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