look at that. He's got that thing tied up. But yeah, you don't want to get in... I guess you don't want mosquitoes having access to the head. That could be a problem. That could be a problem.
Aren't there little fishies that swim up your dick hole, too?
That's only if you're peeing in the water. Oh. A much worse thing is when you take a shit in the jungle. Uh-oh. All the bugs are coming for you. Oh, no. So you've got to be on dick patrol while you're doing that because you're going to get bug bites on your ass, but you've got to make sure... They don't go in your asshole. Well, sure. Yeah. Right, does that happen?
Yeah, because as soon as you crouch, dung beetles bigger than golf balls start flying through the air. So as you're trying to take a shit in the Amazon, as soon as you fart, there are animals following you. And so you're sitting there, and there's a bunch of things you've got to do. First, you've got to break your stick, right? So you have some leaves.
The leaves is to keep your ass bug-free, to get the mosquitoes away. Oh, my God. And then the other thing you got to do is you got to be holding a tree because you're crouching, right? Right. But then you use your ass stick to swat away the dung beetles because they come in. And one dung beetle hit my friend Mohsen in the eyeball and like scratched his actual eyeball because it flew straight.
And they have, you know, rhinoceros horns coming out of their faces and their exoskeletons brutal. And they're heavy. It's a big bug, and they're airborne, and they're moving quick, and they want your shit, and they're going to take it, and they're going to roll it into balls, and they're going to push it through the jungle, and they're going to lay their eggs in it.
Oh, God.
So, yeah, taking the shit in the jungle is like a hole. You have to know how to do it. If you don't know how to do it, you could end up in a lot of trouble.
Good Lord, man.
so many things to think about and this is your everyday existence yeah yeah i just so when you went to that spot when you decided let's let's go there and it takes you three days and you get up there and you see these people did you wind up going deeper into the jungle and seeing how they actually live so could you can you or is it dangerous well both well i had some trackers with me who were extremely experienced in all of this they knew where we could and couldn't go and we went on a
It took us a week to get to the launch point, and then we went on a six-day expedition from there, where we're eating fish out of the river, we're drinking out of the river, camping on the beaches. And then we did reach a point where they found signs of uncontacted tribes.
And that's when it gets dangerous.
And they went, we're going back.
Wow.
100% going back. I mean, you have to. For everyone, there's absolutely no way that you can continue going. You're going to either get killed or be killed, like it turns into. I mean, these guys turned around, they loaded the shotguns, and they were like, we turn around this moment. They turned to the boat. Wow. The moment that you find.
Because they know you're there before you know they're there. Oh, they know you're there.
Yeah.
If you're coming in a boat, too, it's probably making a lot of noise. Yeah. Right?
Oh, yeah. Wait. They hear that thing from a long ways out. Two, three weeks ago, some loggers, they found them. The loggers were chainsawing on the Tawamanu River. The loggers were, from the look of the, I'm kind of Sherlock Holmes-ing the image I saw, the loggers were cutting this log. They were dead where they were standing. So you think these guys are going, cutting this log.
And the tribes are surrounding them. They had no idea. Wow. And they just started throwing arrows from the shadows. And so they found the bodies of two loggers. See if you can find that, Jamie. This was within August. Peru, tribes killed. There's a picture, like a blurry picture of it. Of the loggers? They don't show you anything. It's just when it comes in. I bet you can find it.
I bet you can find it. I bet you my guys have it on WhatsApp. Dark web. I bet your WhatsApp group is wild. My WhatsApp group is ridiculous. I got to show you some of the pictures. I got to start sending you some crazy shit.
Yeah, let me in.
Yeah, man. I promise I won't share them. I got terrible pictures. Because one time they killed these guys, and their bodies were on the beach for a few days, and they blew up and became white, so they looked like the Michelin Man. But then when the vultures got to them, they started ripping out their eyeballs and disemboweling them. So by the time people went to find them... Just skeletons.
It was like the skeleton was half out of the face. It was some of the most gruesome shit you've ever seen. It was incredible. Oh! It was incredible. That's like, dude, now because of having a large social media following, people just send me their craziest shit. So I got to be careful what I open because people will send you a video.
And one thing that I found very disturbing, somebody sent me a video and it was like, here, click on this. And I was like, I don't know if I really want to. And it was somebody like there was like a deer and he was feeding a deer and feeding a deer. And then he takes a handgun and shoots it in the head. And I was like, that's fucking hard. I was like, no. So now I'm careful.
But somebody sent me a few weeks ago a video of which this one I'm probably going to share, but I have to make sure that they don't get me for it. An elephant trainer in India and he's working next to this elephant. And he's just working next to the elephant doing his thing. And this elephant just decides that today ain't his day. And the elephant just knocks him over and crushes his pelvis.
And then it's like, that's not good enough. So it pushes his foot on the guy's head and just flattens him. And it's all on video. Oh, my God. It's wild. Actually, Jamie, on there is this one picture of, it might even say, yeah, it says elephant dead. And it's just a picture of a guy. His gun is broken in half and his head is flattened. And that's in India, that the elephant just flattened the guy.
Enough is enough. Well, I mean, people torture elephants, man.
Oh, yeah. Oh, that's the guy. Oh, boy.
Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah.
Oh.
Yeah.
Why did you make me look at that?
Hey, you want the good stuff or not? I do. I do. I want the good stuff. Give it to all of me. Show me the arrows and the guys. The one next to that one is the elephant stepping on the guy if you want. Okay. I'm here. While I'm here. I mean, it's important. People should know not to go, not to be, people think elephants are cuddly. They're not. They're not to be messed with.
He's just decided he's had enough of this dude.
This one's horrible because it's not quick. It's not quick. But, like, see, this elephant is not... You know, he's probably around this elephant every day, and it doesn't look like he's... See what he's doing? See what he's doing? He's poking the elephant.
That shit's annoying.
Yeah.
So at this point... He's already broken at this point.
I mean, his pelvis is gone.
Even if he lived, he'd be... Oh! Everything's just getting crushed.
And...
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That's it.
Oh, my God.
That's it. He just had enough. Oh, this is horrible, man. Just stomping this guy. He's already dead.
Yeah, he's dead now. Oh, my God.
He's so flat. That's so crazy. He's picking him up in his mouth.
I mean, this elephant is angry.
Oh, my God. This guy's so dead. That's it.
But, I mean, that's not even a big elephant.
And this other guy runs in to stop it. Are you out of your fucking mind? But that elephant's probably tired of wearing that fucking stupid outfit, too.
Yeah.
Tired of getting poked at with a stick.
Yep. And that's probably like a 5,000-pound Asian elephant, whereas the largest African elephant was something around 24,000 pounds.
Oh, my God.
Yeah. These are, you know. Eighteen wheelers. They're huge.
Yeah, and what's fucked up about that is like when you have tribes or towns or villages of people that are growing things Yeah, and the elephants find it. They just like sorry.
Yeah, that's really tough for you because there's not enough jungle for the elephants and then and You had to turn down an entire field full of pineapples.
Yeah, they're like, no, this is my pineapple.
These are my pineapples.
Yeah, they don't have any understanding of ownership. They're like, these are pineapples that are on the ground. No one's eating them. Of course I'm going to eat them. And they can eat all the pineapples. And so now everybody starves. And no one can stop them. People come out, they throw rocks at them.
You can't do a fucking thing. They'll push your house over. They don't care.
Oh, yeah, they'll stomp you into the fucking dirt.
They don't give a shit. Can I tell you my favorite elephant story from recently? Sure. So I started doing work with this private game reserve in Africa called Buffalo Kloof. And it's these incredible people, Warren and Wendy Rippon. And I started going over there because they were using post 9-11 veterans to protect their elephants and rhinos.
But their elephants, they found out, they call it the Holcroft herd. They found out that some Saudi prince had elephants in this reserve and they weren't irrigating it. So the elephants were dying. So they went and they did a flight over and they saw dead elephants. They saw dead animals. And there was I think there was I think there was 10 or 11 elephants that were still alive.
And so they went to the South African court. They repossessed the elephant herd.
the owners of the reserve that I work with, they went with a helicopter, you circle it around, they got the elephants together, they darted the whole family at once, all 11 elephants, got them on trucks, like semi-lucid, just kind of awake, got them onto trucks, transported them to Buffalo Clove, where they're gonna be safe,
released them, and they said that when these elephants woke up and came off the trucks, and now they're in a private game reserve where they're going to be safe the rest of their lives, he said they just exploded. They went flying into the water, started drinking, playing, bathing, just eating everything.
They rearranged the entire ecosystem, and one of the females was pregnant, and they didn't know that the female was pregnant. Wow. And so these people are doing this crazy work where they're protecting black rhinos, which are critically endangered,
Elephants white rhinos all this stuff and they're doing it through hunting they're doing it where they have hunting they have a reserve that is fenced in because South Africa everything's fenced in but the elephants and the rhinos and you're keeping at this point we're keeping black rhinos on the brink of extinction we're keeping them from going extinct.
But it's like you go there and these elephants are so happy because they're living in a place where they're free. Right. Wild. They have food. And they have as much food as they want. They have like 50,000 acres.
What a dream for an elephant.
To get rescued. You're like, oh, fuck. You see a helicopter and you're like, oh, shit.
There's no water here. Everyone's dying. And then all of a sudden you're in this bountiful place.
In this bountiful place.
That's pretty dope.
And it's funny too, because talking about like the people, the, the, you know, the, the, the, the anti-hunting people. And it's like, this is a place where very, very different reality than the Amazon, but where, you know, the, the owner said to me, he was like, you know, you can, you can, no one's going to pay you $30,000 to take a picture of a Buffalo.
He's like, people pay $30,000 to hunt a Buffalo all the time. And so they use sustainable hunting of like the zebras and the Buffalo and the Impalas and stuff like that to protect the The entire ecosystem. So you have leopards and elephants and black rhinos, white rhinos. And so you have tourism and hunting side by side in this incredible game reserve. It's wild.
Well, unfortunately, the only way where people really appreciate animals is to make them a commodity. Whether you make them a commodity for going on safari, whether you make them a commodity for hunting them. Because before that, when people were just poaching and doing market hunting, they were on the brink of extinction. There's a lot of animals there.
A lot of the undulates that were on the brink of extinction.
Yeah.
You know, there's animals in Texas that you can hunt that are endangered in their native lands.
But that they've bred them in Texas. Yeah, they've bred some.
There's more tigers in Texas than there are in all the wild of the world, just in people's yards. Yeah, I just met somebody that had elands on her property, this giant.
Elands are very common.
Huge fucking animal with crazy horns. They're cool looking. But these wild game reserves in Africa, people go over there and they shoot these animals and then that meat gets donated to these tribes. And this friend of mine who went over there to do that was saying that they went to this school, which was like, to call it a school, it's just dirt floors. No windows.
It's just this building where kids go, and the food they get is all canned. So they have canned foods, and so they brought them hundreds of pounds of meat. And everybody went crazy. The whole village comes. They get baskets of it, fresh meat. And it does help. It helps. But really what's fucked is that people live like that.
Like, really, the way to get people out of that situation when you have these insanely impoverished countries where you can take advantage of people and have a mine for cobalt is to try to elevate the standard of living for those people. Try to bring them power and give them irrigation and give them fresh water and... and figure out a way to get them resources.
Yeah, and I mean that's exactly what we're doing in the Amazon is give the loggers a better fucking job. They don't want to be loggers. Nobody wants to be a gold miner. Nobody wants to be a poacher in Africa. I bet a lot of people want to be gold miners. Not this kind of gold miner. Trust me. But that's not gold mining. This is sand mining for bits of gold.
This is what they cut down the Amazon for.
Right. But gold mining in Alaska is probably pretty fun. Imagine being part of the minor 49ers that came over here in 1849.
That's different. You'd find a nugget of gold. Yeah. That's different. That's a whole different thing.
Have you seen the movie Sisu? It's like a John Wick movie from World War II. It's about this crazy soldier who becomes a gold miner and he finds gold and he's retired, done with the war. And then he's hiking out with his gold. He's riding out with his gold and the Nazis show up. And he has to kill all the zombies.
This is one of those movies, though, where you can kill everybody. It's awesome. I can't, man. I bet you can. I can't. The only reason it's okay in The Matrix is because they're in The Matrix. Right. Every other movie where one guy, like Taken, where he can take down a room full of people.
Taken's a little ridiculous, but this guy, you kind of believe it. Yeah? Yeah.
It's pretty fucking bad.
I mean, this guy's covered in scars, his whole body. He's been in war his whole life. Yeah.
I don't give it a chance.
This is this is the guy wait Who's the actor that's not Brendan Gleeson is no it's I don't know I don't know his name, but it's not American movie Look at the look at the trailer with the knife bro this fucking movie rules.
Yeah It rules
Yeah. That's the gentleman's name. I've never heard of him. But he's fucking awesome.
The farthest I can go with violence was Peaky Blinders.
Oh, my God. What a show. Yo. What a show. Yo. What a show.
I have so much trouble not just talking like Alfie Solomons my entire life. I fucking love that character.
By all of the Peaky Blinders.
Oh, for hell for them. That and then my newest thing is the 100-foot wave. If you haven't watched this thing, man.
No, what's that?
Oh, my God. Surfers? Garrett McNamara. You know the wave in Portugal? Yes. It's the dude and his wife who discovered it. You know, they tell the whole story where, like, you know, he's looking for big waves. They're all chasing big waves, like point break shit, like, you know. And then I think they get an email from someone. She gets an email from someone.
She's like, we should go check out this wave.
and this dude goes first of all wave porn all day long such a good show and i'm looking at this going i want to make i want to make a show one day about how we made our national park how the did they document this this dude is so insane to do that so insane this is this is some of the best i've ever seen i'm riveted by this also i just can watch that wave again and again and again those guys who do that are different humans
But this is, it's the cinematography, it's the storytelling. Oh, he goes down! No! Yeah, dude. No! Oh, the injuries are brutal. I mean, you're talking about a 70-foot wave. Oh my God, the weight of that water must be insane. They literally went looking for the biggest wave. And then, just like that old tree in Ireland, this has become the thing for that town. People come there for the wave now.
How many people die there every year? They have a pretty good safety system. They have like a jet ski rescue system where like if you if I if I tow you onto a wave, I feel like I know it now from watching the show. If I tow you onto a wave and you catch this epic wave, but then you get trucked and you're under 40 feet of foam and you're getting just bashed under there.
When that wave goes to the shore, I have like 10 seconds to race in there with my jet ski and you got to grab on before the next wave comes. And if I don't if you don't grab the ski, I got to leave you. And you've got to go under there. So as you're watching this show, you're like, do they die? Do they die? Are they okay? Holy shit.
And the whole time they're just showing you this beautiful wave porn, constant waves. And you're just like, this is, this is. And these people wake up every day and have the same affliction that I have. They're just like, how do I get my adrenaline? They're like, how do I get my adrenaline? It's like, I feel like I can relate. Do you ever meet those dudes? They're so calm.
Because they're always coming down from it. They're like, oh, man, there's no waves today. Just like when you meet certain veterans, they're just like, well, man, look, we're not getting shot at today, so it's all good.
Yeah, it's fascinating how calm they are. Kelly Slater. Yeah. Have you had him in here? Yeah, I've had him on. He's awesome.
You've had Laird Hamilton. Yep. Laird Hamilton's in this doc.
Shane Dorian is a good friend of mine. He does that shit, too. All these guys, they're all chill dudes. Like, real serious people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah, Laird shows up in there. They have him being like, yeah, that fucking wave is crazy. With his huge neck, he's just like, dude.
You ever see his workout where he takes weights in the pool? And walks on the bottom of the pool. He's a fucking maniac.
Yeah, no. He's always been. I mean, you just look at him. He's built like an action figure. He's always been incredible.
No days off with that guy. He's incredible. And that world of just wanting to constantly get on the biggest waves is just such a nutty proposition.
I totally understand it, though. I think it's to do something that that's... It's like saying, you know, you can ride a dragon. Yo, you know, or, you know, Elon's like, I want to go to Mars. Like somebody tells you, look at the big, a mountain of water. Right. You can fly on that. Right. I'm in. Right. Sign me up. I mean, I feel like that's snowboarding and snowboarding is chiller.
You're not like taking your life in your hands, but like when you're going as fast as you can on a snowboard down a mountain, like, man, I am fucking surfing a mountain right now. Yeah, it is. It is flying. It's an apex of life. I feel like that when I jump on an anaconda, I'm like, I am going to die.
I don't snowboard, but I ski. And when I ski, I'm like, don't get hurt, don't get hurt, don't get hurt, don't get hurt. Didn't get hurt. Yeah.
Don't eat a tree.
I've just been injured so many times in my life that I see people falling down.
The last time I skied, too, I did wipe out pretty hard. See, skis, I don't like that your legs, I feel like I'm going to tie my legs into a knot.
Yeah, but I don't like being attached to that board. Nope, because when you hit ice and you fall forward, that face smack, your teeth are coming right out. I know a dude who got fucked up on a snowboard that way. The snowboard went up and he landed head first and just got out cold.
Friends had to find him. Yeah. Somehow I've taught all my friends how to snowboard and I've never had anybody get hurt too bad. It's always like, you know. That's crazy. Bunny hill to like, you know, whatever.
Shane, my friend Shane Dorian that I was just talking about, he destroyed his knee snowboarding. Yeah? Slammed into a tree, tore it apart, had to get reconstructive surgery. And, you know, think about that. That guy's whole life is riding waves.
Shane Dorian? Yeah. Yeah. He's a surfer. Yeah. Awesome surfer. Yeah.
Big wave surfer. And so, you know, he had to get his knee reconstructed. As soon as he got fixed, right back to snowboarding.
Yeah. I mean, dude, it's the thing you love. It's the thing you love. I mean, you can't... I don't get it. No matter how many dung beetles fly up my ass, I just keep going back to the jungle.
I understand, but I don't get it. I do understand. It's just like my brain didn't go down that path, but I get the path. I could have gone down that path. I see it. I see the lure. I see the lure of the big wave. I see the lure of the jungle.
I see it. I think you do it in a lot of – I think you do a lot of things obsessively. I think that when you get interested in something, whether it's elk hunting or whether it's archery or whatever it is, you go 100%. And so you kind of get that same hit from it. These guys have just attached themselves to something that's insane.
I think it's in everything. I think everything is like that. There's things that human beings find that are complicated and challenging. We gravitate towards those things because we get these rewards of accomplishment. And I think these rewards of accomplishment are built into our system of what it is to be a human being and what our purpose is on earth.
And I think that you can live your whole life and not find a thing that you find challenging and rewarding. And I think that's a tragedy. Because I think you're living a boring ass life. And there's a lot of people. That's the great Thoreau quote. Most men live lives of silent desperation. And that's real. Most people don't have a thing that they do that excites them. It's difficult.
It's challenging and rewarding. And that's not a good life. It's a safe life, right? That's what people want. They want a safe life. People want to retire. I want to go off in the sunset. It's all bullshit. You want a life filled with challenges and rewards and you want to learn about yourself along the way. You want to make mistakes because that's how you grow.
You want to do challenging things because that's how you find out how far you can push yourself. You want to learn more because it elevates your capacity to understand things. It's part of being a human. It's a fascinating thing that's elective. And that's the part about it that makes it interesting. It's elective. You don't have to do it.
You can get a very plain, boring job that's not challenging or intriguing and just exist. And you can exist on bad food and you can exist on bad information and watch television all day and never challenge your mind and just dull yourself with alcohol and slowly rot.
until your body gives out i think a lot of people clip their own wings thinking that you know that's not me yeah that's true too i don't have access to that and then you don't realize that the difference between you and goggins or you know mcnamara is is just it's just obsession it's just go out and do it
And a lot of times it's getting on a path. And then, like, think about Goggins. Like, when he first started that, what if he never did decide to get fit? What if he stayed that 300-pound dude who's just drinking milkshakes all day, and he was big and fat, and he couldn't even run 100 yards? That's who he was when he first started working out.
And a switch flipped, and he got on a path, and he stayed on that path. He wasn't on that path his whole life. And then all of a sudden he gets on that path and becomes the biggest psycho of all time on that path. Yeah.
But you have to either have a traumatic event that wakes you up or some sort of just boundless innate optimism that makes you think it's possible.
I don't know if there's a you have to have this or that. I think there's a whole bunch of different things that can happen to people. I think near-death experiences. I think loss of a loved one. I think maybe a realization that sometimes people just wake up and say, I can't do this anymore.
Whatever they're doing that's boring or sucky or just soul sucking, they just get to a point where they go, I can't do this anymore. And sometimes it's just like an alcoholic hits rock bottom. It's like, I'm not drinking anymore. I'm fucking done. And people do. My friend Dave did that. He never went to rehab. Didn't do nothing. He crashed his car.
He got arrested because he ran away from the scene of the accident. He was drunk driving. And he said, I'm never drinking again. Never drank again. To the day he died.
Just reached his limit one day. Just quit.
Just reached his limit. Didn't go to Alcoholics Anonymous. They're like, you have to go. He's like, no, I don't. I'm just not drinking anymore. I'm done. And he just had to, his whole life he was a drunk. He just had to get to this point where he's like, this can't be me anymore.
Yeah. He just discussed yourself.
There's a whole bunch of different ways to get to that. Sometimes you get to it through inspiration. Sometimes you get to it through desperation. Sometimes you get to it just through intrigue. Like sometimes, you know, you walk into a jujitsu gym and you've never even done a martial art in your whole life. You take a lesson and you're like, oh my God, this is so fun.
And then five years later, you're a fucking jujitsu wizard and you're obsessed with it. You train every day. And you're on this new path as a human being because you found a thing that excited you. And it could be big wave surfing. It could be playing chess. There's probably a thing out there that resonates with you. You just haven't had it.
And then there's the thing of getting outside of your comfort zone, which people don't like to do.
That's where people struggle.
Yeah, because they have never had any experience with it and they don't understand the reward of doing it. But the people that do do it all the time, whether it's David Goggins or Jocko or anybody that you see that's like a fitness influencer or people that are like super fit, they just stay on the path. That's the key. The key is just every fucking day is a new challenge.
You don't want to do it every day. If you're a guy who runs marathons, there's no fucking way you want to run every day. But you know if you want to run a sub-three-hour marathon, you've got to run every fucking day. And you've got to check your heart rate. You've got to make sure you're eating correctly. You've got to do all those things. It's fucking hard to do.
But because it's hard to do, people get obsessed. Maybe they run a 5K. They're like, I can't believe I did it. Wow, I ran three miles. And then the next thing you go, you know what, I'm going to run a half marathon and they prepare for a half marathon. And the next thing you know, they're a fucking runner.
Yeah. Well, but that happens. And that's the thing that to me, what I see is so many people going, you know, especially like at this point, people like, oh, I can't believe, you know, you do this work in the jungle. And they go, I always wanted to do this. And I listen to when people say I always wanted to do it. I'm like, go do it.
Yeah.
Go do it.
But some people can't, right? Because some people, I mean, the reality is some people have families, and they have mortgages, and they have loved ones they take care of. There's not a chance in hell you could take a father of four, and all of a sudden this guy can become a jungle keeper. It's just he's not going to leave Ohio and quit his job in Columbus.
17. 17.
Yeah, see? That's a good age. 17, you don't know what the fuck is going on in the world. You're young. You're all full of cum. You're fucking crazy ambitious.
Teachers keep telling you what to do. Yeah, fuck these people.
Fuck these people. And then you have confidence and intelligence, and you decided to make this a path, and then you find... This incredibly rewarding part of the path, which is saving the rainforest. And so now you have a reason to live. So your life becomes filled with meaning. And that's the problem with a lot of people, even that have jobs that are really good jobs. They don't have meaning.
And that's why people fill their life up with bullshit. They just buy things and do cocaine and fucking, you know. get a luxury yacht. They just get these things that are trying to fill some sense of purpose and meaning because they don't really enjoy what they do. They don't get just purely satisfied by what they actually do.
They need all these other things to motivate them to keep doing it, and then they get caught up in this numbers game where a guy only has a billion dollars feels like a loser when he's hanging out with Jeff Bezos.
I never understood that, dude. I never understood making it past a certain amount of income and not just going... Cool. Now I'm going to go enjoy. Now I'm going to take care of my friends. Now I'm going to take care of that one neighbor that I always knew needed help. Now I'm going to do this and just start doing good with that shit. And there are people who do that.
I could tell you as a person who grew up poor, one of the things that happens is first initially you worry that you're not going to be able to maintain it. That's initial fear. That's super, super common. And guys start getting like really famine. It's interesting when they start making more money, they start getting more freaked out about money. I understand that. That happens.
You see that with a lot of Hollywood people. They change how they talk about things. They change their opinions. They don't want to take any risks. So you want to keep that gravy train rolling. But if you're doing something you enjoy doing, then I think, especially if you're independent, like podcasters, right? That's a good example.
You start making money in podcasting, you're like, oh, this is great. I just can make money doing a thing that I love to do. I'm not going to stop doing it. Why would I stop doing it? And I also can keep making a lot of money. I think I'll just keep doing it, especially since I enjoy it. So I don't even think about it like doing it for the money. I think about like, I would like to talk to Paul.
He's an interesting dude.
He lives in the Amazon. Oh, this is my job. I get to talk to Paul. Why would I stop? I mean, I would do this for free. But I'm not going to.
Yeah, but you're also, you've changed the world of podcasting. You've kind of like flown above that, I'm saying. But even for the normal guy at a business. Yeah, but all that's by accident. I know, but I'm saying a normal person makes his first five million.
You know what I mean?
Like, people just don't. No, no, no, no, no. Now I need $30 million.
No, you need more. You need more because you got a mortgage. You got this. You got that. What if your kids go to college? Also, your money's not going to be worth as much because of inflation. And what if you invest in this fucking hedge fund and this and that and this goes under? Or what if you're an idiot and you invest in NFTs or Bitcoin? I know a dude who just lost a shitload of money.
Crypto coin like you get nutty you think it's free money and like no it's some kind of crazy thing that's going on We got fake money some weird created money, and you just spent a lot of real money to buy some of this weird like fucking imaginary money Digital money do you want to buy a what were those things those fake pictures that people bought for a while NFT yeah those
what was that what was that about that what was that that was crazy bro and they sold for millions of dollars i know a dude who made he got rich he was an artist yeah but he got rich selling nfts yeah yeah in the beginning when everyone was like frothy with it it sold and then they dropped to nothing so i i always have all these people coming up to me and they're like oh man
you're trying to raise money for the rainforest. You need to get into the NFT market. So I almost got got by the NFT people.
Yeah. No, I've had multiple occasions where I've been asked to do things for NFTs and I've been asked to do things with crypto. And I was like, I don't even know what it is. So how the fuck am I going to endorse? I won't endorse something unless it's a product that I've used or makes sense or they can explain to me, oh, this is how it works. Okay, it makes sense.
But if you're doing something like an NFT, like Jamie tried to explain it to me like six or seven times. Yeah. And I was like, okay. But you have it on your phone, right? So I can take a screenshot and I have it on my phone too. Yeah. No, but you don't own it. Okay. What does that mean? I have the same thing you have. I have the exact same experience of having this million dollar yacht ape.
Is that what it was called? No, it was the board ape. What was the board ape? What was the apes? It's a fucking cartoon picture of a monkey. What were they called though? Was it yacht apes or board apes? There was one that a lot of people were buying, and I was like, what the fuck are you paying money for? This is crazy. It's called the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Oh, that's what it is.
Okay.
Did it just change color because we talked about it?
Yeah, that thing, no. Does it know? That's like a digital piece of art. That's a completely different thing. So you have to plug it in? Yeah. But that thing was a gift from an artist. What the fuck's his name? I forgot his name real quick. Beeple.
Oh, yeah. I've heard his name.
Sorry, Beeple. But Beeple's, he puts up digital art every fucking day. So when you, he has like a gallery and you go there and there's this giant digital art. It's like those kind of NFTs make sense. This thing is like a shit cartoon. And how much did they go for?
I mean, so those numbers at the bottom right there are showing that that would be, I think it's Ether. So 111 Ether would be the price. That's 3,000 a coin right now. So it'd be 300 grand. 300 grand? It said it was sold at 769. But you could just screenshot it. So it was sold at 769. So it was sold at close to a million dollars.
And what is that?
Getting into the screenshot thing is a tough thing because it's like you own a car, but me having a picture of your car on my phone doesn't mean I own your car.
Yeah, but you don't understand what I just said earlier. I said it's the exact same experience. Yeah, I know. The experience of having it on your phone is very different than the experience of you having a picture of my car.
It's the same with any art then. That's just the argument for art. Yeah. No, but it's not. It's a bad example.
But Mona Lisa, I can look at the Mona Lisa on my phone all day long. I don't own it. Right. But there's a big difference between owning the Mona Lisa on your phone. So the Mona Lisa was only on a phone, and you could just screenshot it, and you would also have the exact same experience of the Mona Lisa.
The difference in the physical Mona Lisa is it's hundreds of years old, and it's painted by a master.
You don't just own it on your phone is sort of the thought. But you do. Where do you own it then?
But the thing is you can rep.
Your phone's an access point to where you do own it. That's like saying your bank account is only on your phone, but it's not.
I hear what you're saying, but it's not the same because there's no real value in that NFT. It's fake. The experience of having it is no different. I get that you're saying that it's money, and you're going to trade it
I agree with everything you're saying as someone that is invested in this stuff. How much did you waste? I didn't waste any because I was getting stuff when it was cheap or whatever. I bought it at the right time. I could have sold it and made a bunch of money, but I did not. I would have had to pay taxes and all that money too, which I don't know if people are doing or did and all that stuff.
It's all so kooky. The thing I was going to bring up is I'm into sports cards now. Those are... Why is that stuff worth money?
Well, because they're original physical things. And then they're also like have serial numbers on them. I guess if you had a fake one. That's where you don't know if anyone's faking it. But the thing is, the real ones, you're also getting like a little piece of history. Like this arrowhead. If somebody made this arrowhead and I didn't know, because guys do make arrowheads.
There's a lot of modern day people that make arrowheads. But this one was found at a friend of mine's ranch. I have a bunch of these. I have a few of them at home. They're fucking amazing because these are like little windows into a time in history that was not that long ago that was right here. And they're all over the place. And somebody made that. Somebody made that.
And it took a long ass time. And then they had to make the rods for the arrows. Which is not that easy.
No. No, it's not. Like if we went out in the forest right now and we said, okay, let's find a perfectly straight stick.
Well, not only that, you have to use sinew to make the string for your bow. You have to know what woods to use for the bow. You have to know how to harden those woods. If you're making a recurve bow, now you're talking even crazier. Even if you're just trying to make a simple longbow. Yeah, a simple longbow.
Fire. And you have to be accurate with that thing. And so that means you have to have enough arrows to practice with. Yeah. Fire is the same thing. Every time I try and show someone how to make fire, it's like, this is such a process.
It's such a process.
Just to get fire started.
yeah which is again it's so much fun being out in the jungle because whoever you are no matter how rich you are no matter how hot your shit is you're out in the jungle you're shitting with the dung beetles do you bring fire starter you know that stuff that so like they sell they have like bricks of this stuff um or cords of it you cut off a little bit of a piece of it and then you have a flint and a piece of steel and you knock the two of them together like this this deal is like those rods the
I think a ferro rod. Exactly. That's exactly what it is, right? And you light that stuff, and it's soaked in chemicals. It's probably fucking terrible to breathe in, but that will keep fire for a long time, and you can use it to start fires.
Yeah, we don't. I mean, usually we just have a lighter with us, but there have been times. It's the problem. So the only real way, especially in the rainy season, the wood is soaked through. Like if this was a stick, it's soaked through and through. It's not going to burn. You have to be very creative.
You have to put some diesel fuel in a tuna can and make a fire over that and then let that burn for a little bit.
So it dries everything out?
So it dries everything out. And then even then, it's not a very enthusiastic fire. Right. It's like, I guess I'll burn if you need me to. You're trying to cook a pot of beans and it's your last pot of beans and it's all the food you got. Oh, my God. It's a pain in the ass. Things don't want to burn. But when there's rain... We're happy.
So you never bring a little Bunsen burner, those little lightweight ones?
No. No? No. And honestly, that's a great idea for expeditions. But what we do, we bring these big propane tanks and just throw it on the boat. And if you can't bring that, then nothing but what we have at the camping stores here where they have the little ones that go in your backpack. They just don't sell those where we go. Right. And you can't bring that on the plane.
Oh, you can't?
No. You can't bring a propane tank on a plane. An empty one?
Or whatever those are.
You can't... Like, if you go to REI and buy a... Whatever those little camp stoves have in them, you can't bring that on a plane.
So, is there a place where you can receive packages?
Where you can get it shipped to you? Yeah, we could probably get it shipped to Lima and then have it shipped down or whatever else. But, I mean, right now we have a system that works, but... Again, to me, this may be me being like a Luddite, but it's like, when we're out on expeditions, like... To me, I want everyone's shit off. Like people are like, oh, I have this new device.
I can get network anywhere. I'm like, turn it off. That makes sense. Turn it off.
The thing about this is it helps you boil water. Jet boils, is what they call them. So it's this little thing. It's got a little tank, and it lasts for days. You just cook it up when you want to cook food. You turn it on, you have a little thing with you, and freeze-dried food and shit. That's what a lot of these guys pack when they go 30 miles deep into the woods.
They have coffee real quick.
Yeah, you can make a coffee if you want to.
I brought a guy who used to work at National Geographic on an expedition with me, and it was a couple local guys, me and my friend Mohsen and him, and we went up this river, and In hindsight, he was like, he actually thought we were messing with him. He was like, this can't be what you guys do. He was like, you just have a fucking boat and tents.
He was like, it was the bugs, the sand, the brutal, the sun beating. He goes, why don't you have a fucking roof? Do you become accustomed to the bug bites? Yeah.
So is it just you just deal with it or does your body develop any kind of an antibody to it or anything?
To the sandfly bites, like me and JJ get bitten and we bleed, but we don't get the elevated skin like that classic. So your body doesn't react to it anymore. Dude, wasp bites. I don't even react to bullet ant bites anymore, dude. I'm on number 11. What are you talking about? I'm talking about like I just got bit by a bullet ant as I was trying to go to bed. I got up to go to bed.
I was like doing something with people. I stood up. And I know the feeling by now. You're just like, oh, there it is again. Bit me right in the foot. I just went to bed. No way.
Yeah.
They're stopping. It's starting to lose its efficacy on me. Wow. Enough bullet ins.
I didn't know that that was the case. Because I saw those rites of passage thing that they do. They take these guys, the glove. Yeah. And they fill their hand up with bullet ants. And they have the bullet ants stuck in the gloves so they can't go anywhere. So they just keep fucking you up. And it's supposed to be some thing that they do that is like a religious experience.
It's a rite of passage. It's a rite of passage. So they'll pair. It's kind of like a bonding thing. Find a video of that, James. Fucking mad. It's a rite of passage thing. They'll take a young man, do it to him. And then they'll have a girl take care of him afterwards. And it's sort of trying to encourage them to pair up. I know that Steve-O did it. I saw a video.
Of course he did that, retard.
Every time I talk to him, I'm like, please stop. Please stop. Don't let people punch you. Please stop. Don't let this happen. Just take care of yourself.
Please stop.
You've done so much. Yeah. He's so banged up. He's such a wild man. Have you ever seen the one when he was in Africa and he climbed up the trees and a lion climbed up the trees with him and pulled his hat off? Yeah. Those are real lions.
Like lion lions. I always wanted to ask about that because he's in a hammock and they have meat hanging from the hammock and there's lions biting their asses.
Yeah, I don't understand him. He looks good. They play keep away with hyenas. So he's got it on. He's freaking out. Yeah. Let me hear some volume.
And the next day, Chris's hand looked like Mickey Mouse. Yeah.
What a fucking psycho.
Wild Boys was a show.
You can get stung by those things now. And I thought it was like my friend Steve got it. He said it was like 12 hours of excruciating pain. And he said he could barely walk.
My first one was like that. My first one was like that. I was like out. Like your lymph nodes swell up. You have horrible pain in your body. You have a headache. One bite. One bite. One bite to the arm. And now... Did you do it on purpose? Yeah. Oh. Well, because the guys were like, yo, what up? They're like, you think you're tough? Big guy? Down there, I'm big. Up here, I'm not big.
Down there, they're like, oh, you're a big guy, huh?
Does anybody work out? You're the only guy that works out in the jungle.
You're out there doing chin-ups. They're out there.
And they're like, what the fuck is this guy doing?
They think I'm weird. I'm sure they do. Because I'm in the sun with my shirt off doing push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, doing my jungle workout. And they're like walking by like, what's wrong with Gringo Loco? Why does he do this? Crazy fucker. Yeah. But then I go climb the giant trees and I'm like, all right, listen, you know. Yeah. You want to come? And they're like, no.
But they, so they said, you think you're tough. So they took a bullet ant and you play bullet ant roulette. You just, you know, so we each take a bullet ant and I put it on my arm. So it starts walking around and then you take your arm and we just mash our forearms together and we go like this. Oh boy. Whoever it stings. Oh, boy. It's super fun. It's a great drinking game.
Oh, super fun.
Dude, you mix that with doing shots, it's awesome. Sounds really fun. It's so much fun.
So you were wrecked for how long?
How about a day and a half? I took it really bad.
That's not fun. I took it really bad. You and I have a different understanding of fun.
The excitement of wondering who it's going to hit is fun.
I would rather not know.
Dude. I don't want to know what that feels like. See, that's different. When I see the wet paint sign, I go, really? I don't. I go, let's paint. Somebody painted it.
I don't respect that guy's work.
No, no. I can never. I have to. And with the dumbest things, too. People could be like.
So how many times did you do it voluntarily?
Once.
Okay, once.
No, never more than once.
And every other time after that was just.
Every other time than that, you're just doing your life. Pain rating.
Four plus on the Schmidt Siding Pain Index. Sting Pain Index. The highest possible rating. And you can just go to sleep after that? Causes waves of pain for up to 12 hours after a single sting. Being studied for use in biological insecticides. Of course it is. Of course it is. Paralyzes insects and causes pain in humans.
Affects voltage-gated sodium channels and blocks synaptic transmission in the central nervous system. Yo, how many people died from bullet ants?
I don't know, but it does feel like something that at the level where you have it as a glove... Could kill you. Yeah. I feel like, given the intensity that my system felt from one...
Do you think that those people have already been stung a couple of times?
Yeah, those kids have grown up being stung. So JJ said he didn't have shoes until he was 13, so he grew up walking through the jungle. He said he had his first bullet and ant sting when he was, like, two years old.
Oh, my God.
Which, like, as a two-year-old, that's like being stung in the face by, like, a wasp the size of this water pitcher.
Imagine what that feels like if you're a baby, a soft, mushy baby, and that ant just fucks you. So they are experiencing it akin to what you experience now. So when they're putting the glove on, even though it's horrific and it's getting their whole hand and there's a bunch of those bullet ants in there, they're probably much more accustomed.
I think that they have because they've grown up in the jungle they're much more accustomed but I mean you're watching Steve-O do it like I would think twice before putting my hand in that glove and not having a hospital nearby because I would think that you could go that could be overwhelming to your system they're very intense it's not a joke
I could get bitten by a bullet ant right now and go, all right, well, we're going to do the rest of our day because I feel like it. But what you really want to do is just stop living because it just hurts. Even today? Everywhere.
It hurts everywhere. So is it that you just accept the pain and you understand what it is and you don't freak out? Or is it your pain threshold, has it lowered because you've done it a bunch of times so your body's immune to it?
Yes, it has to lower to the point that you can make the decision to grit and bear it. Because at first, it's so bad that you walk around going, wow, wow, wow. And you're like, wait, okay. If I walk, I'm in pain. If I lay down, I'm in more pain. There's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do. You're just fucked. And so now it's different. And now I'm like, man... God damn it.
And I'm like, well, let's go do what we're going to do anyway. I'm just going to be in a bad mood. So now is it like a wasp sting to a normal person? Yeah. So now a wasp sting to me, like I'll just catch a wasp now. Cause like I was like, you know, like I come home and I see people like running from a yellow jacket and I'm like, I'll just like grab it with my hand, let it stick.
We were talking about this yesterday. I genuinely think that people must feel pain differently. And it makes sense that some people just, I don't even think it's a tolerance thing. I think it feels different. I think that's sort of like the same thing with spicy food. And there's a bunch of different things like that. Cold water. There's things that people can tolerate.
And it seems like they're not just being tougher. Like it's not as hard for them. Like there's a, you know, maybe their ancestry evolved around being in pain all the time.
So they got accustomed to it. Dude, my friend Noel, my childhood best friend, he always calls me and he goes, dude, you want to go surfing in Montauk? And I go, bro, it's February.
fucking February there's gonna be ice on the water and he's like yeah but the swell is awesome well wear wetsuits so one time I tried it with him I will never do it again so your hands in a wetsuit or no no oh boy booties boots on but it's so fucking every time a wave washes over you it goes flying down your back of course you're in ice cold water and yes the waves are incredible I don't care and you can't breathe
I mean, you do the cold plunge all the time. Yeah, but I'm not moving. And you're not out there for four hours. Exactly. And you're not sitting on your board waiting for a wave to come. I'm not trying to balance my cold ass knees. So to me, I look at Nolan and I go, shit, either he's way tougher than I am. Or he just is predisposed to not really giving a shit about cold water. I hate cold water.
It could be that, or it could be you get acclimated. You get accustomed. Because we're talking about people, we adjust to our environments. We adjust to all kinds of different things. You probably get accustomed to that experience and the rush of riding those waves. And it's also, there's a thing about being a badass, putting that wetsuit on and getting in that ocean.
That's where it gets me. Where it goes, no, I'm going to make myself do it. That's where I get myself on it, where it's like there is a certain satisfaction to going, yeah, take it.
Take another frozen wave. If you're warm in your house and you're looking outside and it's snowing and there's ice on the ground and you're looking at your wetsuit, you're warm. You're warm. Ah, you're drinking soup. You know, you got some chicken noodle soup. Oh, you're just so warm and you're watching television. Why would I go to the ocean? Are you guys really going to go? Let's not go.
You sure you want to go? Come on, pussy. We're going to go. And the guy comes back with fucking icicles in his beard and shit.
Yeah, and we admire those people. Well, you, you fucking savage. You said you wake up cold and go on your cold plunge. That's not that hard. That's terrible. It's not that hard. To wake up cold and not do any push-ups or something? If you told me you worked up a sweat first, I would say, okay, fine.
I do it sometimes after the sauna, but then I always finish on the cold. Yeah, but that feels good. If I do that, I never go cold, sauna, heat up, and then go outside. I go sauna, cold, sauna, always end on cold. So you always freeze your dick off at the end.
But it's not that hard. It's three minutes.
If you count slowly to ten two times, it's three minutes. That's what I've found. So I just count slowly to 10 for three minutes, and that's it.
I respectfully disagree with you. I think this is one of those things where you have found that this is a way for you to sort of flex for yourself, and you've gotten used to it, and you've come up with a system. I would never. There's certain things I just don't want to do. Yeah, it sucks, dude. I don't want to do that.
I don't want to do it every day. Every day I don't want to do it, but I tell myself, shut the fuck up, pussy. Pick up the lid. Yes. Put it down. Climb in. You know you're climbing in.
Stop.
set your oh i do want to say garmin uh your new uh phoenix 8 watch shuts off when you get in the cold plunge no yeah so this is a i have a phoenix 8 and i have a phoenix 7. they're awesome i love these things but the phoenix 7 i have to wear when i do the cold plunge so if i work out with that one but this one has a better heart sensor yeah this one this one's just better overall
But it sucks that if you go in cold water, it doesn't even make any sense. How did you go backwards? The old one, you go into cold water and nothing happens. Underwater operating temperature range 0 to 40. Yeah, that's not true. So Google this. Phoenix 8 shutting off cold plunge. Google that. Trust me, I looked it up online. It's not just me. Yeah. See? Watch turns off and reboots in cold water.
Yeah. That's what everybody notices. So if I'm in the water for five seconds, it shuts off. Damn. Yeah. So they're apparently going to fix that. I hope it's a software issue. They better fix it now. But the crazy thing is they have a dive feature on this watch. So if you're swimming and you're diving and you're in cold water, it's going to shut off.
That could, I mean, if you're down there and you're like, how much time do I got on this tank? Exactly. You can't have your watch turned off.
Right. And if you get down to depths and it's below 40 degrees, it's probably going to shut off. I don't even know what temperature it shuts off, but people have done it in cold water. So they've taken a glass of cold water and dropped the watch in cold water and it shuts off. Not good, Garmin. It's just not good that you just released this thing and didn't know.
And didn't check it.
How did you not check for cold plunges when you got a dive function on the watch?
Interesting.
Yeah. So apparently they think they can fix it with software, which I hope is true. Well, that would be good. But the 7 works. That just doesn't make any sense. I've never had a problem with the 7. I put the 7 on in the sauna. I put it on in the cold. Never have a problem with it. Yeah. Well, I'm like that watch. Cold. Kryptonite.
The message boards say it's a software issue, and you can fix it by putting it in beta if you know how to do that.
Right, but beta disables the dive function.
Woof.
Yeah. So the beta that they put out, it disables the dive function. I think there's some talk of another workaround, like maybe shutting off the touchscreen, that maybe that would help. But the problem is it's like you have a watch that everybody's used to cold plunging in. They're used to jumping in the ocean in. They're used to doing stuff in. And then the new one doesn't let you do it.
You can't release that. You've got to fix that before. You didn't have to sell it yesterday. I mean, it just came out, like, I think September. I ordered one. It took a while to get there. I was all excited. And then first cold punch, I'm like, what in the fuck? That's a wolf tooth. That's a wolf tooth? Yeah. Nice. I forget who gave me that one.
Yeah, I got a lot of shit here, man, from cool stuff that people have given me. But, you know, having things like that, like a watch that does GPS, like this watch has maps on it. Yeah. It shows your elevation. You can get a lot of information off of these things, and you can track waypoints on them. And I always use a thing called Onyx Hunt as well, and Onyx Hunt is a software app.
You download maps for the specific regions, and you can hit a tracking function.
And it goes on there?
No, it doesn't. I bet it can. I don't know how to do it.
I don't do it that way. What if it's on your phone?
I just do it on my phone. I use this mostly for elevation. You can use GPS on it, but it will drain your battery a lot quicker. I don't use the GPS function. This thing will go like 30 plus days without charging. Without charging.
Yeah.
And monitoring your heart rate, doing all kinds of different shit. It's a flashlight. It's built in.
A flashlight?
Yeah.
Look at that.
Built in. It's nuts. So if you're out in the woods and you don't have a flashlight, it's LED flashlight. It lasts for fucking ever because it's LED, because it doesn't draw a lot of power. These fucking things are incredible. But this new one, you guys fucked up.
But having those things, do you bring an inReach or anything? Well, I mean, because we also do tourism. We bring out a sat phone. But now, dude, now Starlink. Now at our base, at the tree house and at our research station, we have two different star links. So we have better internet there than I have in the Hudson Valley in New York. Dude, I can, dude. Isn't that incredible? It is. It is.
It's absolutely incredible.
It really is amazing. It's amazing how small it is too.
You can also take it and put it on a boat if you need to. So like, so I, I finally let like Lex broke me down on this. I finally started a YouTube channel and it's like, I'm going to start bringing people on all kinds of shit. Cause now I can just stream it from there. Right. Fuck TV crews. You can have it. I'm going to take people on night walks.
The roof of your car as you're driving around in the jungle. Yeah, well, hopefully there's no roads, but I want to take people, like, I could literally... Put it on your backpack. I could put it on my backpack.
Yeah, you probably could literally have it flat on the top of your pack and walk around, at least catch some signal.
Catch some signal or, you know, for the boat, like, if we go, look, we're going to be going four hours upriver and we know that there's an invasion and we're going with the police to go check out these loggers and there's going to be some fucking action going down. Throw the Starlink on the boat. I could live stream that and take people with me. Whoa. Yeah, or...
Now, so we, a few weeks ago, I sent you that picture, that huge anaconda, the one with the blue eyes. And we've been working slowly on breaking the 20 foot mark. That one was 19 something.
And so we've been working more and more on the anaconda project and my guys, and you know, like when you, you know, you have your people with elk hunting where they go, dude, I saw an elk that like, and certain people you trust, my guys, They went, we found one that's over seven meters and they haven't caught it yet. Are you talking over 21 feet? So we've broken 19, right?
And so we're going to be going out for that. And so that's the type of thing where I'm going, imagine bringing people... Because after our first show, the comments were hysterical. Where people going, this guy's full of shit. Like, absolutely hysterical. About the anacondas? About everything we talked about. Oh, that's funny. Like, the internet was just like, great show, this guy's full of shit.
There's so much documentation of it. I know, I know. But... All they have to do is go to your page. They were like, oh, this guy really is there. Some of them were really funny. I laugh at a lot of the comments. They're like, oh, I'll take that. Never fucking happened for 300 Alex.
Like, you know, it's like, OK, great. Well, people always want to say that.
People always want to say that. But but but now it's like now we can fucking live stream this.
Right.
And we go jump on a snake with a head this big. So we're putting together an expedition to do this now, and it's going to be fun.
In these areas that you go to, have they ever done any of those LIDAR explorations of it where they fly drones over to try to map out if there was some ancient structures in these areas?
So we talked to the local people and they find the Terra Preta earth and the pottery in the areas that it is. So usually the places that it is, and we kind of talked about this, like the Graham Hancock. I always want to say Graham Watkins. Graham Hancock. I think that on the Amazon proper, I think there was a lot of civilizations around.
Out in the tributaries where I am, it's very rare to come across those things, those ancient civilizations.
So those people, the uncontacted tribes out in the tributaries, they're probably living the way they've been living for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
So my book publisher, it was so funny. I got kind of like, I was writing something and I said something about these Stone Age warriors, what this guy must have seen as these Stone Age warriors came and murdered him with arrows. And they were like, how dare you call them Stone Age warriors? And I went, they don't even have stones. So first of all- Right. They're really stick age. Yeah.
Did I just get woke for- So dumb. Is Stone Age a bad thing to say? But I mean, it's not very often that you come into that problem because we wouldn't call most normal people Stone Age people.
Well, the Native Americans were essentially Stone Age.
Well, he uses it in Empire of the Summer Moon. He goes, well, these Stone Age warriors are da, da, da. And I was like, well, these are pretty much Stone Age people. And so I wrote it and I basically got told like, hey, don't say that.
God, how weird is that?
Yeah. I also lost a book deal because I retweeted that Elon Musk liked our tree house, but.
So you lost a book deal?
Yeah, I had an amazing meeting with like all the people. This lady was like, you know, like the devil wears Prada, like Meryl Streep. Like she was like the big head honcho at one of the major publishers. And they were like, dude, your next book is gonna kill. She had like 20 other people on this Zoom call. We had like an hour long thing. We talked about you.
She was like, and how close are you with Joe Rogan? And I was like, we're bros. And then they were like, well, either way, it was going really good. Liberals. I was thinking I was going to get a life changing amount of money. I was thinking I was going to get like a million dollar book deal. And that got confirmed through a bunch of avenues that it was a big one.
And then, and they were very impressed with Lex. They love Lex. And she was like, you have Lex Friedman in the Amazon? I said, he's right over there. I was like on the phone, on Starlink, talking to this publisher. And she's like, so your next book is going to tell the whole story? I said, yeah. And then that week, Elon tweeted, cool treehouse.
Now, when the greatest inventor of your generation tweets on anything that you did, you share it. So I shared it. The publisher got back and went, not only are we not even, we're just not making an offer anymore.
they don't like the type of people that i associate with just you retweeting that you sure it wasn't me no it was him they vetted you they were like how close are you with him and i was like listen to me he's the fucking nicest guy in the world i was like you can't i was like and they were like would he write a forward for your book and i was like i don't i was like i think like i need like a more like a harrison ford to do that like i don't know
Like Joe could do it, but I was like, I think we need like a less polar. They just want like famous people. That's all they were doing.
Famous people to say you're awesome.
But as soon as Elon's name came into the mix, I didn't know this. I was unaware of this, that Elon has people that hate him. Hate him.
I didn't know that. Well, it's a lot of propaganda that really works, and a lot of it is what happened when he took over Twitter. So you have to look at it from, like, what really happened? Was there real outrage when he took over Twitter? Yes, yes, there was real outrage. I firmly believe there's manufactured outrage that's done in a very directed manner.
And I think he was most certainly the victim of that as well. And then there was a narrative that continued to get pushed like hate speech on X, hate speech.
That he's promoting it.
Yes, that anti-Semitism, that racism, that all this stuff is up. Well, if you allow people to just speak freely, you're going to have that. You're going to have that. But you can always, like, not look at that. Yeah. But you're also going to have many more good things, too.
And the point was what he really exposed was that the FBI was involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story and that these journalists who studied the Twitter files, Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger and Barry Weiss and all these different people that went over these –
Documents found that, hey, there's something very inappropriate happening where the government is getting these social media companies to take down true stories and to sign off and say that it's Russian disinformation.
And Elon confirmed this.
And Elon confirmed this. So that's when he became very dangerous to them. And so then the narrative of Elon being a white supremacist and Elon being – But then the thing that happens also is he will tweet wacky shit. And then he will retweet wacky shit that turns out to not be true.
And all that, they attack and it builds up and you get a distorted perception of his value in our culture, in our society. And he's one of the greatest inventors the world's ever known. One of the greatest... engineers we have alive, and he's involved in multiple different industries, and he's changing those multiple industries in incredible ways.
What they've done with space travel, with SpaceX, where these fucking rockets can land now, what they've done with these Starlink things that we were talking about. If it wasn't for Tesla and electric cars, do you really think there'd be as many electric cars as there are today? It wouldn't even be close.
You wouldn't have Governor Newsom saying that California has to be all electric by 2035 because no one would be making electric fucking cars like that. There's a documentary from... Early 2000s. It's called who killed the electric car.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I saw that in college fascinating Yeah, fascinating documentary and if it wasn't for Elon and making Tesla's awesome You wouldn't have all these fucking electric car companies and he makes everything open source.
Okay, and that's all fine But my problem is people that take the guy who's trying to save the butterflies and the monkeys.
Yeah, and
and kick me out. For that. For naughty, I've never even met the guy. Dude, it's akin to being a Nazi. So I have to pretend to not like him. Right, exactly.
To align with their worldview. It's what I was talking about with Hollywood when I was talking about how people start making money and they start being very careful about what they say because they're worried about it's going to go away. you also realize there are consequences like what you experienced. So those are real financial. So that's it. And so minor, right?
So that is how you get people to stay in line. That's how you get people to only think the way they think. And then you start reinforcing it in yourself and you start wearing pearls and doing all kinds of wacky shit because you want them to like you. You want them to think you're one of them.
No, that was really creepy because, you know, I mean, I live in the jungle, but, like, I hear about all this stuff, but I don't know, like, who the players are and what the temperature is in the room.
You just thought it was cool that the guy said you have a cool treehouse. He's, like, one of the coolest guys ever.
If this guy goes to fucking Mars, a historically relevant inventor said something I did was cool. Great. You share it, you know? And it cost you a million bucks. Yeah.
This is the world we're living in. That's why. And it's primarily the left that's that wacky. Like if Bernie Sanders had said, cool treehouse, and you retweeted that, everybody would have loved you. You would have been fine. And the right wouldn't have attacked you.
No.
They wouldn't have cared. They wouldn't have been upset. You wouldn't have lost businesses. No one from the right would have not given you a book deal because Bernie said, nice treehouse. And you're like, thanks.
Cool. And you retweeted it. No one would care. It could have been Obama. It could have been anything. By the way, that was super cool. I loved it. My friend Connor sent me a clip where you were telling one of your guests about me. And so I shared it. but it was like the first time that I shared a clip where it was like really just you talking on my Instagram and the comments were berserk.
I didn't realize you were such a polarizing person, Joe.
It's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's a distorted perception of who you are by people that have very low level information. They have surface information. And they've decided that you're an alt-right this. Or there's been many, many articles written about me being like some fringe right-wing person, which I'm not at all.
But if they say it enough times, the people that have low information, they believe it.
Well, but this is where I'm interested in when you say like, okay, and this is like the shit that's going on in Israel, the hysteria that everyone's feeling. You're either a good guy or a bad guy. Elon's good. If you like Elon, you're bad. I just want to see everybody start to calm down. I just want to see the adults be running the room again. Oh, that sounds cute. No, no, no, no, no, no.
Pre-9-11, I'm sorry. When I was a kid, and let's just go back to like, I was in eighth grade in 9-11. Somehow back then, it seemed like I know there's still corruption and there's a lot of fuckery going around on, but somehow things have gotten more off the rails with this, this stuff where it's like, you know, remember the, the, the, the Obama Romney debate where they're like, yo man, what's up?
And they're like, we disagree, but we agree. Like we're both gentlemen here. Like, come on, come on. Yes. It's very nice. Yeah. And so like, I think, I think that what I've seen in the last few years,
months or in the last year was that is that a lot of people again i'm really speaking from my perspective here and i'm just kind of hoping that this is the case for the rest of the world that people are chilling the fuck out and some people are waking up and realizing how stupid it is and how most of the problems that we have are bullshit yeah in terms of problems we have with each other but then the next thing is is then then we can actually start focusing on if we're not hysterical and we're not doing all this crazy shit then we can actually start focusing on okay well look how do we
fix things in the Congo how do we fix things in Africa how do we in the Amazon like how do we pragmatically fix things so that the American food system is better and everyone benefits and stop fucking arguing over it yeah and to realize that this is not a right wing or left wing issue it's a human health issue a very unhealthy way to argue
And also like real charitable organizations, like real ones, like what you're doing. It's actually helping things. It's actually designed to help. It's not designed as some sort of a front to cover money and as a tax shelter. There's a lot of philanthropy.
That's good.
Yeah, a lot of it, a lot of it. But then there's also a lot of philanthropy that's not really philanthropy.
Posturing.
It's money. Sure. You're making money with this philanthropy. You've got economic.
Well, that's the thing. So now that I have an NGO, we went and looked up all the other NGOs, and a lot of the NGOs- their CEOs are making $500,000 a year, like big paychecks. And that's where I do think it's, you know. It gets weird.
It gets really weird, but I think also that what I told, the first story I told you about, like when how we saved the ancient forest, it's like I think what we've done that's very exciting that we're feeling this swell, we're kind of riding this wave right now is because The guy with four kids, or classically, I had this mom in Ohio message me, and she was like, I have two kids.
I show them your Instagram. I love what we do. We give you $5 a month. And it's like, $5 a month from enough people, and we saved the whole fucking Amazon. Not to mention that then people like Dax DeSilva from Lightspeed reach out, and he's like, look, man, I won capitalism. I'm going to fund your whole Ranger team. And it's like, people are reaching out.
That's amazing.
And so I'm surrounded by all these incredible people that want to do good. I got approached by those dudes at Vivo Barefoot. Shout out to Vivo Barefoot. I use their stuff all the time. So they're my first sponsor. That's great. They reached out to me.
They make great shit.
Well, I also, I hate hiking boots, right?
Those barefoot hiking boots are legit. The ones they make, they're legit.
Well, I like theirs. I hate hiking boots that are constrictive. So they reached out and this is the cool thing. They went, you know, are you interested? But it was like, only if you check out. They were like, are you good? Are you sustainable? Are you this? And I was like, I run a fucking rainforest organization.
And they were like, because, and these guys care so much about their shoe and about how people wear it and about where it's used and the materials. And I just read Yvonne Chouinard's book, Let My People Go Surfing, the guy who started Patagonia. He, I mean, he just worships rivers and mountains. And they started making this stuff.
And I just think we're on this cusp of that we still can save a lot of the endangered species. I mean, I'm living miracles every day. I'm like watching us... draw in this map of protecting the Amazon. And when you're one third, you're like, we're gonna do it. And so it's like, I just think that as people, I got really scared when I got woke. That Elon Musk thing was so weird.
I was like, we all gotta just take it down. I got woke. I got woke right in the face. I got dick left.
And it's such an innocuous thing you did. It's so funny, but that's like wrong think, wrong speak. You're not allowed to like this guy. Well, that's the thing. Who am I allowed to like? None of it makes any sense. It doesn't make any sense.
So I gotta stay in the jungle, man. This shit's scary.
People are just so polarized. And it's also, you often have to realize that the pressure that they're under is not from that many people. It's like the commenters on Instagram. Unfortunately, the reality is most people comment on things all the time are morons and they're not happy. They're unhappy morons. So it's a bad sample group, right?
So you're getting a lot of people that are making comments. But people, if they're commenting, I would like to know what percentage of comments, and just overall, if the internet, if anybody's ever done this analysis, are positive versus negative. I would have to say it's probably at least 50-50.
I would say it's 50-50. Again, I think I'm jaded, though, because if I look at the YouTube comments on a Lex podcast, all the comments are like, thank you, Lex, for having this important conversation with this amazing person. Right, Lex's fans. Lex's fans are great. Yeah. I don't know. A lot of the support that I get online, people tell me I look like the lead singer of System of a Down.
Other than that, there's nothing. A little bit. Middle Eastern features. Hey, man. Serge Tankin's a fucking hero. He's a dope dude. I love that guy. Yeah, he's awesome. I listen to his music every day.
Yeah, if you're getting compared, that's a good guy to get compared to. But this polarization is just like there's a bunch of people that feed into it and they attack people because they know that the people that are on their side are like, yeah, you're one of the good guys.
Yeah.
And so there's that weird shit where you got a lot of really weak people and mentally ill people that like attacking people. And that's a lot of what it is. It's a lot of people that lack nuance and understanding. But don't you think it's coming back?
Don't you think we hit a peak and now it's starting to come back?
Yeah, because those people are kind of being exposed for what they really are. They're very damaged human beings. Like the people that attack people all the time, they're all fucked up. All of them, 100%. Why would you, you only have so much energy in your day. Why, why are you spending it getting mad at some guy because he retweeted the greatest genius of our generation said nice treehouse.
That's fucking ridiculous. It's a ridiculous thing to get angry about.
I'll tell you one of the conversations I heard recently was this is like such a simple point, but. Someone I know was going, forgive me, I don't understand these issues. He was going, how dare they make a mandatory minimum wage? They were going to raise the minimum wage or whatever else. I was watching two people and one guy was passionately going off about this. And he was, I think, a Republican.
My other friend was sitting there. And it was such a great thing that he did. He went, that is, he goes, I 100% disagree with you. He goes, but could you explain to me why you think what you think? And they had this amazing conversation where they just debated. Yeah, that's great. And it was with respect. And I was like, oh, fuck, cool.
I watched it like it was a podcast because I don't know who, I don't know any of this shit anyway. So I was just like, I don't know.
It's a complicated issue. It's about restaurants and places that operate at the margins. They're very close to going under all the time. And you can get cheap, unskilled labor from young kids and high school students and people getting first jobs. And that's how they operate.
And when you say, no, you have to pay a living wage to everybody who works, they're like, okay, now this is a lot less money.
As a business owner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but the point was, though, that they were able to completely disagree and go, I completely fucking disagree with you. No. And it was fine.
It's great when people can do that.
I love that. I think that's great.
When people don't attach themselves to the ideas. That's the problem. It's almost every man that I know has a hard time. Women do it, too. But for men, it's like a dick swinging thing where they have a hard time deciding. not being attached to an idea. Like if they have espoused an idea, if they believe an idea and they're arguing that idea, that idea is a part of them.
And they'll even lie and fuck around with things and like half truths to try to make their point, make a little, you know, they'll do bad faith arguments. You see it on podcasts all the time where people make bad faith arguments about political issues. You're like, oh God.
Now I'm never going to listen to you again because I know you do this thing that's a gross thing that you don't have to do anymore because we live in the internet now. Like you don't have to do that gross thing you do where you pretend you're right about something so that you can win this argument. That's a stupid person's way of talking.
If you're debating honestly – You could, in many situations, be happy to be proven wrong. Yeah, you should be. With my friends, if I say, there's absolutely no way you can lift that fucking thing, and you do it, I'm like, I was wrong.
Yeah.
You know what I mean? Like, I'm stoked. You just did that.
Well, also, it's like, you're not your ideas. I say this all the time, but it's a really important thing for people to recognize. And to people, have it in your head. You are not your ideas. You are you. Mm-hmm. And these ideas, they come and they go, and you agree with them or you disagree with them.
And sometimes you're going to agree with an idea, and then a few years later you're going to have some life experiences or talk to some people that will make you look at things differently and go, you know what? I used to think this, but I don't think this anymore, and here's why. And you have to be very cognizant that your ideas can capture you.
And then you can be – like so many people are captured by – the way they want people to think of them. This is a very Hollywood thing. They want people to think of them in a very specific way, so they'll say the things that they've heard other people say who are accepted, and they'll talk in a certain way. That's where you get accents from. That's also where you get up talk.
You know what uptalk is? So when you do this thing, and so when we build these infrastructures, what we're trying to do, so someone talked like that, and a group of people talked like that, and to get in with that group, you had to kind of talk like that. So you let them, oh, Paul is a really good guy. So what Paul is doing is quite amazing. Paul goes to the Amazon, and he's in the rainforest.
I can't watch Valley Girl. But this is a thing that they do to let everyone know that they're on the team. It's a very tribal thing. It's almost like another language. And these tribal things that we do, we attach them to everything. We attach them to religion. We attach them to technology, even health. We attach them to ideologies. And if you don't...
If I can't trust you, if you're retweeting Elon Musk, don't you know he's the devil? If you're hanging out with Joe Rogan, oh my God, he's a piece of shit. These people have these little... religious ideas in their head that you can't eat pork. You can't violate this. It's Sunday, motherfucker. Why are the lights on? They have these weird laws in their head. They attach them to everything, man.
People have like a place in their mind for religion. And if you do not have religion in your life, you will take social issues and you will treat them with the same fervor, the same fucking fever pitch that people treat religion, that people who are evangelical Christians, the people who are fucking snake handlers, you'll do that with your thing.
And if your thing is trans kids or whatever your fucking thing is, no oil now, whatever your fucking thing is.
a religion because you don't have religion and the human mind is set up in a way that you need some sort of divine structure you need something that's bigger than logic bigger than all of us and people will apply those things wherever they see fit you can join a cult and that's a whole different thing oh we're different we do yoga and this is our life yeah we all fuck each other I mean but then there's casualties like then Kevin Hart doesn't get to do the fucking Oscars
Yeah, but Kevin Hart shouldn't do the Oscars. Fuck the Oscars. Kevin Hart wanted to do the Oscars. Those things are gross. And what they are is you're having a contest for art, and I think that's gross. I get it that it helps your movie sell if it's an Oscar Academy Award winner, and I get that people are celebrated for great work. I get all that. It's awesome.
I get it's a sellout, but it's also gross. And when it was revealed to be gross was when Chris Rock was on stage and Will Smith slapped him. And then a few minutes later, Will Smith wins an Academy Award and they give him a standing ovation after he just assaulted a guy in front of everybody. It just shows you there's no ethical, moral structure to the way these people are living their lives.
They're living their life by the whim of what the crowd agrees with.
But that's also like group hypnosis. Yes. Like if that happened... In any other situation, everyone was just like, we don't really know what to do. You just keep going.
Well, it's also they're afraid of being racist. Two black guys are duking it out. I can't get involved in this. This is not my thing. I don't know what to do. I'm gay. They're just sitting there watching this take place. And then they're clapping for him and standing up when he wins the Academy Award. And so the rest of the world, unbeknownst to them, had already cast their judgment.
The rest of the world was like, are you out of your fucking mind? Yeah. This is insane. And so they're like, oh my God, the rest of the world think we're out of our fucking mind.
Because you are out of your fucking mind. You guys are all in a cult. But that's what I mean about adults. Nobody else walked on stage and just went, all right, everybody, we're taking five minutes out. You get the fuck over in the corner. You stop. Are you okay? Okay, great. We're going to commercial break.
There's no one who grabbed him immediately and escorted him out of the building.
Everyone just awkwardly continued on with the night. And he awkwardly continued on with his set.
He did great. but not really. No? No, no, no. Chris Rock? Right after that, he was all fucked up. Like, his jokes, they were flat. Everybody was like, you just got slapped. Like, this is crazy.
But I don't think that was his fault. I think that was because... Well, it's totally not his fault. He just got slapped. I thought he did an incredibly classy job of just being like, well... I'm going to do the best I can and do my job.
As a professional, he did that. But he went back on with the script, which is just insane. But the good thing about that is then Chris Rock really became Chris Rock again. He didn't give a fuck anymore. He's like, once you slap me on TV, I'm going off. So he became Chris Rock from Bring the Pain again. But I think what kept him from doing that in the past was that he was in the club.
He was in the club. He was hosting the Oscars, doing these big movies.
You've got to be in the club. You've got to be safe. You can't be retweeting Elon Musk. You've got to start learning the rules. You've got to learn the rules. You would know the answer to this question. Again, I miss all these things. Didn't somebody rush Chappelle on stage and they took him out? Tell me if my memory is accurate because I saw a video.
I don't remember who tackled the guy or whatever else, but did they dislocate his arm?
Oh, they beat the fuck out of this guy.
They beat the fuck out of him, right? They beat the fuck out of this guy.
Yeah, once they got him, they beat the fuck out of him. I'm sure they broke his arm. I'm pretty sure he's had multiple injuries.
I'm pretty sure.
He had a knife. I mean, he was a crazy homeless person. Terrible lapse in security. Who are the security guys? They got fired. Yeah. And the whole thing was a fucking mess.
The guy ran onto the stage. Sometimes I do this thing where I don't believe my own memory. Like, I'll see something amazing. Yeah, look at his arm. Look at his arm. It's out of the fucking socket. They beat the shit out of him.
They broke it. They probably Kimura'd him and snapped his arm.
Dude, look at his face. He looks like he went through a whole five-round fight. Yeah.
They beat the shit out of him. He's lucky he's alive, you know?
I mean, you go after Chappelle?
With a knife.
Fuck, man.
You know, I mean, he didn't have the knife in his hand, but he had a knife on him. Like some big fucking knife.
Dude, that's also terrifying.
Brass knuckles looking thing.
That's terrifying.
Yeah, it's terrifying. It's terrifying that there's people that are so out of their fucking mind. And it's, again, the same kind of thing. He's transphobic. He's transphobic. Jokes are transphobia. Words are violence.
Whoa.
No, that's not.
Whoa. That's violence. Dave Chappelle, listen.
But that's how nuts we are.
That's how nuts we are.
Did you listen to his special? Right. They didn't listen. That's the thing. No one's listening. They're not listening to me. They're not listening to Elon. They're not listening. They have these things, and they're just like religious dogma. And they lock down on those things. Dave Chappelle's a transphobe. We've got to take him out. Dave Chappelle's a living saint. Yeah, he's a beautiful person.
He's untouchable. Amazing person. But he makes jokes about things that are real in our culture, and that's a real thing in our culture. And if you say there's a thing that you can't make fun of, that thing's bullshit. If there's ever a thing that you can't make fun of, that thing is bullshit.
Dude, yeah. I had to do, I was taking care of somebody. Actually, I wanted to tell you this. I was taking care of somebody that had life-saving surgery and I was helping them recuperate. And so I was just staying with them. And it was like, you know, you have a brush with death. You see your mortality, things are down, whatever else.
And when we like caught our breath, I was like, let me just do something. And I put on a clip of you and it was, it was, it was a, you were telling the story about like a hotel and you, you, you, you was, it was you, Segura and Chappelle. But anyway, we were watching you guys do various bits of comedy on YouTube. And I made this person, you guys made this person laugh so hard.
We had to stop watching it because they were going to bust a stitch. It was like the best medicine you've ever seen. And it was, it was, you were telling a fucking crazy story about, about waking up in a hotel and everyone's cramming down the exit. Yeah.
The hotel was on fire.
Yeah. That was great. And then it was Segura doing when disabilities are funny. He goes, he goes, not all disabilities are funny. He goes, but sometimes they're funny. And he does like a 10 minute piece on that. True. And it was just such a great transmission of just comedy just being medicine.
The thing is comedy is comedy. And to try to say it's normal speech is ridiculous because it's not your opinions. It's things that are funny about these things. Like when someone's saying something about anything that's inappropriate, you should never say that. That's Louis C.K. 's whole act is saying the wrong thing. You're not supposed to say that. So he's going to say it. And it's hilarious.
But it's also really well written and funny. This is not like if you sat him down and asked him his opinion on people and life, he would give you a different version. This is just an art form. It's just like a movie. Like you go to a Quentin Tarantino movie, none of those people really died. Okay? This is just art. It's just like something's creating something.
And that's the sense where I feel like it's coming back. Because look at the shit that Chappelle's pulling. Look at the shit that you're pulling. People are saying stuff again.
Well, people are realizing that you don't have to give in to this. You don't have to listen. Because it's a small, very vocal minority of people, but most people are tired of it. Most people miss old, you don't get a good comedy movie anymore. You don't get super bad anymore. They can't make that movie anymore. Tropic Thunder.
Tropic Thunder.
But you can't.
I mean, we fucked ourselves. We fucked ourselves by listening to these mental patients.
I think it'll come back. I think some of it's going to come back. I think it's going to come back because I think it's going to... Now it's going to... Usually, right? It'll swing back. You look at movies from the 70s, they're fucking brutal. Oh, yeah. Everything now is so sanitized and like you don't... But there's still Tarantino though.
He's sort of like... He's the only one. He's sort of like grandfathered in.
The last time that I saw a scene in a movie that made me really cringe was in Bastards when the... the bear Jew comes out of the cave and the guy is the Nazi soldiers. He's on his knees and you're so used to that they cut. on impact. He comes out and he fucking takes that swing and they don't cut. I don't know how they film that shit. Movie magic. But you, you go, Oh God.
And Brad Pitt's sitting there chewing on a piece of bread and like clapping, you know, like eating while this guy gets beaten to death. And, but like, I remember being like, Oh, cause usually you watch John wick, you watch whatever the fuck you watch. A thousand people die on screen. It doesn't matter. But every now and then they make it so real. Yeah. Those seventies movies back in the day.
Oh,
Because all the shit was real. Oh, yeah. Car chases were real. Yeah, man. And now I watch movies and I'm like, dude, come on. You remember Bullet?
Like 10 minutes of the movie. Car chase. Steve McQueen?
Yeah.
To the streets of San Francisco.
Crazy. There's a Mustang and a fucking Charger. There's a movie with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin where Anthony Hopkins has to fight a bear. I think the whole movie is about them fighting. Dude. They actually... They used Bart the Bear from Legends of the Fall and whatever else. But it is the most... You watch it, you will be...
blown out of your seat because Anthony Hopkins is 10 feet from a fucking grizzly bear. And then the tree, you can tell where they swap. If you watch it really closely, you could tell where they swap them out. And the trainer gets like hit with a paw, but this guy is wrestling with his pet bear. Yo, seriously. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at that fucking bear.
Look at, look at fucking Anthony Hopkins. The best. How does he live this? How's that even possible? Cause they just tear you apart. Look at his face.
Just trust me. Just, Jamie, go. Go to, like, halfway. Go to, like, halfway of this video.
This is so ridiculous. That bear is, like, barely chasing him. Go, like, halfway down this video. Oh, he's got the fire out.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I don't need to see this. I'm going to have a different opinion of it. I'm going to get angry.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the clip. There's a clip. Did you see The Revenant? What the fuck? Yeah, piss me off, cartoon bear. Ah, CGI bear. And I love Tom Hardy and I love DiCaprio, but that, come on, that CGI bear didn't get it.
You know, that's based on a real story.
Yeah?
Yeah, that's based on a guy who really did get, he crawled like 20 miles.
My main takeaway from that movie is a lot of cold water.
Cold water just watched every time he fucking crawled in a cold cold stream I was just like you know that incident didn't really take place in that environment though the actual incident took place on the plains it wasn't the same environment as They just rainforest they just put it up there put him in I think they filmed it See if they filmed the revenant in BC I think they filmed it in in the like the rainforest of BC You know BC is a lot like Seattle
Well, I think they filmed it in, like, a dense forested area. And I don't think the real incident took place in any sort of environment like that.
I remember it being, like, winter deciduous forest, but not rainforest.
Waterfall scenes were filmed in Montana, but the wiki says it takes place in the Great Plains.
Right. So, but where did they film all the forest scenes? I think it was Canada. Think it's BC because it just is way more dense than the Great Plains. It's not what the great It's not what they experienced with this guy crawled.
It's like he's crawling across the fucking plains Like this guy got torn apart by a bear and crawl actually initial plans were to film the final scenes in Canada Although the weather was ultimately too warm so they had to go to Argentina where there was snow to shoot the ending That's the ending what about the other stuff in the woods like when they get attacked by the Native Americans I
I thought that was in BC. Either way, whatever it is, it's like very dense forest, which is not... Not historically accurate. No. You got to do a little bit of that. Do you? Do you? It's about the plains.
Yeah, but then there'd be no trees. Like, trees are central in that movie. Like, the stark... No, so the movie's kind of bullshit. Like... Isn't there a way to do it? Well, then every movie's bullshit then.
Alberta? Yeah, there it goes. Okay.
I mean, even, you know. Alberta's crazy thick. I mean, every movie then that you like, you know, like every like historical movie, you go, how much of it is true?
Oh, yeah.
Like I just watched, you know.
I hate those movies.
Ford versus Ferrari. And I was like, how much of this is true? And they're like, none of it. Did any of this really happen? No.
Okay, so the Kananaskis country and the spectacular scenery of Bow Valley in the Canadian Rockies west of Calgary, Alberta. Fucking beautiful up there, man. Yeah, so that's not the real environment where that really went down.
Yeah, I guess it would have a different feel if they were out on the plains and it was nothing.
Yeah, and they get attacked by the plains Indians, and that guy got fucked up by that bear out there. There was bears out there, dude. That's what's nuts. We killed them off. California has a bear, and it's a state flag. It's a big old brown bear.
There used to be brown bears in California. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, they fucking killed all of them. They're like, get the fuck out of here.
Yeah, they know what year the last brown bear was killed in California, and they know when the last black bear was killed in Manhattan. That's nuts. Think about it.
A black bear in Manhattan.
When was that? When they bought it for like $15. It was just a fucking couple of trees.
This is a town named after the guy who was the last guy to get killed by a brown bear in California. It's called Levesque. Nice. I think his name was Steven Levesque. The last guy that got killed by a brown bear. I'm like, that's it. We're done.
Kill them all. Did you ever see the video where the bear takes the guy's face off and he's still talking? Yeah, I did. That's a really bad one. Yeah, he got his face all apart. And they stitched it back together again. They didn't do a bad job.
Not bad. Not bad.
Because that video, that was again one of those times where I'm an adult and I'm not okay. That was like early days of internet gross shit. That was like Ebaum's World Time where you could see everything. It was the early days. I was just trying to explain this to my mom. I was like, when they were doing the journalist beheadings, you could see it. Yeah. If I tried now, I don't know.
I wouldn't even know where to go. Reddit. Really? Yeah. 4chan. I don't think I've ever been on Reddit. You should go. Yeah? Should I go on Reddit? Go to know these people like that out there. Is it search engine?
Reddit has become like much more... Reddit is very left wing and Reddit has become very censored. Like things get pulled down off of Reddit. No, I'm saying... But 4chan is still buck wild.
4chan?
4chan. Yeah, 4chan is where like... All that QAnon craziness came from. There's a lot of nutty people out there. That's where the political frogs, those frogs, Pepe the Frog that they use for memes. It's all like internet culture, shit posters. People that are anonymously posting so they can just say the wildest things and there's no censorship.
Yeah, but I'm saying, but what I want is, I want the God's Google.
I want that thing where you go, I want to see people eating, you know, who got eaten by a bear. Or you know how in the Grizzly Man they don't show you the footage or play you the audio? I want that. If I want to see it, I want to be able to see it.
I think Werner Herzog destroyed that audio, which is unfortunate.
Yeah.
But also, his mind was like... It's kind of funny, right? Because his mind was like, this would be too damaging. It's too bad. You don't want to hear it.
You don't want other people to hear it. I wouldn't want people to hear me screaming in agony as I died.
Right, but your whole film... It's about how fucking stupid it is that this guy lives in the grizzly maze in a tent surrounded by bears. Then it's inevitable that one of them is going to eat him.
So there'd kind of be like a comedic punchline to hearing him go.
Bro, the movie's a comedy.
It is a comedy. It is a comedy. It is. When he's like bad bear and he touches it and the bear turns around.
It's like, what the fuck did you just do? The whole thing. He was so nutty and he was such a crazy.
He was nuts. He was Tiger King times 100. Yeah. But he also, there's like a moment where he transcends and he's like in the grass and there's a fox on his tent. And you're like, dude, this is kind of cool.
Yeah. That was the fox relationship.
The fox was cool. But with the bear stuff, foxes become your friends, which is weird. Yeah. Foxes are cool.
Yeah. Like you can just, you don't even have to have lived there a long time. You just hang out with them long enough. They'll, they'll hang out with you.
Well, I found a fox den a few years ago. And so there's all these, the mom was out and there's all these foxes, baby foxes, pups sitting outside the, the hole and, So I would creep up on them, I'd get into position, and I'd watch them come out, and they are the cutest little things in the world. And they're all just standing around, and I was like, I want to raise a fox so bad.
People have done it. I know. They have pet foxes.
Oh, I know. I wanted to do it so bad I had to go to the jungle in like a week. But I was like, man, if I wasn't going to the jungle in a week.
You would have to feed those little fuckers, and they'd want to kill things all the time.
It'd be like having a really wild dog.
Yeah, it would be like having a coyote for a pet. Yeah. I would imagine. But they're really clever. They're really clever.
They're really smart. They're really beautiful. Yeah. And coyotes, I don't even need to have coyotes as pets. They're like behind in the Hudson Valley.
Oh, yeah. They're all over the place. Everywhere.
Yeah.
They're in Manhattan. I don't believe that. It's 100% true. Really? Yeah. Yeah. In Central Park.
In Central Park?
Multiple coyote sightings. They've had them in the Bronx. Coyotes are in every city in North America.
Or at least in the U.S. It's a huge testament to how stealthy an animal can be. Oh, yeah, man. Because they live... Look at that. Stop it. Coyotes in Central Park.
Yeah.
Yeah, man, they're all over the country. They're all over the country. And that's basically in the last hundred years. I think less than that. I think it's like from the 1950s on, they've spread across the entire country. There's a great book called Coyote America.
It's on my list. I'm dying to read it.
I'm dying to read it. Coyote's been seen in Central Park and other parts of New York City since the 1930s.
Yeah.
The number of sightings has increased in recent years, especially in 2019. Yeah. Incredibly adaptive. I mean, that's just unbelievable. They're the craziest. They adapt and they expand their range. So whenever you kill one, the females have more pups and they expand their range.
Dude.
That's why they're everywhere now.
In the jungle, I was working with this British filmmaker, and he came out of the jungle one day, and his face was white. And he goes, I saw something. And I was like, if you say Bigfoot, I'm gonna, he's like, no. He goes, no, I saw, he goes, Matt, he saw a white-tailed deer. And I went, you didn't see a white-tailed deer. We have red brocket deer, gray brocket deer.
You didn't see a white-tailed deer. And I started really hammering on him. I was like, bro, you've been out here too long, man. Long story short, there is a vestigial population of white-tailed deer that inhabit the Western Amazon. What? So he thought he was insane. They come in from the Andes and they have like an island population down in the lowland jungle.
He happened to see, and this is like a guy that you know he's not bullshitting.
Whoa.
He was physically insane. You know, it's like you saw a giraffe.
That's ridiculous that he would be that freaked out.
I think just because it didn't belong there. He was a real wildlife guy. I mean, if I saw, you know, a leopard in New Jersey, I'd be like, well, fuck. Either I'm cracking up or something. As far as I know, this doesn't go here. Right. You know? Right. So he came back and he was like, I don't know what to do. He's like, I saw something. And I was like, well, did you get a shot of it?
And he was like, no, I put my camera up and it ran. And he was like, but I swear to God. And I was like, nah, you didn't see anything. He saw a white-tailed deer.
That's crazy. Have you seen the jaguar sightings in Arizona?
I did. I saw the camera trap photos. That is super cool. That is super cool. We're doing something with these new eDNA packages where we can take water samples and it tests for all the different DNA in the water.
Oh, so all the different animals that are drinking in there.
Wow. Bigfoot's either about to get found or go extinct.
He's going to go extinct.
Yeah, I know.
Do you think they could find the giant sloth with that? So that's an interesting one.
That and the thylacine are the only cryptids that I'll entertain conversations about.
I entertain the sloth one because there's so many of these people in these deep, dense jungles in the Amazon that claim that they've seen them.
Yeah. I'll tell you something offline about that. I have a theory about where they are. Ooh, I can't wait to end this podcast. I just, I just, there's gotta be this, there's places people keep going. We've, we've explored the whole world. Just like people don't realize.
And I'm telling you after coming off of these expeditions where we travel for an entire week by land to get, cause you get on a plane, go to get on a plane and be in Barcelona in a few hours. Right. It's such a mind fuck. It doesn't make any sense. Whereas when you start walking, or you start paddling, you go, this planet is huge.
And we deceive ourselves into thinking like, oh yeah, we figured it out. But if you fly in a Cessna over the Amazon and you look at a winding little golden river and you're looking out over a vast picture of football fields with this tiny little golden filament going through it.
And the next one of those golden rivers, which by the way, that river is like a hundred meters across this giant water artery that's been flowing through the jungle. The next one, as you're in this Cessna looking out over the jungle, The next one is barely in your peripheral vision over there. So you're talking about like 110 miles that way is the next... Dense, dense jungle. Dense jungle.
No trails. Not even the tribes. Nothing. No one there. Who the fuck has explored that? They don't know what's under there. No one's explored it. Not to mention... 50% of the life in the rainforest, you forget it's a 3D environment. When you're on the plains, the animals are at eye level. When you're in the rainforest, you're under 160 feet of canopy.
So it's like being at the bottom of the ocean and we don't have access. Who can climb 160 foot tree that goes straight up like the World Trade Center? Right. Pretty much no one. You're only going to see the tree tops if you do. And you're only going to see the tree tops. So scientists have had very limited access to the rainforest canopy where 50% of the life in the rainforest is. Wow.
So, so much of the planet has not been described or studied. And it's so funny when I watch people go, yeah, everything's been explored. And it's like, bro, I could take you somewhere right now and show you the places where no one's been. And they haven't flown over with LIDAR yet. And there are things that we don't know. There's like a lot of stuff that we don't know about.
And I've seen, because I've seen it with my own eye. I don't believe shit. That's why I have to touch the wet paint. Because I don't believe shit unless I've seen it myself. Yeah.
Well, listen, brother, I'm glad you're out there. It makes life more interesting.
I'm trying.
I appreciate everything you do and I appreciate you and thank you for coming in here. It's a lot of fun. Tell everybody how they can get a hold of you and how they can see what you're up to.
Absolutely. Jungle Keepers is growing. We're protecting more rainforests than ever. Junglekeepers.org. We are bringing people to the rainforest. We're supporting the indigenous conservation efforts. We're crossing 100,000 acres. The more people that come in and help... we can actually find a way to protect the Amazon rainforest and stop feeling guilty about it.
Also, Jamie, if you just, last thing, pull up that rhino transport picture. I'm taking people out into Africa with the experts at that place, Buffalo Kloof, and people can actually come with me to do some incredible front lines on the ground work with endangered rhinos in Africa, like this type of shit. Wow, that's crazy. Absolutely.
The people who are holding back the extinction of these animals, who are doing kind of research and work protecting these amazing animals-
junglekeepers.org paulrosley.com instagram all that other shit and uh we're doing some truly miraculous stuff and a lot of it has to do joe with the fact that you came in and uh told everybody about it so thank you my pleasure i'm i'm happy for you wild out there it is so much thank you my pleasure all right bye everybody