Paul Rosolie: Amazon Jungle, Uncontacted Tribes, Anacondas, and Ayahuasca | Lex Fridman Podcast #369
- It was just like one of those moments where we saw it at the same time. And we were standing by the tail, and the snake was so big that, I mean, this must have been a
25-foot anaconda dead asleep, with a probably a 16-foot
anaconda sprawled across her. And they're laying in the starlight and we're floating on top of a lake, standing there in the
middle of the Amazon. And JJ just, I could feel the
blood drain outta his face. And as like a however old I was, you know, maybe 20 years old. I just said if we could
somehow show people this, we'll be on the front cover
in National Geographic and we can protect all
the jungle that we want. And so I tried to catch it. Yeah, so I jumped on the snake, and the only measurement
I have of this animal is that when I wrapped my arms around it, I couldn't touch my fingers. And so I was, you know,
my feet were dragging. And to her credit, this anaconda did not turn around and eat me, 'cause her head was, you know, this big. And she went and she reached
the edge of the grass island and she starts plunging into the dark. And so I'm watching the stars vibrate as this anaconda is going, and I had to make the choice
of either going head first down into the black, which, no thank you, or stopping and just keeping
my hand on this thing as it raced by me. And I just felt the scales
and the muscle and the power go by and then eventually
taper down to the tail until it slipped away into the darkness. And I was laying there, just panting. - The following is a
conversation with Paul Rosalie, a conservationist,
explorer, author, filmmaker, and real life Tarzan. Since, for much of the past 17 years, Paul has lived deep in
the Amazon rainforest protecting endangered species
and trees from poachers, loggers and foreign nations funding them. He is the founder of Junglekeepers, which today protects over 50,000 acres of threatened habitat. And Paul is one of the most incredible human beings I've ever met. I hope to travel with him in
the Amazon jungle one day, because in his eyes, I saw a truth that can only be discovered
directly by spending time among the immensity and power
of nature at its purest. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Paul Rosolie. In 2006, at 18 years old, you fled New York and
traveled to the Amazon. This started a journey that
I think last to this day. Tell me about this first leap. What in your heart pulled you
towards the Amazon jungle? - From the time I was, you
know, three years old, I'd say, you know, it was dinosaurs,
wildlife documentary, Steve Irwin, you name it. And when my parents said, you know, nature versus nurture,
they nurtured my nature. I was always just drawn
to streams, forests, I wanted to go explore
where the little creek led, I wanted to see the
turtles and the snakes. And so I was a kid that hated school, did not get along with school. I was dyslexic and didn't
know it, undiagnosed, I didn't read until I
was like 10 years old, like, way behind. And so for me, the forest was safety. Like, I remember one time in first grade they had you doing those
multiplication sheets. That was pure hell for me. And so I actually got so
upset that I couldn't do it, that I ran out the
classroom, ran out the door, and went to the nearest woods and I stayed there 'cause that was safe. And so for me, once I got to
the point where I was like, high school isn't working out, I had incredibly supportive
parents that were like, "Look, just get out. Take your GED, get outta
high school after 10th grade. You gotta go to college, but start doing something you love." And so I saved up and bought
a ticket to the Amazon and met some indigenous guys. The second I walked in
that forest, it was like, it's like the first
scene in "Jurassic Park" when they see the dinosaurs
and they go, oh, this is it. I walked in there and just, I looked at those giant trees, I saw leafcutter ants in real
life, and I just went, "Oh." It was like the movie
just started, you know, that was when I came online. - Can you put into words what is it about that place that felt like home?
What was it that drew you? What aspect of nature?
The streams, the water, the forest, the jungle, the animals, what drew you? - It's just, it's always been in my blood. I mean, for any forest, I mean, whether it's upstate
New York or India or Borneo. But the Amazon, it's all of
that turned up to this level where everything is superlatively diverse. You know, you have more plants and animals than anywhere else on earth. Not just now, but in the
entire fossil record. The Andes Amazon interface, terrestrially, that's where it is. That's the greatest library
of life that has ever existed. And so you're so stimulated, you're so overwhelmed with
color and diversity and beauty and this overwhelming sense
of natural majesty of these, you know, thousand-year-old trees, and half the life is up in
the canopy of those trees. We don't even have access to it, there's stuff without names
walking around on those branches and it's like, it just
takes you somewhere. And so going there, it was like, you know, the guys I met just opened
the door and they were like, how far do you wanna go
down the rabbit hole? How much of this do you want to see? - You mentioned Steve Irwin. You list a bunch of heroes that
you have, he's one of them. And you said that when you're
unsure about a decision, you ask yourself, WWSD,
what would Steve do? Why is that such a good
heuristic for life, what would Steve do? - He's a human being that, like, everything we saw from
Steve Irwin was positive. Everything was with a smile on his face. If he was getting bitten
by a reticulated python, he was smiling. If he was getting destroyed in the news for feeding a crocodile
with his son too close, he was trying to explain
to people why it's okay and why we have to love these animals. And everything was about love, everything was about, you
know, wildlife and protecting. And to me, a person like that, that where you only see positive things, that's a role model. - And it's just like an endless curiosity and hunger to explore
this world of nature. - Yeah, and an insatiable
madness for wildlife. I mean, the guy was just so much fun. - I gotta, if it's okay, read to you a few of your own words. You open (chuckles)
- [Paul] Oh boy. - the book "Mother of God" with a passage that I think beautifully paints a scene. Before he died, Santiago
Durand told me a secret. It was late at night
in a palm-thatched hut on a bank of the Tambopata River, deep in the southwestern
corner of the Amazon Basin. Besides a mud oven, two
wild boar heads sizzling, sizzled in a cradle of embers, their protruding tusks
curling in static agony as they cooked. The smell of burning cecropia wood and singed flesh filled the air. Woven basket containing monkey
skulls hung from the rafters where stars peeked through
the gaps in the thatching. A pair of chickens huddled in
the corner, conversing softly. We sat facing each
other on sturdy benches, across a table hewn from
a single cross section of some massive tree, now
nearly consumed by termites. The song of a million insects
and frogs filled the night. Santiago's cigarette
trembled in the aged fingers as he leaned close over the candlelight to describe a place hidden in the jungle. That line, the songs of a million insects and frogs filled the night,
for some reason hit me. What's it like sitting
there conversing among so many living creatures all around you? - Every night in the jungle, you live in constant awareness of that, out there in the darkness
are literally millions of heartbeats around you. And so, like, we exist in this, you know, domesticated,
paved world most of the time. But when you go out there past the roads and the telephone poles and the hospitals, and you make it out into earth, just wild earth and there's no, you know, it's not like this is a national park, there's no rescue helicopter
waiting to come get you, you are out there and you're
surrounded at night by, I mean, there are snakes and
jaguars and frogs and insects, and all this stuff just
crawling through the swamps and through the trees
and through the branches. We put on headlamps and
go out into the night and just absolutely fall
to our knees with wonder of the things that we see, it's absolutely incredible. - And most of it doesn't make
sounds like the insects do. - The insects do, the frogs do, you have some of the
night birds making sounds, but a lot of it, everything has evolved
to be silent, invisible. I mean, everything there is on the list. There's another line in "Mother
of God" where I said like, you know, life is just like
a temporary moment of stasis and like the churning
recycling death march that is the Amazon like. It's been called the greatest
natural battlefield on earth. I mean, in any square acre, there's more stuff eating other
things than anywhere else. And you go through a swamp in
the Amazon and there's like, there's tarantulas floating on the water, there's frogs in the trees, there's tadpoles hanging from leaves waiting to drop into the water, there's fish waiting to eat them, there's birds in the trees. You literally are
surrounded by so many things that your brain can't process it. It's just overwhelming life. - Churning death march. Some of the creatures are waiting and some of them are being a
bit more proactive about it. What do you make of that
churning death march, the amount of murder that's
happening all around you at all scales? What is that? You know, we dramatize wars and the millions of people
that were lost in World War II, some of them tortured, some of them dying with a gun in hand, some of them civilians, but
it's just millions of people. What about the billions and billions and billions of organisms
that are just being murdered all around you? Does that change your view of nature, of life here? - I've always kind of wondered like that when you see like a
wildebeest taken down by lions and eaten from behind while it's alive and it makes you question God. You know, you go, how
could they let this happen? In the Amazon, I find personally that these natural processes
make up almost a religion, that it reminds you how temporary we are, that, you know, the botflies that are trying to get into your skin and the mosquitoes that are
trying to suck your blood. When you sweat, you see the, you literally can like hold out your arm and watch the condensation
come off of your skin and rise up into the
canopy and join the clouds and rain back down in the afternoon, and then you drink the river
and start it all over again. And it's like, it's flowing through you. So the Amazon reminds me that there's a lot that we don't understand. And so when it comes to that overwhelming and collective murder,
as Werner Herzog put it, it's just part of the show, it's part of the freak show
of the Amazonian night. - I see you in certain moments able to feel one with a mosquito that's trying to kill you slowly. - One with the mosquito is a stretch. - Is it always the enemy? What I mean is, like, you're part of the machine there, right? - Yeah, and it's like fair play. It's like fair play. So we have bullet ants and you know, you get nailed by a bullet
ant, and you just go. - Yeah, well done. Well done. - Yeah, today's over, I'm going back to bed and
I'm taking a pile of Tylenol. - Do you think in that
sense, when you're out there, are you a part of nature or
are you separate from nature? Is man a part of nature or separate? - I think that's what's
so refreshing about it, is that out there you truly are. And so whether we're bringing
researchers or film crews, or whether we're just out there
ourselves on an expedition, you truly are a part of nature. And so one of the things that
my team and I started doing when I became friends with these guys, this is a family of indigenous people from the community of
Infierno and they took me in. And as we got close, they
started saying, you know, you can come with us on
our annual hunting trip. And I went okay. And it's four guys in a boat, and you don't wanna get your clothes wet, so we're all in our boxers
in a canoe with a motor going out past the places that have names, and you're out in the
middle of the jungle. And the thing is like
when your motor breaks, you are so quickly reminded of the inherent truths, like the things that
nobody can argue with. And we live in such a human world where everything is debatable, religion and politics and
perspectives on everything. And then you get down to
this point where it's like, if we don't figure something out, the river is going to
rise and take the boat. That's the truth, and ain't nobody gonna
like argue with that. And it's like, to me there's
a beauty in that truth because then all of us are
united there in that truth against like the natural facts around us. And so to me, that's a state where I
feel very, very at home. - And the Amazon is more efficient
than most places on earth at swallowing you up. - Oh God, yeah.
- Okay. (both chuckles) So just to linger on that because you've spoken about
Francisco de Orellana, who's this explorer in 1541 and 42 that sailed the length of the Amazon, probably one of the first. And there's just a few things
I should probably read. I should probably find a good book on him because the guy seems like a gangster. - [Paul] Yes, there's
some great books on him. - So he sailed, he led the expedition
that sailed all the way from one end to the other, there's like a rebuilding of a ship. - [Paul] Which is insanity. - Yeah. So because it speaks to the thing, it's like nobody's gonna come
and rescue you, you have to. If your boat dies, you
gotta have to rebuild it. - Yeah, so they came down the Andes, entered in the headwaters of the Amazon, constructed some sort of
raft boat, craft something, and made it down the entire Amazon Basin. Of course his stories are the ones that led to the Amazon
being called the Amazon because he reported tribes of women, he reported these large cities, places where the tribes lived
on farms of river turtles that they corralled and they
lived off of that protein. And then when they came out
to the mouth of the Amazon, if I remember it correctly, that just through
navigation and the stars, they were able to calculate
where the way was back to Spain and make a boat seaworthy
enough to bring them home. Incredible. Absolutely. - Do people like that inspire
you, your own journey? Like, what gives you kind of strength that in these harshness of times and harshness of conditions
you can persevere? - Yeah, I mean, you look
at the stories of people that are so, you know, these stories of people that have overcome incredible suffering like
that or like, you know, what Shackleton did or
something like that. And so like when your, you know, your tent gets washed away, you go to sleep and
the river rises 20 feet and washes away your tent. And you crawl out and
all you have is a machete and a headlamp, literally
no bag, no food, no nothing. And you go, wow, the next six days before I reach back to a town
is gonna be just pure hell. I'm gonna be sleeping on
the ground covered in ants, destroyed by mosquitoes. And then it becomes, you
know, am I in any capacity, any percentage as tough
and resilient as the people that I've read about that
have made it through things far worse than this? And then that's the game you play. - What goes through your head when all you got is the
headlamp and the machete? So are you thinking at all? Like, I've gotten a chance to interact quite a lot with Elon Musk and he constantly puts out fires having to run several companies. There's never a kind of whiny
deliberation about issues, you're just always one
step forward how to solve, this is the situation,
how do you solve it. Or do you also have a
kind of self-motivating, almost egotistical, like,
I'm a bad motherfucker, I can handle anything, almost like trying to fake it till you make it kind of thing? - There was a little bit of that. - [Lex] With your machete in the hand. - I got a sword. There may may have been
a little bit of that when I was like 14, 15 years old, I'd like have a hunting knife and my dog and I'd go out into the
woods in like the Catskills and survive for a weekend, which my rule was one match. You know, you get one match
and you gotta make shelter and then, I'd bring like a steak and make a fire and stuff. And at that point there
maybe was some ego, but in the Amazon you get stripped down so completely that you, it's like that thing like, you know, watch the atheism leave everyone's body when they think they're about to die. It's like when you find yourself staring up at the Amazon
at night and you go there is no hope of getting outta here. I mean, I was once lost in a
swamp where it took me days to get out of there. And there was moments where I just said, you know, this is clearly it. There's no ego there, there's just hope. You start realizing what you believe in, and praying that you'll be okay, and then trying to summon
whatever you know about how to survive, and that's it. And so it's actually, again, it's kind of a blissful state if you can walk that line
between adventure and tragedy and sort of keep yourself right
at that very, very fine line without going over. - Ever fear of death? Ever fear, terror? - No, I don't want to die. I wanna, you know, I love the people in my life and there's a lot of things I want to do, but every time I've been
certain that I'm gonna die, I've been very, very calm. Very calm, and just sort of like, okay, well if this is how the movie goes then this is how it goes. - [Lex] Almost accepting.
- Yeah. Which is reassuring. - You've mentioned Herzog, just to venture down this road
of death and fear and so on. There's been a few mad men
like you in this world, he's documented a couple of them. What lessons do you
draw from "Grizzly Man" or "Into The Wild,"
those kinds of stories? Were you ever afraid that
you'll be one of those stories? - Oh yeah. I actually think
that it's in "Mother of God" where I said I almost
"Into The Wild"ed myself. Like, I went out there and really, I got so lost and so destroyed that I said this is gonna be the next one. You know, this is gonna be the
next story of some idiot kid from New York who went to the Amazon thinking he was Percy
Fawcett and then vanished. Because if you do vanish out there, your body's gonna be
consumed in a matter of days, like, two. If we see an animal dead on a trail, you got dung beatles and
fly larva and vultures, and there's a whole pecking order, you know, you get the black vultures, the yellow vultures, the king
vulture, they all come in. That thing is picked
clean in a couple of days. - What would be the creature
that eats most of you in that situation? - Probably the vultures.
- [Lex] The vultures? - Probably the vultures and the maggots. It's really quick. It's really, really quick. Even as far as like you
can't leave food out, you know, like if you
have a piece of chicken, you say, "Oh, I'll eat it in
the morning," you leave it out. You can't do that, it's
not good by morning. - "Grizzly Man" for example, like what? 'Cause that's a beautiful story. It's both comical and genius, and especially the way Herzog tells it. Well, first do you like
the way he told the story? Do you like Herzog? - I do. I love Herzog, and
I love his documentary, the "Burden of Dreams," which is in the Amazon not
very far from where I work. And the sheer madness that
you see this man undergoing of just trying to recreate
hauling a boat over a mountain, is wild. And the extras that he
hired to play the natives are the, I think, they're
Machiguenga tribesmen. They just look like all the
guys that I hang out with. And it's like, you know, they're doing all this
stuff in the jungle that months and months and months, and you can just see him
deteriorating with madness because the jungle, you know, your boat, you know how many times
I've tied up a boat to the side of the river? This just happened like
a year and a half ago. Through COVID I pretty much
just lived in the jungle for a while. And there was nobody there
and there was no support. And I tied up my boat, and
the rain is just hammering, like the universe is trying
to rip the earth in half. The rain is just going
and the river's rising, and I tied up the boat. But then you go to sleep and you gotta wake up every
two hours to go check the boat, and the boat is thrashing back and forth. And so all night, every two
hours I'd wake up barefoot in driving rain, like, you
know, golf ball raindrops and just go down, check the boat. And then by morning I was like, I fell asleep, woke up, checked the boat. And then I was like, I'm
just gonna go make coffee, I was so done, I was so at the end of my rope every time I'm bailing
the boat out and stuff. And then we got 15 minutes of heavy rain that filled the boat, sank it. And so now I'm stuck
up there with no boat. And it's like that type
of thing where it's like, no matter how hard you try
the jungle's just like, "Listen, you're nothing. You are nothing." And so it's that constant reminder. And so Herzog really threw
himself into that, in that Film, and it's brilliant to watch. - What do you think he meant by the line that you include in your book, "It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger," said in a German accent. - Yeah, overwhelming
and collective murder. (both laughs) - So he didn't really appreciate
the beauty of the murder? - I think he appreciated it,
but to him it was very dark. You know, I think he
saw the darkness in it, and that's there, it sure is. As soon as you do ayahuasca, that door opens and you see the darkness 'cause it brings you
right into the jungle, like the heart of it. But I think that for him, it is, I think that darkness is
something that he embraces and that he loves. There's another film of his, and I don't know if this is accurate, but my memory has it
that there's a penguin, and I think it's in Antarctica, and the penguin's going
in the wrong direction, away from the ocean. And I feel like he goes
on this monologue about how he's just had enough. This one penguin is just
marching towards, you know. - Yeah. Well, because I remember that clip from that documentary. And what Werner says is that
the penguin is deranged, that he's lost his mind. And I took offense to that because maybe that's a brave explorer. Like, how do you know there's
not a lot more going on? Like, it could be a love story, those penguins get super attached. - Maybe his mate was over there and he had to go find her, like, you know. - Or it's a lost mate, and he last time he saw was going in that direction. So this is like the great explorer. We assume animals are like
the average of the bell curve, like every animal we interact
with is just the average, but they're special ones, just
like there's special humans. That could be a special penguin. - It could have been. And
I had the same thought where I was like, I found it beautiful
how he interpreted it. What I took away from
that was I found that Werner Herzog's monologue there was brilliantly dark and also comedic, but maybe irrelevant biologically
speaking towards penguins, like, you know, which
happens a lot with animals. I find like, there's so many times where I'll find people be like, "Do you think that animals
can show compassion?" And you hear like a bunch of people that have never left the
pavement talking about like, "Wow, this one animal
helped another animal." It's like, go ask Jane Goodall if animals can show compassion. Go talk to anybody that works on a daily basis with animals. And so like to me, there's a always a
little bit of frustration in hearing people sort of
like pleasantly surprised that animals aren't just these automatons of just, what's the word? Like, programmed, you know, nothingness. - First of all, what have
you learned about life from Jane Goodall? 'Cause she spoke highly of your book and you lister her as one of the mentors. But what kind of wisdom about
animals do you draw from her? - The wisdom from Jane is so diverse. I mean, first of all, she's
someone that, you know, the work that she did at
at the time she did it was so incredible because I
mean, she was out there at a very young age doing that field work. She was naming her subjects, which everyone said you shouldn't do. She broke every rule,
she broke every rule. She was assigning, and everyone said, "You're anthropomorphizing these animals by saying that they're
doing this and that." She was like, no, they're interacting. They're showing love,
they're showing compassion, they're showing hate,
they're showing fear. And she broke straight
through all of those things, and it paid off in dividends for her. - Do you see the animals
as having all those human-like emotions of anger,
of compassion, of longing, of loneliness from what you've seen especially with mammals, but with different species out
there? Do they have all that? - It depends on the animal. If you're talking on
the scale of a cockroach to an elephant, you know, it's
like a lot of these things, and I wonder about this
stuff all the time. You know, I'll have a
praying mantis on my hand then just go, "What is
going through your mind?" Or you'll see a spider make
a complex decision and go, "I'm gonna make my web there." You know, and you go, how are
you doing this? How are you? Because he made a calculation
there, you know, it's smart. I was in the jungle not that
long ago and I was walking. And all of a sudden this dove comes flying through the
jungle right up to my face, lands on a branch, like
right here, right next to me. I look at the dove, dove looks at me. And she's like, "Hey." And she's clearly, like, panting. And I'm like, why are you
so close? This is weird. And she's like, "I know." And then, an ornate hawk-eagle
flies up 10-feet away, looks at both of us and just like scowls, and like sticks up its head feathers and then just flies off. And the dove is like, "Sweet, thanks," and then flew in the other direction. And I was like, "Dude, you just
used me to save your life." The dove knew. - See. But this is what, because there's different, you know, there's Mike Tyson and
there's Albert Einstein. And I sometimes I wonder when
I look at different creatures, even insects, like, is this
Mike Tyson or is this Einstein? Or other kinds of personal, like, is this a New Yorker
or is this a Midwesterner? Or is this like a San Francisco
barista of the insects? Like, there's all kinds of personalities, you never know, so you can't like project. If you run into a bear
and he's very angry, it could be just the asshole New Yorker. - Yeah, sure.
(Lex chuckles) What are you saying
about New Yorkers, man? - Exactly. Point well made. So speaking about
communicating with a dove, you first met the crew in the Amazon. You talk about JJ as somebody who can communicate with animals. What do you think JJ
is able to see and hear and feel that others don't, that he's able to
communicate with the animals? - When I say this is the most skilled jungle man I've ever seen, and I know so many guys in the region. He has libraries of
information in his cranium that we cannot fathom, it's just stunning. Like, you know, I have seen him use medicinal plants to cure things that western doctors couldn't cure. I've seen him navigate in such a way that he's not using the stars, he's not using any discernible, you know. It's like when elephants, sometimes you'll watch a herd of elephants and they'll be like, "Yo, let's
go. We're going this way," and you'll see them sort of communicate, but there's no audible sound. They'll just decide that they're going, and they all do it. JJ has this way in the jungle
of, you know, he'll stop and he'll go, "Wait," and you go, "What is it?" And he goes, "There's a
herd of peccary coming." And I'm like, where? Based on what? And he's like, "Just wait, you'll see," and he'll sit there. - [Lex] You think that's just experience? - It's incredible experience. It's growing up barefoot in the Amazon. And the gift is that he
can speak fluent English. And so when I bring
tourists and scientists or news reporters down there,
he can communicate with them. He's actually good on camera 'cause he doesn't care about cameras. And like for instance, we were walking up a
stream a few months ago, and I went, "Hey, look, Jaguar tracks." And he went, "Whoa." And I was like, "What, Jaguar tracks?" And he's like, "No, look. Look harder." And I was like, the toes
are deeper than the back? And he was like, "Uh-huh,
and where are they?" And I was like, "By the water." And I was like, "The Jaguar is drinking," it was leaning to drink. And he was like, that's right. He's like, "Now look behind you." I look behind me and there's scat, there's a big log of
Jaguar shit sitting there and it's got butterflies all over it. - [Lex] Fresh?
- Pretty fresh. And then there's another
one that's less fresh. And so he's teaching me as he does, he's just going, "Look
at this, look at this. Is that one as fresh as this one?" No. And then he goes, "Now look up." I look up. There's
three vultures above us. The kill is near us, the jaguar has been coming
multiple times to the river to drink as it's feasting
on whatever it killed. And he's going, "It's within
30 feet of us right now." And it's like, I'm like, oh look,
impression's in the sand, he's like, I just drew
19 conclusions from that. It's like watching
Sherlock Holmes at work. - Reconstructing the crime scene. - [Paul] Incredible. - Does that apply also
to be able to communicate with the actual animals? Like, read into their
body movements directly into whatever that dove was saying to you, to be able to understand? Or is that all just kind of
taking in the complex structure of the crime scene, of the interactions of
the different animals of the environment and so on? Like, what is that that you're able to communicate with another creature, that he was able to communicate
with another creature? - He knows the intention of pose, he knows the habits, he
knows the perspective. When he talks about animals, he'll talk about each
species as if it's a person. So he'll say, "Oh, the Jaguar, she never likes to let you see her." And so he'll come back from
the jungle and he'll go, "Oh, I was watching monkeys and this Jaguar was also
watching the monkeys, but I was being so
quiet she didn't see me. And then when she see me,
she feels so embarrassed and she go." And he'll tell you this story like as if he had this interaction
with his neighbor. And he'll be like, "Oh, the
pukakunga it never does that, you won't see it do that." One time he caught a fish,
it was such a big fish, it was this big beautiful
pseudoplatystoma, this tiger catfish, this amazing old fish, and they're all excited to eat it. And I felt so bad watching
this thing gasp on the sand. And I went, you know what? We don't need this, this is for fun and threw it back. And then I took my hand and I went, and I made like drag marks. Like, so I could say it
snuck back in the water. And so he walks up, he looks at it and he
was like, "I hate you." And I went, what? No. I said, "It must have just." He went, "That's not what happens." He goes, "It goes like this when it go," he knew the track of a fish. And I was like, "Oh yeah." I was like, "All right, JJ, I'm sorry. I'll catch you another fish." - So stepping back to that way
you opened "Mother of God." Who was Santiago Durand, and
what secret did he tell you? - JJ's father was, at some point, he was a policeman, at some point when he was a teenager, he was working on the boats
that before this little gold mining city of Puerto Maldonado grew, the only way to get supplies in was to take canoes up the Tambopata River up to the next state, which is Puno where the mules would come
down from the mountains with supplies and then
he'd pilot the boats down. But they didn't have motors at that time, so he would be pulling the boat. So he became this
physically terrifying man. And I met him in when he was in his 80s and he was still living out
in the jungle by himself. And I mean, he's seen
an anaconda eat a tapir, which is a cow-sized mammal in the Amazon, he'd seen uncontacted tribes face-to-face. He once killed an 11-foot electric eel, opened the back of the thing's neck, removed the nerve that he says was the source of the electric. Then he cut his forearm, placed that nerve into his forearm, wrapped it with a dead toad, and claims that it would give him strength through the rest of his life. And continued to be a jungle
badass until the day he quietly leaned back at a
barbecue and ceased to be alive. The man was incredible. But the secret that he told
us was that if you wanna find big anacondas, you know, if you wanna see the Yacumama, he was like, "You have to go to the boayo, the place of boas, the place that we came to
call the floating forest. And so he sent us there and it
became like this pilgrimage. You know, in the Amazon, a lot of the creation
myths are based around the anaconda coming down from the heavens and carving the rivers across the jungle. And if you look at the
rivers, it looks like that, it looks like the path of an anaconda crawling through the jungle,
it's even the right color. And so from the reference
to the tribes of women, the Amazons to the anaconda mother, everything in the Amazon
is very feminine based. Even the trees, the largest
trees in the jungle, the mother of the forest,
the Madre de la selva, is the kapok tree, and it's
just this monster tree, these beautiful ancient trees. And that was the beginning
of the transition that we made from me
being like, I hate school, I want to go on adventures. You know, Jane Goodall got
to do all this amazing stuff. I'm just a kid stuck here to eventually becoming
something that had to do with where my identity became the jungle, where my life became the jungle. The secret that he told
us opened that door, because when we started working
with these giant snakes, it started getting attention. It started getting people
to go, what are you doing? And it started allowing me
to have experiences that solidified and nailed down the fact that this wasn't just like a weekend retreat, this was something that I was born to do. - And gave you more and more motivation to go into these uncharted territory of the Yacumama?
- [Paul] Yacumama. - Which, just to step back, what nations are we talking about here? Some geography, what are we talking about? Where is this? - [Paul] So I'm in Peru, we're in Peru. - Which is a South American nation. - Peru is a South American nation. Brazil has 60% of the Amazon, which is unfortunate because
anything that happens politically in Brazil has a
massive impact on the Amazon. Peru has the western Amazon, and Ecuador has a little
bit of the western Amazon. The western Amazon is
where the Andes mountains, the cloud forests, which
is a megabiodiverse biome, falls into the western Amazon lowlands. And so you have the meeting of
these two incredible biomes, and that's what makes this
like superlative, incredible, you know, glowing moment of life on earth. So yeah, we're in Peru
in the Madre de Dios, which is the mother of God, which I always thought was
such a beautiful, you know, the jungle is the source of all life. And so we were with the Ese-Eja people, and they belong to a community
that's called Infierno, which was given by the missionaries who when they tried to go
bring these people Jesus, got so many arrows shot at them they just called it hell. And so, Santiago Durand
helped unite these tribes that were sort of scattered
through the jungle and get them status,
government-recognized status as indigenous people. So he was sort of a hero, he was sort of a legend for
a lot of the stuff he'd done out barefoot with just like a rifle and a machete in the jungle. He had 19 children, and the last one, I think the
20th child that he adopted was a refugee from the Shining Path that floated down the river, and he just took him in. This is just a guy that was a, you know, everything he did, like when he died, the whole region showed up. He was somebody, so just
the fact that I know him gives me street credit. Like, the fact that I knew him, I can go like, oh, I knew Santiago and people are like, no. I'm like, yeah, yeah. - So you had to get
integrated to the culture, to the place that mean,
in every single way, which is tough for you
being from New York. - Yeah. It could have been tough, but I took to it. You know, the jungle, they were very, you know, JJ's teaching me about medicines and we were doing bird
surveys and, you know, taking data on macaw populations. JJ was just like, "You really wanna," like, he goes, "You gotta sleep." And I was like, "I only
have a few weeks here, I don't know if I'm ever gonna come back, I'm never going to sleep." So we'd be out every night looking for all the wildlife we could. I wanted to take photos,
I wanted to see things. And then, the exchange came with that, he was like, "I'm terrified of snakes." And I said, "Oh, I've
always worked with snakes." I said, "I'll teach you
how to handle snakes." And then we just had this
like little exchange. And then when I left, after
my first time back in 2006, you know, I said, "How can I help?" And they were like, look, you know, we're out here trying to protect this little island of forest
that is going to be bulldozed. And the more people that you can bring, the more knowledge and the more awareness that you can bring to this, it'll help. And so really at that
age, at 18 years old, I sort of started dabbling
with the idea of that I could be part of helping these people to protect this place that I loved. And of course, at that time, that idea seemed like too large of a dream or too large of a challenge to that I could actually impact it. - So what was the journey of
looking for these giant snakes, of looking for anacondas?
And what are anacondas? - Anaconda is the largest snake on earth. So you have reticulated
pythons in southeast Asia, they're actually longer, but anacondas are these massive
boas, they give live birth. And unlike a lot of other species, so an anaconda starts off,
a little two-foot anaconda, just a little thicker than
your finger, a little baby. And they're food for cane
toads, herons, crocodiles, you name it, they're pretty
harmless, defenseless. But as they grow, they're eating the fish, they're eating the crocs. And then they grow a little more and they're eating things like capybara and they're eating larger prey. And then at the end of their
life, a female anaconda, you're talking about a 25, 30-foot, 300, 400-pound snake with a
head bigger than a football. And these things, that
means that they impact the entire ecosystem,
which is very unique. - [Lex] Moves up the food
chain to become basically-- - An apex predator.
- [Lex] Yeah, apex predator. - The apex predator of the rivers, and so. - That's so interesting, just eating your way up the food chain. - Eating your way up the food
chain, if you can survive. And like they're constantly
at war with everything else. So I showed up in the Amazon, I was like, so where the anacondas at? And they were like, oh,
no, no, it's not like that. They're like, you have
to find these things. They're subterranean, they're
living in the special swamps. People kill them. And so we went to the floating forest after we'd come back from an expedition. We'd caught like a 12-foot anaconda. And now it's become like
this like classic photo of me and JJ with this
anaconda over our shoulders. And we were like, you know,
12 days out in the jungle on a hunting trip, we came back and we showed his dad. And Santiago looked at us and he was like, "That's the smallest anaconda
on deep dive I've ever seen." He's like, you guys are pathetic. - [Lex] Oh man, 12 foot. - And he was like, "Look, you go." He was like, go. He's like, "I'm giving you permission. Go to the boayo, go to
the floating forest." And so we went to this place, and we reached there at night. And it was me, JJ and one of his brothers. And his brother took one look
at it and was like, "I'm out," and he started walking back. And me and JJ get to
the edge of this thing, and this is our friendship,
it's about this two idiots pushing each other farther and farther. And like, I like put a foot on
the ground and it all shook, and the stars are
reflecting on the ground. And what we realize is that it's a lake with floating grass on top of it. And there's islands of
grass floating on this lake, very "Life of Pie," and the tops of trees
are coming out of the surface of the water. And so we start walking
across this, and JJ's going, "These are big anacondas." And I'm going, "JJ, that's
a two-foot wide smooth path sneaking through the grass.
There's no anaconda that big." And he was going, "Shh,
they're listening." I said, "They don't have ears." He goes, "They're listening." And it's like, we're
walking and we're walking, maybe it's like 1:00 AM or something. And it was just like one of those moments where we saw it at the same time. And we were standing by the tail. And the snake was so big that, I mean, this must have been a
25-foot anaconda dead asleep, with a probably a 16-foot
anaconda sprawled across her. And they're laying in the starlight and we're floating on top of a lake standing there in the
middle of the Amazon. And JJ just, I could feel the
blood drain outta his face. And as like a however old
I was, maybe 20 years old, I just said, "If we could
somehow show people this, we'll be on the front cover
of National Geographic and we can protect all
the jungle that we want." And so I tried to catch it. Yeah, so I jumped on the snake and the only measurement I
have of this animal is that when I wrapped my arms around it, I couldn't touch my fingers. And so I was, you know,
my feet were dragging. And to her credit, this
anaconda did not turn around and eat me 'cause her head
was, you know, this big. And she went, and she reached
the edge of the grass island, and she starts plunging into the dark. And so I'm watching the stars vibrate as this anaconda is going. And I had to make the choice
of either going headfirst down into the black, which, no thank you, or stopping and just keeping
my hand on this thing as it raced by me. And I just felt the scales
and the muscle and the power go by and then eventually
tapered down to the tail until it slipped away into the darkness. And I was laying there, just panting. And then I turned around and
went, "JJ, what the fuck? Where were you man?" He was just like completely
white, circuits blown, and I had to go and kind
of like take care of him. I was like, "Are you okay?" And he was like, "No." You know, he just couldn't. And so we came back with that. And then after that we were like, okay, clearly the parameters of reality that we thought were possible
are just a tiny fraction of what's out there. That sort of recalibrated us, we were like, okay. We're rubbing up against things that are bigger than we
thought were ever possible. And so we were like, okay, now we need to concentrate on this. - So how dangerous is
that creature to humans? - To humans, not at all. Our cook's father-in-law
was eaten by an anaconda, but like, you know. - Love the way you say that and tell that story. Sometimes it happens. - It happens. I mean, come on, every now and then somebody
gets stung by a bee and dies. Like, you know, once
in a while it happens. But you gotta have a really
big anaconda really hungry. And like, anybody that works in the wild, I mean just, you know. If you walk up to a crocodile, even a giant Nile crocodile,
you walk up to them, most of the time they're
gonna run into the water. They don't want confrontation, they hunt in their way
on their terms, sneaky, you're not gonna see him. And so with an anaconda, it's like, yeah. I mean the guy who got eaten, like if you're drunk and you
go to the edge of the water and you go for a midnight swim by yourself in an Amazonian lake, I
mean, whose fault is that? - But if you jump on an
Anaconda, try to hold on, then you're safe. - Apparently. I think at this point, the research we've done, I
think I've handled or caught over 80 anacondas in the field, and not one of them has bitten me. They always choose flight over fight. They're like, just leave
me alone, let me go. I'm just gonna crawl under this thing. They're not an aggressive
animal, I mean, no snake. The only time I get particular
with like, you know, the words is like, people
go, that's an aggressive, black mambas are aggressive. And I go, no snake is aggressive. A rattlesnake is gonna
rattle to say, hey, back up, cobra's gonna stand up
and show you it's hood. And people go, "Oh look,
he's being aggressive." No, he's not being aggressive, He's going, don't step on
me, don't make me do this. They're actually being very peaceful, that's the way I look at it. 'Cause if there was a cobra
in the corner of this room right now, he would
crawl under the curtain and we'd never see him again. - Yeah, it's like Genghis Khan before conquering the villages, he always offered for
them to join the army. - Doesn't need to be like this. - Yeah, join us, nobody gets destroyed. If you want to be proud
and fight for your country, then we're gonna have to deal with it. - Oblige him. - Exactly, okay. So how do you catch, actually let's step back because there is, in part you are a bit
of a snake whisperer. What is it that others don't understand that you do about snakes? What's maybe a misconception? Or what have you learned
from the language you speak that snakes understand? - I don't know. It's an
animal that has many times in my life I've been
responsible for helping. I started catching snakes
when I was very young, I'd watch Steve Irwin and go
out and catch a garter snake or a black rat snake in New York. And then I had a rule. I said I have to catch a
hundred non-venomous snakes before I'm allowed to
handle a venomous snake, if I ever need to handle a venomous snake. And then, I was on a trail one time, I think in Harriman State Park. And some guy, like some big
hero, he tells us, you know, he is like, "Back up, I'm gonna get this." And he like picks up a
stick and he goes to assault this poor copperhead that's
sitting on the trail. And so, at like 16 years old, I had to go and shoulder
this guy out of the way and I got the thing by the tail and used a stick to very gently
just put it off the trail. Copperhead was not gonna
do anything to him, but he wanted to beat his chest and show his wife that he was tough. But then in India, you know, I've lived in India for
five years at this point in and out, periodically, and snakes are always getting
into people's kitchens. One time we had a king cobra
get into someone's kitchen, an 11-foot snake, like a
monster, like a god of a snake. This thing stood up, it would stand up, he'd be able to look
at you over the table. (Lex laughs) And this terrifying monster thing, this giant gorilla dog thing, like we caught it with one
of the local snake catchers and we brought it out and he goes, "You know, "I wonder why
it was in the kitchen." And I went, yeah, looking for food. And they go, no, they eat snakes. King cobra, ophiophagus
hannah, they eat snakes. And he goes, "She's thirsty." And so we got a bottle of water, and we got footage of this. She's standing up, she's going, "Don't make me kill you,
don't make me kill you. You're scaring me right now,
I don't want to kill you." We took the bottle of water
and we poured it on her nose and she started drinking. You could see her just drinking, and the snake just took this long drink, she drank a whole water bottle. And then said thank you
so much, and crawled off. And it's like, to me, the fact that people are scared of snakes, they have symbolic hatred of snakes, you know, if someone's evil and sneaky, we call them a snake. And like to me it's like,
when I take volunteers or researchers or students
out into the jungle and we find an emerald tree
boa or an Amazon tree boa, or a vine snake. It's one of the few animals, like you can't really catch
a bird and show it to people, you're gonna scare the bird, its feathers are gonna come out, you might give it a heart attack. Snakes, you can lift up a snake. You know, if there's a
snake in the room right now, I could lift it up and say, Lex, here, this is how you hold it, and we could interact
calmly with this thing and then put it back on its
branch and then it'll go. And I've seen what that does to people, I've seen how the wonder in their eyes. And so to me snakes have always
been this incredible link to teach people about
wildlife, about nature. - Because they have
naturally a lot of fear towards this creature and to realize that the
fear is not justified, is not grounded, or is not as
deeply grounded in reality. Of course there's always
New Yorker snakes, right? There's always gonna be an
asshole snake here and there. - Coming for me, man.
(Lex laughs) - Well, okay, so back to the anaconda. How do you catch an anaconda? How do you handle, because
it's such a 25-foot or even 12-foot, these giant snakes. How do you deal with this creature? How do you interact with them? - We had to learn how to do that 'cause one of the first ones
we caught that I would say maybe like a 16 footer,
which is no joke of a snake, girth of a basketball, I'd say. You know, we're on the canoe, and this is the early days. Like, you know, now we're
at a whole different level, but this is back when we
were barefoot and shirtless and just guys in the Amazon. And JJ's like, you know,
I just listen to him. He'd be like, "Get off the
boat, you come from the top, we're gonna come from the bottom." So okay, I just did as I was told. I came in, the snake is
all curled up, dead asleep. She's got some butterflies on her eyes trying to get salt and stuff. And all of a sudden I see the tongue, and I'm like, "She's awake." And I'm like, "Guys, guys, guys." They're paying attention
to not crashing the boat to getting over there, and
we're all trying to run. Snake starts going into the water, so I run ahead, grab this
snake, get her by the head. So you got her by the head, you think, okay, she can't get me. I got her right behind the head and it's about this thick, the neck. - What's that feel like,
sorry to interrupt, like grabbing this thing
with this giant head? - [Paul] It's exciting,
it's amazing, it's scary. - How hard is it to hold? - It's not that hard to hold. The scary part is the moment of, it's like if you've ever done
a cliff dive or something, it's that moment where
you go, do it, do it, the time, like do it. And if your body's
going, "Do not do that," and then you're like, I gotta
just do it, and you do it. - Because you can't just
gently flirt with it, you have to grab the thing.
- No. And it's like crossing the
street when there's a bus coming. It's like, if you hesitate
it's more dangerous. So like, you go for it. And I got her, and I
was like, "I got her." And then a coil goes over my wrists. And all of a sudden my
wrists slap together, and you feel this squeeze
that can crush the bones out of an animal bigger than me. And the next coil comes
very quickly over my neck. And now I'm on my knees with my arms tied, if I wanted to let go of
the snake, I couldn't. And my shoulders are coming together and my collarbone is about to break. And I tried to yell for JJ and
all that came out was, "Ugh," there's nothing. And so that's what they do
to their prey, you know? So I attacked, as far as
the snake knows, I attacked. She doesn't know that I
just wanna measure her. - You started out as the big spoon, but then the snake became the big spoon. - The snake very much
became the big spoon. I would say I was 15 seconds away from having my entire ribcage collapsed, and then JJ showed up and grabbed the tail and just started unwrapping
this thing, and then we got. But now we have a system, now we know, you know. I've gotten more head
catches than anybody, so I'm usually point guy. - You're the first, the point guy. - [Paul] I'm the point guy.
- Okay. Taking the big risky first step. - Yes. Although it could be argued that there's a similarly large
risk for the tail guy because anacondas' defense is to take a giant projectile shit. And so the person that gets the tail is gonna smell like anaconda
for at least a week. - Yeah, so it's the least pleasant. You're taking the most
dangerous one there. They have the least pleasant job, but this is fascinating. - But what's really
fascinating though is that because they're the apex
predator, they're eating the fish, they're eating the birds,
they're eating everything. And everything in this
riparian ecosystem is absorbing the mercury that's coming off
the gold mining in the region. And so anacondas can be indicative for us of how is mercury moving
through this ecosystem. And this is a region where
we've lost hundreds of thousands of acres to artisanal gold
mining where they use mercury to bind the gold. They cut the forest, burn the forest, and then they run water through the sand and the sand particles
have bits of gold in it. Not chunks, but just little, almost microscopic flex of gold, and then they use the
mercury to bind that. And then they burn off the mercury, and that vapor goes up into the clouds. So just like everything else,
it's all connected down there, and then rains down into the rivers. And so the people in the
region are having birth defects from the amount of mercury
that's in the water. And so we were starting, at one point when we were doing most of our anaconda research, we were learning things like, these animals actually
aren't just ambush predators, which is what most of the
literature would tell you, is that anacondas are ambush predators, no, they actually go hunting. They'll go find clay
lakes and salt deposits and they'll wait there, they'll
actually pursue animals. And we were trying to take
tissue samples to find out if anacondas could be used to study how mercury's moving through the ecosystem. And so that was really, it became, can we use these animals
not only as ambassadors for wildlife, because everybody
wants to see the anacondas, but also, you know, what can
we learn from studying this very, very little
understood apex predator. - And one of the things you can learn is how mercury moves through the ecosystem, which can damage the ecosystem in all kinds of different ways. - Yeah, it's brutal man, the gold mining that's
happening down there is. It's funny 'cause we've
been hearing a lot recently about like the cobalt mines in Africa. And it's like, where we are in the Amazon, we were down there with ABC News I wanna say like a year and a half ago with my friend Matt Gutman, who's the chief correspondent for ABC. He wanted to see the Amazon fires, he wanted to see some wildlife, he wanted to see the areas
that we're protecting. And then he goes, "I wanna
see the gold-mining areas." And I'd never gotten in so deep, but we met this Russian guy, you can't go, the Peruvian, they will kill you. Like, our lawyer's father was assassinated for standing up to the gold miners. There was two Russian guys though who had a legal mining concession somehow way out past the machine gun guarded limit of the Pampas, which is where
they do all this gold mining. And we got in there and
took footage of the desert that is forming in what used to be the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest. And it's like there is
a massive global scale ecological crime happening down there that you can see from space from this unregulated gold mining. And the cops can't go there
'cause they will be murdered, it's completely lawless. - What's the machine gun limit exactly? - It's the border of this area
that they call the Pampas, which is where the rainforest has been cut and completely destroyed, and it looks like Mars, it's just sand. And inside of this area are gold miners. We tried to get in there to film years ago and there's just a lot
of guys with machine guns who don't let that happen. - And what, the Russian guys have-- - The Russian guys had access somehow. They'd come down with a bit of money and they had a new system, yeah. And actually, what was interesting
is while I was in there, they're very friendly, and really, really two
friendly gold miners. One of them while I was there, you know, he kind of tapped me on the shoulder. He was like, you know,
"Look at those guys." He was like, "Those guys over there" he goes, "I just heard
them say your name." And he goes, "That's not a good thing." He goes, "They know exactly who you are." He goes, "I wouldn't
keep posting to Instagram about gold mining in the Amazon." And I was like, okay,
thanks for the warning. And then, you know, in June
somebody pulled up beside me on a motorcycle and I
got a more stern warning. - They pay attention to
the flow of information 'cause they don't want
the world to find out. - Oh, the last thing they
want is to be shut down. But the gold miners are
notorious for, you know, just whacking people and
throwing them in a pile of gold mining leftovers. The Peruvian government
has to get the military to go after them. Like, the work we've
done with gold miners, converting them into
conservationists has all been like, I mean I've seen the
Peruvian navy come down and literally blow up gold mining barges, and, you know, it's a war. It's a war being fought in the Amazon. - So it's possible to convert
them into conservationists? What's that process like? Or is that like, you say that in jest? - No, I say that in absolute sincerity. We went upriver, up the Malinowski
River several years ago, and I think it was 2018. And everyone was like,
you are going to die. Like, you will be shot and killed. And the reason we were able
to do it with relative safety was that the gold miner
that we were going with was the brother-in-law of one of my closest friends
down there, our expedition chef and one of the directors of Junglekeepers. And they said, "Look, you can
go, just keep a low profile." And so I went up with a photographer and we spent a week there. Dead animals everywhere,
deforestation everywhere. I mean the things that
we saw were so horrible. And we're living with these
gold miners that are, you know, they're getting their gold,
they're burning off the mercury. I watched the guy smoking a cigarette, burning the mercury off of his gold with the vapor going
straight into his face with his child right there. I mean, unbelievable
negligence of just sanity. And then towards the end of the week, the Peruvian navy comes down the river and everyone starts scrambling. And I was like, I'm just gonna
sit here with my hands up 'cause, you know. And they didn't even stop. They found the gold mining barge, you know, they have a
floating thing in the river that just plumbs the bottom of the river, just sucks all the sediment up. And they stopped and they
strapped a bunch of explosives to this motor. And good lord, the
sound of this explosion. And there was just hot metal raining down all over the place, and
then they just went. A bunch of guys in fatigues and they just kind of like
looked at us, like, peace. And I sat there with this gold
miner and I went, now what? And he went, "Well, now I
gotta go get a new motor." And I went, "Why don't you
just do something else?" And he goes, "What else is there?" And I went, "Look what we do." And I sat there with my
phone and I was like, "See this? These are pretty tourists. And we feed them food and we show them tarantulas and macaws." And he looked at this and he went, wow. He goes, "That looks like so much fun." And I went, "It is so much fun." I said, we show people, we
bring students to the jungle. He goes, "So you're saying
if I build you a lodge you'll bring people?" I said yeah. And I came back a year later and he sat there with a chainsaw, a hand saw and some nails. And he cut down like 17 palm trees and he built an ecotourism lodge. - So you give him another
channel of survival, of making money.
- [Paul] Yes. And that's what we've been
doing through Junglekeepers for loggers and for all kinds
of extractors is just saying, look, what do you make? You make $15 a day
destroying the ancient trees of the jungle? What if we paid you $35 a day to have a uniform and a
job and health insurance and security, and you just protect it? And use all of the jungle
knowledge you've gained as a logger to protect this place. - Who are the loggers trying
to destroy the Amazon? Can you say a little bit more about it? Is that as a threat to
the Amazon rainforest? - A lot of them are really
close friends of mine. They're people that need to make a living, and they're jungle people who, you know, the rainforest is a very challenging, especially the Amazon is a
very challenging environment. And so you have these people who, they have a chainsaw, they have a job opportunity, they go out and they cut the trees. And a lot of these guys grew up fishing, they grew up in the jungle,
they know how to do it. And so for them it's a way
to like, they also love it. So this is the thing,
these are outdoorsmen, these are guys that love the jungle. You know, in the 90s we
had the mahogany boom where they went out after the mahogany, and you almost can't find a mahogany tree in the jungle anymore. And if you wanna talk about
like carbon sequestration in the rainforest, the ancient
hardwoods hold like 60% of the carbon of the whole rainforest. They have an outsized
disproportionate mess from that ancient density of the wood. And so these loggers go
out and they cut the wood that's most valuable and then
they bring it back to town and they sell it. And then people like us buy it and put it on our kitchen floors. So the thing is, you know, when I got to the Amazon it was, you know, loggers are the bad guys. And if you talk to a lot of
the PhDs that I worked with down there were always very
at odds with the miners, at odds with the loggers. And then I'd be with JJ,
and JJ would sit down, and he'd be like, "Hey,
let's pour a drink." Oh, they have masato, let's all sit down." And like we'd all be chilling
and throwing 'em back with a bunch of loggers. And then the opportunity through
not vilifying these people came to be like, these guys are great. You know, and then of
course out in the wild, every now and then something will happen, you'll see somebody's boat flipped over and you go help 'em out and then that creates a
certain type of kinship. - So they're ultimately people who love the same thing you love. - Often, yeah. Even if they don't love
it, they're people that aren't necessarily looking to destroy it. I've met loggers who have looked at trees they're about to cut and
gone, ah, this is a shame. Start it up. You know, they're just like, this is where the paycheck comes from. - Let's come back briefly to anacondas. Can you tell me this whole situation with Discovery's "Eaten Alive?" There's some drama and
controversy around that. Can you explain that
whole saga with Discovery, with your whole effort? Maybe outside of even the drama, the initial thing, which I now feel you're sufficiently insane to actually do, of being eaten by an anaconda. Is that actually possible to
survive something like that? - I mean, if an anaconda swallows you while you're wearing the
suit that they made, maybe. But that was in hindsight
that was the result of, look, I go to the jungle and you start seeing
these beautiful places, these incredible species, you start developing a
relationship with these animals. And then you watch it get destroyed, every year we watch it burn, every year, places that
are are crucial to my soul, I have seen leveled and turned to ash. And at some point we started going, someone has to do something about this. And you look to your right
and you look to your left and there is no one 'cause
it's the middle of the Amazon, and the rainforests have
been being destroyed since the 70's, it's a cliche. And so we started trying
to do something about it, so I started putting a
little bit more emphasis on publicity, a little bit more emphasis on getting the message out there. And so I started trying to
see how, what was gonna work. You know, you just start firing shots in the dark and seeing. And you know, JJ's going, "You have to help us do something," and I'm going, okay. And so from 18 years old,
now I'm 23 years old, and all of a sudden this place isn't foreign
to me anymore, it's home. - You're trying to think
of all the different ways you can bring attention to
this place that you care about that's being destroyed? - Yeah. You're standing next
to a boulder of progress of destruction and it's
about to roll onto the forest and just destroy it and
snuff out all that life, and no one's there to
do anything about it. And so you go, is there any
way that I could put myself in front of this boulder and hold it back? And you're talking about, you know, the global economic reality, it's just such a massive, it's systemic. - So what's the most dramatic
possible thing I could do? - Exactly. So when you
find yourself flown to LA as a 23-year-old dude, and you're sitting there with some guy who's like spinning a pen and
got his feet up on the desk, and going, you know, what
can you show us down there? And you go, I could show
you the biggest anacondas in the world and we
could talk about mercury and bioaccumulation,
and we could show people how these animals are misunderstood. And we go on a big expedition and we could be the coolest show ever. And he goes, "Yeah, not good enough." And you go, okay, and so that cycled
through a bunch of times. And someone at some point in one of those meetings
said, "What if we show people that anacondas really can eat humans?" And I went, how is that a good show? You want me to feed
someone to an anaconda? And I said, and I kind of joked, I was like, the only way that's feasible is if you make a suit
with a breathing apparatus and let the snake eat you
and then come back out safely and make sure you don't hurt the snake. And they were like, "Kid, you're on." And I was like, "Oh shit." - So I should mention as a small tangent. I think I mentioned to you
offline due to travel troubles, when I traveled to the totally wrong part of the United States on my way to Boston. And on my way to Boston
I did a conversation with Mr. Beast, Jimmy. And I got a chance to hang
out with him for the day, and one of the things we did is have a lengthy brainstorm
session with his team, or I was observing it. But it was interesting because
he's probably way better at that conversation that
you had with the guy in LA than the guy in LA, obviously because he's
revolutionizing entertainment and he's also doing philanthropy which he's trying to figure
out how to help the world with that kind of stuff. So I would love to actually, I'll send him a message
to see what his thoughts. Just brainstorm, he's so strong at this. Literally, take the
situation you're facing. Here's the place that I really care about is being burned down,
it's being destroyed. What's the sexy video? - Yeah. Well, how do you get
people to watch something that's, you know, we all change a channel when
they show us the kids in Africa with the swollen stomachs,
nobody wants to see it. And it's like, with the
rainforest that like, we know, we know, we know. And I'm going, I could
give data all day long. I could show photos of burning forest, and so I was looking for what would do it. And so the "Eaten Alive" thing, without spending too much
time on a massive misstep was I agreed to do it. They paid me at the time more
money than I had made before, which I very much needed 'cause nobody pays you
to be a conservationist. So I was a very poor 23-year-old. It was like, "Yes, I
would love that, please." And I thought, you know what, this is the start of a TV career. We got shafted so bad. I mean they used, somehow
they changed our voices, they changed the things we said, they changed the message of the film. There was one point where we
had caught a 19-foot snake and I was holding her head and I said, "This is such a beautiful
animal, the queen of the Amazon." This is such a great moment for me, I kissed her on the head. I said, "She's made so many
babies, look at the scars." I was talking about just the poetry of this incredible dragon. And then the producer goes,
"Yeah, yeah, that's great. Listen, if that was to bite
you, what would happen?" And I was like, "Oh, well if
it bit you, you'd bleed out cause it would lacerate down to the," that's what they put in the film. They didn't show me the film until the night before I
went on Matt Lauer's show. And I said I am not endorsing this film. And they had called it, on the call sheet, they'd called it Expedition,
EA, Expedition Amazon. All of a sudden they
changed it to "Eaten Alive." And I went, "Wait guys, wait, wait." I said, "You're gonna make people think that it actually happened,
not that we're attempting it." And I said, I'm not. And then they called me and they said, "You're going on live TV tomorrow." They said, "You let us
know what level of control we need to show for you," and it was a very threatening phone call. And so I had to go out
and smile for the cameras and endorse something
that was a train wreck. And the scientific community
was like, "You're an idiot. We don't want to ever see you again." I lost a lot of opportunities. PETA came, which you know, PETA whatever, but PETA came out, people were like, you were trying to hurt a
snake, which I would never do. And then the American Public was like, you said you were gonna
get eaten by a snake and you didn't. And so everyone was pissed, I basically had to exile myself to India for like six months and just. I mean, I had death threats
coming through all my messages, people were furious with me. - What gave you strength to that? How difficult was that, psychologically, just everything you care
about being completely kind of flipped upside down? - I've spent so much time on the ground with the local people
learning from the wildlife. It's such a devout an
important thing to me, and it got turned into a sideshow. It got turned into a joke,
and then not just a joke, it got turned into that
I'm somehow bad to animals, I'm irresponsible scientifically. Jimmy Kimmel told me to
have sex with a hippo as my next stunt. Like, it was like, it got really ugly and it misfired so bad. And when you hear these
like motivational speakers talk about, you just gotta keep trying and sometimes you're gonna fail hard. It was like, that one
I got hit in the head with a baseball bat, that one was tough. And at the time I was like, I'm fine. And I was like, I'm gonna
go away for a while. And I learned a lot though, like at this point I'm still glad I did it because man did I learn a lot about what a room full of
people that you don't know who could look you in the
eye and shake your hand and say, "Trust us." Ooh boy. - Do you have on a human
level of resentment towards Discovery, towards
the people involved? Are you able to forgive them? - I don't care. It literally,
that's what they do. You know, they literally
put out a documentary saying that mermaids were real. - Wait a minute, wait
a minute, they're not? Listen.
(Paul laughs) I'm not even touching that one. - [Paul] It's true, it is true. There is a documentary where they duped a bunch of scientists who are like oceanographers, and they showed them ancient footage of mariners saying that seals
were mermaids, who cares? I was young, I got brought to Hollywood and I got spit out the other side, and that's on me, that's not their fault. There's that parable about the frog who gives the scorpion
a ride across the water. And then at the end he says, "I'll give you a ride,
just don't sting me." And they get to the other side
and the scorpion stings him and the frog goes, "Why did you do that?" And the scorpion goes, "I'm a scorpion." It's not their fault. - That's in my nature. But now that you've become
much more well known and much more successful at what you do, you have a platform. Can you return to those people
and use it, the machine, to get more and more attention? Is that something you work on, or do you prefer to
work completely outside? - I think that most of the
success that we've had now in protecting the rainforest and it's the levels that
we've reached are so far. I think back to those barefoot
days of catching snakes with JJ and the boat. And now the massive
ecological reserve we have and the team of rangers
and the converted loggers, and all of that is because of the ability to communicate
and to show people, but that's all been through social media. And so I'm open to the fact, you know, if somebody came and gave a
sort of like Bordenian pass where they said, look,
you can be yourself. You can swear, you can
fart, you can smoke, you can do whatever you wanna do, go out there and show us the real thing, I would love to. But now I know how those
contracts need to be, I need to have right to refusal
and they can't change 'em. And so I'd almost rather
just do it like the way, I think, like Mr. Beast does stuff, where it's like you get a crew
of guys and some seed money and go film the episodes and put it out. I mean, a committee never
helped real art be better, it has to come from the
source of inspiration. I think, you get JJ and a crew of people or the guys in Africa that
I'm working with right now doing elephant conservation and like, but you gotta show real. I mean, look, that's why Joe Rogan is important right now, that's why you're important right now is because it's not being filtered through this ridiculous system of
polishing it and dumbing it down. - That's why Joe has been an inspiration. You don't need a crew
of a bunch of people, you don't need a crew, period, all you need is one or two
other people, and that's it. And in my case, you don't need anybody, I've been doing this. By requirement, I just
need to be by myself. There's a few other folks now
that are help with the editing and so on, but it's just,
they make life more awesome as opposed to a boss, like a creative director. Somebody told me actually,
I was visiting LA, I think it was in LA. They were saying that, now
for all intimate scenes in Hollywood movies, there's
an intimacy director. So when there's two people having sex, there's a third person
that ensures that on film, so it's not real, but
there's still intimacy, that there's a third person
that ensures that like everyone is comfortable and
the actors say that this always ruins the chemistry
of the scene. (chuckles) It's a very Hollywood thing, I understand there's
creepy people and so on. - [Paul] Thanks, Harvey
Weinstein, by the way. - It's usually I think
comes from the director pushing things too hard. If you just leave it to the actors, they know their boundaries, they can control their own boundaries. So the intimacy director is more for the director pushing things. - I understand the logic. Like, let's make sure that
we don't have anything happen here that shouldn't be
happening, I get it. But no, I think that authenticity
is the greatest currency. And I think that in order
for me to tell the stories that I can tell, like, what
changed the game for me was, I wanna tell you the story. So, in 2019, the Amazon fires started popping
off and we had just gone to film like a month earlier, we'd filmed like a small documentary. And they had been following
me as if I was on a solo, which we did the best we
could, I lived on my own. But as we were driving, we passed a spot where the flames were 70-feet tall, the forest was being destroyed. And I went out there with my phone, which overheated in like
two minutes and said, you can't use it. But for a second I was
out there in the flames, picking up animals and throwing them off to try and just get them cooled off, I was trying to get snakes
outta there, everything, the birds are flying,
and I fucking lost it. I was red-eyed, I was
crying and I was going, "This is happening every fucking day." I was screaming, and it's the
first time that I'd done that 'cause I've seen the burning so many times and I just lost it that day. And I don't know what
made me pull out my phone 'cause usually in those intense moments I say forget the documentation,
this is real life. We got stuff to do and I'm
doing, I'm not documenting. And then a month later I'm
home and I'm in New York, and all of a sudden I see
these articles like, you know, the Amazon's burning worse this
year than it was last year, and blah, blah blah. And I was like this, you know, fuck it. And I threw it up on Instagram like eight o'clock at night. I'd never cursed on Instagram, I don't know, you know,
why? I just never did. My phone was on a hundred percent and I put on top of the
refrigerator and I went to bed. And I woke up in the morning and my phone was on the floor on 2% and it was ringing off the
hook, and it was like the news. And they were like, "Are you the guy that posted that viral
video about the Amazon?" And I was like, what? And that was the start,
that's where it broke. And that's where we went from
barefoot in the Amazon to all of a sudden, you know, I was a talking head for three weeks and going around on all
these news stations, and all of a sudden I was like the spokesperson for the Amazon. JJ's calling me, and he was
like, "Go, go, go, go, go." Like, "Get us that support." And it was just, you know. So communicating with people and bringing them into that reality, and whether it's rhino
poaching and elephant poaching, or the Amazon being destroyed, it's like, to me, it's like being able to take people into that is
something that I would love to do. - Yeah, and you do it directly with authenticity on your Instagram. People should definitely
follow your Instagram, I think Rogan follows your Instagram too. - Well, the end of that story
actually kind of involves him. 'Cause I went to all these news outlets and I was living in green
rooms and traveling around and I was all strung out
and I hadn't seen anybody I actually know in a few weeks, which was starting to get to me. And I finally got home and I
went to like a family party, and everyone was like,
"Dude, it's been crazy." And I was like, yep. And then I left, and my
cousin Michael calls me and he's screaming, and
I'm going, "What, what?" And he goes, "Joe Rogan just shared it. Joe Rogan just shared it." - [Lex] Oh, nice. - And everyone was losing their
shit and it was so amazing. And it was like, that's
when it really took off. And what happened as a
result of all of this is that a Canadian entrepreneur who started Lightspeed reached out. And several months later,
after COVID, after that boom, I'd been in the game for
maybe 13 years or something, had no money, no savings,
no job, no nothing. And after that great publicity
thing, nothing happened. The waves came and
everything got real exciting, everybody reached out and
they said, "We care so much." Nothing happened, though. You know, we can run into battle, but if we don't have arrows in the quiver, what can we do? And I actually, I made a
phone call to my friend Mosen right at the start of COVID, and I was going through
divorce and I was broke. And I said I'm gonna get a job. I said I give up. This is stupid. I said the ecotourism business is done, Junglekeepers is dried up. We're done. And then this guy Dax Dasilva
called me on the phone and said, "Listen, I'm
in. What do we gotta do?" And so if the analogy was me and JJ and a few other people trying
to hold this boulder back from just destroying the rainforest, all of a sudden Dax comes in like a titan and just puts his arm out and
just goes, "I'm gonna help." And he gave us the funding to start actually
developing a ranger program, to start actually bringing loggers to be protectors of the forest, to be supporting smaller
conservation things. And now we're protecting
50,000 acres of rainforests, we're protecting entire streams
and ecosystems that I love, and we're soon gonna double that. And it's like this whole thing, so yeah. The communication of
these things is crucial, and I actually think it's incredible that social media's played
such a big role in it. - Well, I mean just 'cause I know Joe well and I love him so much, I definitely think you
should do his podcast but also just be friends
with him, I think you guys. He's one, you know, not to meme, but he's one with nature. And I'm much more with the, I'm one, while I do
appreciate and love nature, I also love technology and robots and so on. So we're in that meme type of way, we're very, very different. - Well, either way, at some point make sure you tell the guy thank you because it definitely really
helped push us over that limit where, you know, if enough people see it, you get someone like Dax
who who says, "I can help and I have the resources to help," and that changed our whole lives. - Changed everything. Back to the jungle. You had a bunch of
interactions with jaguars. How are you still alive? Like, what? - Man, dude. I'll tell you this,
Jags are not the danger, the falling trees are the danger. I'll tell you some elephant stories then you'll then you'll
wonder why I'm still alive. So JJ started, and Santiago, his dad, started challenging me to do solos, go out alone into the wild style. You know, I'd have a hammock, a headlamp, three days worth of food,
some fish hooks, a machete, and that's it. And so, like one of the
stories that happened early on was I was out there and it
was raining, and I was lost. This is how we test your jungle knowledge. Can you survive out there?
Do you know how to find food? Have you listened to the
things that we taught you? And there was one night
that I was in a hammock and a jaguar came up, and I
was asleep when it happened. And she came up right next to my head and she was (imitates jaguar panting) and I could hear her smelling me. And then my first instinct
was to turn on my headlamp, and just the sound of my arm
moving against the material, and she just (imitates jaguar growling). Right here, I could feel her breath, and I just laid there in the dark. And that's one of those
moments where you go, you really learn a lot about yourself, because I wasn't scared, I felt like I understood
the intentions of the cat. If she was hunting, I'd already be dead, she was curious. And I was lost, and I didn't know if I was ever gonna get outta that jungle, but what she did was energize me 'cause it was an experience
like the giant anaconda where I said this is so wild that it's so almost cinematically outside the realm of what I
thought my life could be like that it made me, like, wait, 'cause the previous day I
was lost, tired, confused, kind of devastated, tail between my legs. After that, I was like, "Man, you've been waiting
for this your whole life. Go get it." And I woke up, and I was
like I am gonna navigate. Even though I've been in
this swamp for three days, I'm gonna find my way outta this swamp. And like, she just like
breathed fire into me, where it was like, if that's possible, if I could be six inches
away from a jaguar's face. I got that energy from her. - So that you're able to
start to really hear and feel the jungle around you. That was a sign that you
know what you're doing. - [Paul] It really felt
like a sign, I really did. - How do you survive in a solo, solo hike through the jungle? What are the different components, what are the different dangers? So you said you had a
hammock, you had some food. What kind of food, by the
way, are we talking about? - Nuts, stuff that won't
go bad, because you can't, so you can't really start
a fire in the Amazon. Like, I'm a good, I mean
I camp all over the place, I'm a wilderness guide. Starting a fire in the Amazon is futile, in fact a lot of survival manuals
will tell you don't do it, 'cause if you're really lost,
it'll break your spirit. You're not gonna be able to do it. - [Lex] That's dark. - They're like, "Don't even try it." But you can still get like hypothermia if you get wet and you
lay out in the jungle, exposure can still get
you, so you want fire. In the beginning I used to
bring like ramen noodles, which is, nutritionally, is irrelevant. And so I started bringing like nuts and then supplementing that with fish, which forced me to become
a very good fisherman. Now of course JJ knows that he can like, they can cut certain
roots and they bash it up and they put it in the stream and the fish just float
to the top, and they take. He's got all the cheat codes, whereas I'm sitting there with a hook. He'll go, "Now, find bait," and I go bait. In the most competitive
ecosystem on earth, good luck finding a worm. You can't do it. What does JJ do? He takes the machete, looks at his foot, cuts a slug of callous off of his heel 'cause he's got this thick rhino skin. Puts that on the hook,
catches a six-inch fish, chops it in half, puts
it on a bigger bucket. And in 15 minutes he's got
a four-foot giant catfish that could feed a family of 16. And he's happy, I'm
sitting there and I'm like, I'm gonna try and stick a
beetle on a fishing hook. - Do you have just a line and
a hook or is there a rod too? - Just a line and a hook
and then you just chop a rod and tie it to the, you know, you just chop a little sapling. - So are you still able
to start a fire or no? - I like for the food that I
bring to not be fire-dependent. And so if I have some
nuts, I can shove in a few, enough calories to get
me through the night, and leave a fishing line out and there'll be something
there in the morning. But yes, I can start a fire but a lot of times what I'll
do is I'll bring a flask and not with alcohol but with diesel. And so you have a tuna can
and you put the diesel. This is what the local guys do. Everything I do, you know, I'm sure there's gonna be
someone listening to this and they're like, "How could you do that?" And it's like, this is what
we do down there, sorry. It's a tuna can, you pour a
little bit of diesel in it. It burns slow, you light
it and you put your sticks, you make a pyramid over that, and eventually that will
burn through the moisture. And finally you'll get a
very reluctant little fire enough to burn, you know, to make yourself like a cup of tea or to pour that into the
noodles, something, something, or you just eat a fish raw. - How important is it to stay dry, is it basically impossible? - It's impossible to stay
dry, you're wet all the time. You're wet all the time. - What does that mean? That means infections are more efficient? - Yeah. I don't know
if you saw the picture in my book where I have the - [Lex] Yellow spots?
- Yeah. - So yeah, there's a picture with your entire face consumed with yellow spots, it's basically, I guess, that's MRSA? - [Paul] Yeap. - Oh boy. So how did that happen? What was the infection like? And how crazy are you for
letting that infection stay in you for a long period
of time without treating it? Or you had no choice? - No, I did have a choice. I was 19 years old and I was
taking care of a giant anteater that was orphaned. And this is like my dream
animal and she was mine, and my job was to teach her the jungle. And so when I started like
noticing that I had an infection, I think I had dengue at the time too, I went back to town,
probably picked up MRSA in the hospital where I got tested. Came back into the jungle and
then got progressively sicker and sicker and weaker and weaker as I was two weeks, three
weeks in the jungle. And it got to the point where my vision went black and white and I passed out one day. I don't know why, but at the
time I had shaved that day. And when I woke up the next
morning, I couldn't open my eyes because the pus had come outta my eyes and the pores in my face,
all those little microcuts, and the pillow was stuck to my face. I was stuck upriver with
no help at 19 years old. And also when you see that picture, you can imagine that I
assumed that my life was over 'cause I didn't know what it was, or at the very least I
figured I'd be disfigured the rest of my life, I didn't think there was any
getting better from that. And so I remember sitting
by the side of the river praying that a boat would come by, but it was the rainy season, there aren't gonna be any boats 'cause the river's psychotic. And so, it was a long time
before I got back to town, and I didn't wanna leave the anteater, but it became like, I was
like, I realized I was dying. And then I finally got a
boat with some loggers, a death boat, just loaded with, these guys had gone into the jungle and shot everything they
could and taken all the babies and they were gonna go sell them. And so it was like baby
monkeys and toucans and birds in cages and
pieces of crocodiles and anaconda skins and
jaguar skins rolled up. And it was just like,
I was just laying there with all these dead animals in the boat with all the flies on my face. Got back to the hotel, called my mother, said, "Please book me a flight
out like today, like today." And then I sat on the plane. Somebody sat next to me on the
plane, and I had a hood on. And I do remember that in the haze, at this point I was having
trouble staying conscious, but I do remember that
she like looked over trying to see what was
sitting next to her, and then she got up and never came back. And when I got to immigration
in New York, you know, the cop, he takes my passport and he goes, "Yeah, so what were you doing in Peru?" He is looking down, and he goes, yeah. And he holds up the passport, looks at the passport, looks at my face, he goes, "Bo, buddy." He goes, "What the fuck?" And I said, "No, that's why." I was like, "I'm trying to get
home to go to the hospital." He stamps it and he goes, "Go, go, go, go. God bless. God bless." He's like, "Oh shit." And then they put me in
the room in the hospital with the hazmat suits, and
they didn't know what it was. And I spent like five
days on IV antibiotics with four different things
running through my veins. The doctors were like,
"Don't let it go that close." They're like, "You went
real close on that one." - Yeah, that's what that picture, I mean people should check out the book just to see the picture, because I imagine you just laying there unable to see, have a fever probably, so you're like half hallucinating. - [Paul] Yep, yep. - And there's no boat, there's no way out. - [Paul] There's no help coming. - Plus there's this creature
who you've become a parent of, that you love.
- [Paul] Yeah. - Boy that's a dark place
to be as a 19-year-old. I mean, most people will
never be in a place like that. Like, where did you find
strength in that place? - I don't know. I just remember
writing a goodbye letter to my parents 'cause I
said if I die out here, it was really dark,
like, it was terrifying. It really felt like it was the end. And I was writing, if you
find me out here, I'm sorry, and all that type of stuff. And it was, you know. I don't know about strength,
there was no strength, it was just like move forward. And at some point it was like,
if you'll take me downriver, take me downriver, you know. - You just got lucky with the
loggers, with the death boat, that they found you?
- Yeah. - Well, how did the
infection start by the way? - I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, we always have
some sort of little shit. But the thing is now JJ taught me that there's like three different trees that can cure infections, I didn't know this at the time, I didn't know the cheat codes. Now, if you have a small infection, you can use sangre de grado
and it'll cure it right away. Like, let's say you have a botfly and it gets a little pus-y, there's a fly living in your skin, you put that on there, not
only will it kill the fly, but it'll heal the infection. Now if you have a worse
infection, you can go to ojé, which is ficus insipida
and you can use that. And that will completely
heal, that will murder, it's like crocodile blood,
it will murder infections. So like, forget neosporin, that's a joke, these are heavy chemical compounds running through these trees, and they know all about 'em, and so whatever it is. So now at this point,
that's no longer an issue because we know how to handle it, which at that time if JJ had been there, I would've been fine. - Well, you learned the hard way. So these are open wounds and then there's creatures
that start living in them? Basically, what is it? - Well, that's separate, that's botflies. Yeah, there's a creature
that unfortunately, very, very, very unfortunately likes to make its home
inside the flesh of mammals. And so the flies attach
their eggs to mosquitoes, the mosquitoes go and seek
out warm-blooded animals. The eggs, microscopic
eggs fall into your skin and then begin to grow. And sooner or later you feel a twitch, and it's a worm living inside of you that's like vertical down in you and it's eating you. And at first it's not a problem, but when they get to about
as thick as that pen, it starts to hurt 'cause
you got a hole in you. And they have a little
breathing tube that comes up and they breathe and they go back in and then they eat and they
come back up to breathe. You have a friend living in you. - [Lex] You've had one of those? - I've had lots of those,
it's tough to take 'em out. They have hooks. (both laughs) - How do you? Do you have to? (chuckles) Oh man, you gotta love the jungle. So how do you take it out?
- You have to come. - [Lex] A hundred percent. - You gotta put an irritant. So like, a lot of times
what we'll do down there is someone will take a
massive drag of a cigarette and then they'll power exhale and get some of the tar, which also shows you how much
tar you get out of a cigarette and then with a knife you
put that right over the hole. And then you slap some vaseline
or something on top of that so they can't breathe. And eventually over the
course of a few hours, they'll come up enough looking for air and then you gotta grab 'em with a tweezer and try not to rip him cause then you're gonna get an infection, and you gotta squeeze from the butt, it's a whole ceremony. When people have botflies, we're all like, oh, it's botfly time, let's go. And then like JJ will squeeze, he's got like pliers for thumbs. He can like take a piece of your neck and you think he's going
to break your skin, he'll just squeeze until
this thing comes out. - And you don't wanna, this is an open wound right there. - Yeah, you don't wanna
bathe for a day or two after until that closes 'cause
otherwise you're gonna have water sloshing around in
a little pocket of yours, it's kind of gross. - And that water might
have other organisms in it. - That water in your skin tends to, yeah. I mean the jungle water's
clean, we drink it. Like, I drink the water
fresh outta the stream. - [Lex] Oh, that's interesting. - Well, it's just a
giant filtration system, all those roots, the whole jungle's constantly purifying everything. - People might be thinking
about that with the jungle, there's insects probably
all over you all the time. - It's not as bad as you think. Like, I've been to Finland,
Lapland in the summer and the mosquitoes are
horrendous, like devastating. The Amazon in our area, if you're sitting in a
hammock reading a book out, our research stations don't
have walls or anything, you're good for about one
mosquito every half hour, which really is not a lot, I mean, it's worse than New Jersey. Like, it's really not that bad. - Tell me a little more about the little baby anteater, Lulu, who you've rescued and
had to sadly leave behind. - Yeah, I just was always
fascinated with giant anteaters. They're this, you know,
German shepherd sized thing with Wolverine claws and
these giant Popeye forearms. And they excavate ant and termite mounds, and they have this long tongue. And their baby's ride on their back for the first six months of their lives. And so they actually have this incredibly intimate relationship with their young, and it just so happened that this animal that I was wildly fascinated with, there was an orphan on the river, and JJ was like, "You love these things?" And I was like yeah. So he went and he was like,
"Hey, my friend, you should," he got me the baby. And we were, like, we're gonna rewild her. And so I spent like weeks
and weeks and weeks just like with this thing on my back,
crawling through the jungle, teaching her to find
ants, giving her milk, falling asleep with her on my chest. And their tongue is like
11 inches long at that age, and so when she wanted me to wake up, she'd fired up my nose and
it would come out my mouth. And then if I tried to
get her off me quick, she'd stick the claws in. And you know, on all my
clothes I have old, you know, now they're like museum
pieces with rips in them from Lulu's claws. - She was able to also communicate emotion and feeling and all that. - She needed it, she needed it. So if this animal didn't
have the physical touch, if I didn't hold her all day long, she'd throw tantrums,
she'd go shred something, she'd go pull down the curtain,
she'd go ruin the woods. She'd start literally
having traumatic response to not having intimacy,
which was shocking, 'cause again, on the scale of
a cockroach to an elephant, you go, I didn't know that giant anteaters had such intense emotions, like, but she did. And also taking care of her forced me to explore the jungle from
the perspective of an animal. So I got to like be an animal. And so there's only a few
times in your life, in my life where I've gotten to do
that, one was with her, another time was living
with the herd of elephants where I had to walk with them through the forest and like see how they interacted completely natural. And it's different, it's very different. And you realize like, just
like a person's public persona when they're out on the
street in Manhattan, is gonna be very different than when you're on the couch
with them on a Tuesday night. And with wild animals
it's very much like that. You know, like if you
see a bobcat on a trail, it's gonna look at you and
glare at you and then go off. And it's like, yeah, but what's
it like when it's in the den and it's playing with its cubs? - Yeah. So that when it's looking at you, that's like the Instagram
post it's making. - [Paul] He's doing dark face. - Besides Amazon, you spend
a lot of time in India. Can you tell me what you learned hanging out with the herd of elephants? What do people not
understand about elephants that's beautiful to you,
that's interesting to you? - First of all, I think the elephants should have government representation as like a subset of
society, like, actually. - [Lex] They have intelligence? - They are so intelligent. And when you look at an elephant, so there's this question
that keeps coming up of, are we smart enough to
know how smart animals are? Can we interpret the
intelligence that we're seeing? I lived with a semi-wild
herd of elephants in India for a while, and some of the things that I saw changed how I view reality,
to be honest with you. 'Cause you know, you watch a
matriarch of an elephant herd walk up to someone that
none of us knew was pregnant and her trunk goes to her stomach, and then she calls all
the other ones over. And they're interested
in this little human that they know that
there's something in there. And they're all conversing
about it and you go, whoa. Or that every morning we'd wake up and the elephants didn't
want the stream water, they didn't want the lake
water, they didn't want puddles, they wanted the water from our well. We had like a stone well,
you know, like a traditional. And every morning we had to run outta bed 'cause all the elephants were gonna come and they were gonna rip the bucket off and destroy everything, but they wanted that
nice cold, clean water. And so it was like caring
for elephants that were wild, that were sometimes
getting shot at by farmers, 'cause if they went to
try and rob some bananas. So these are sort of
like delinquent elephants that were half wild and the forest department
was thinking about, you know, getting rid of them,
which, whatever that meant. I made really good friends
with this one elephant, his name was Dharma. And Dharma had the... It's hard to write the
book I'm writing right now because none of it sounds real. He grew up around people
because he was a tuskless male, so he couldn't hang out with the females 'cause he was a grownup male, and he couldn't hang out
with the males, the bulls, because he couldn't defend himself when they roughhoused and everything. So, Dharma would be like
wandering around the forest not knowing who to hang out with. And so like, there was one
night there was a tiger calling and we just heard (imitates tiger roaring) you could hear it echoing over the hills. And what does Dharma do? 2:00 AM, we hear Dharma show up. And same thing, he starts
throwing a tantrum, he starts pulling shit over, takes a chair, throws it. We had bananas in the truck. Dharma walks up to the
truck, it's like a jeep. He walks up to the jeep, smells it, he looks at me and he's like,
"Are you gonna get outta bed?" I'm like, no, I'm not gonna get outta bed. I was like, "Dharma, you're
a grown-ass elephant." The tiger does his thing again and he's like, "I need
bananas to feel better." Pushes the truck up on two wheels, looks at me, is this
how you want it to be? And so I'm up, I'm up. And I go and I'm like,
"Please, please, please." Dharma, I'm rubbing his face. And he's like, he puts it down. He's like, all right, well then hit me. I didn't do it, so he lifts it up again. And so in the end, there was no way for me to outsmart the elephant, he wins. There was nothing I could do. And so a lot of my job was
taking him out into the forest and you know, spending a
little bit of time with him. I have this beautiful, one time I set up the tripod and I went, and I was just journaling. And he would come and he
would just play with my hair and he'd be like, "Hey, what's up? He wanted someone to interact
with on an emotional level. And when you think about elephants in terms of the fact that, you know, people go, oh, they use medication to induce labor. It's like, yeah, that's
not that surprising. They hold the bones of the dead, it's like, yeah, they have the best smell of pretty much any animal, that's also not surprising. They probably know exactly
who that was, that bone. But they can navigate to waterholes and communicate in ways that
we cannot really figure out. And so when you hear about people measuring elephant intelligence, you'll hear about scientists being like, "Oh well, we gave it a
bucket with a hole in it, and then it had like a
key and there was a rope." And you're like, bro,
this is all human stuff. Can you go walking with them
for three weeks in the wild and watch how they deal with the problems that they encounter in the forest? And so elephants have become, especially recently with the work that I've been doing in Africa with VETPAW I've just become so
fascinated with elephants. The African elephant population
right now is down at 2% of what it was a few hundred years ago, we're really putting them
on the brink of, you know. There's some elephants that
are being born tuskless because poaching has taken down the great tuskers to the point where now it's actually beneficial for some elephants to not have tusks 'cause then they won't have humans. That's like we've created
deformed elephants. And so now I'm gotten very concerned with issues of elephants. - And tusks are fundamental to the interaction between elephants? - Absolutely. I mean, when
males compete with each other, but also elephants use their tusks. They'll break a branch
and they'll be like, "This is a good branch, I'm
gonna eat the hell out of this" and they'll like hang it on their tusk, and they'll grab a bunch of other stuff, they'll like hold it. You know, ripping a tree
up out of the ground. I just watched it. Two weeks ago, I was watching an elephant, he got down on his knees and
stuck his tusk into the ground and like leveraged up. He, like, archimedes this
root out of the ground and then was like, that's a sweet root. And then when he left, I went, and I tasted the root and
it was like sweet ginger. And I was like, I have
no idea what this is but he knew it was good. - Do they use tusk for sexual selection? Like, to impress the ladies, or no? - It's certainly involved
in who has mating rights. - [Lex] Oh, who wins in the contest. - I mean, if you got the big tusks, and there are elephants out there, like the mammoth, big tuskers that have tusks down to
the ground, like, huge. And when you see them,
it's like seeing something unique on earth, unique in history 'cause we're at a point
where we might lose those. There are only a few of them left and then they're so prized by hunters. - Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I forget what the actual conclusion on that is 'cause there's some studies of the use of the value of beauty in evolution, like birds and peacocks and so on, that there's no actual value to it but it plays a role in sexual selection. Meaning value, like, it's much easier to
understand competition, like a tusk helps you
defeat the competitor. - [Paul] It's a tool. - But I bet you there's
a component to the tusk where the ladies go,
"Goddamn, that's a nice tusk." Like, there's a visual
beautiful component, maybe not, I don't know. - But what if beauty though, as we're defining it though, is symmetry and the absence of
yellow spots on your face and healthy-looking hair. And so like, I think to us beauty is sexually-appealing traits
that look good to mate with. - So that 19-year-old with MRSA everybody in the world would
swipe left on that. (chuckles) The least sexually desirable
object in the universe. Okay. Speaking of elephant intelligence and something I think
and work quite a bit on, as with artificial intelligence, is what the philosophical
question that comes up is what is intelligence? What is intelligent? Humans, homo sapiens are often thought to be highly intelligent, that's the reason they stand out. In your understanding of different species like the elephant, what stands
out to you about humans? Or are they just another animal with different kinds of intelligence? - Well, we're certainly unique because we have altered the entire planet. You know, the term the Anthropocene, I mean, it's like we've literally created a geological layer of us, whereas other animals don't. And going back to elephants, it's like they also
engineer their environment. If you're in a forest, like if you drop me in a forest on earth, I could tell you in two seconds
if there's elephants there because there's twisted
branches and excavated earth, they're constantly gardening. But I mean, look at us. I mean we're clearly unique in nature, which makes me not understand
the anti-human sentiment that so much of
environmentalism has about like we're bad, we're damned,
we ruin everything. And it's like, I've seen the worst, I've seen the burning
Amazon and I'm still like, I love being able to share ideas with you and travel to places and FaceTime my family
when I'm not around them. And it's like, I celebrate a
lot of what makes us human. It's almost like reality
is this crazy video game, and it's like if we could just
figure out the right keys, we can pretty much do
anything we can think of. I mean, poetry, art, I mean, you know. I'm the biggest animal lover in the world, but we are different, we really are. - Yeah, the ability to
puzzle solve, create tools. What do you think is the coolest invention humans have come up with? Is it fire? What's the most impactful? - I feel like fire is kind
of a gimmy. I feel like the-- - [Lex] They didn't really
invent it, they probably-- - Like, the wheel, flying. I mean, flying. Think if you could go back in time to someone that never flew. You know, a saltan, an Egyptian king, George Washington, you know, and be like, you can fly. I mean, just on my way here, and I fly way too much, but I was looking out the
window at the clouds and going, "This is unbelievably
spectacular. It's just stunning." You know, as a kid, you
look at a cloudy day and you go, "The world
is like this today." And then you get in a plane
and you fly above the clouds and it's sunny up there and you go, oh. It changes your perspective, it's like when people go to
the moon and they come back and they tell you the pale
blue dot, you know, just. I'd say flying, I think
the ability to fly. I mean the fact that I could
get on a plane and be in India in 20-22 hours is shocking. - In terms of its usefulness, I would argue that's not in the top five, but in terms of its ability to inspire. There's somebody I forgot
who told me this idea that there's something about the
atmosphere, earth's atmosphere that allows you to look
up and see the stars. Like if we didn't have that, human civilization
would not have happened, meaning like, being able to look up and see something out there. Like, something that allows you to look up versus just look down, looking at your local environment, be able to like wander and see, holy shit, there's a big world out there,
and I don't know anything. If you're able to look up and see that, that kind of humility combined with the ability
to dream about exploring, maybe it just inspires the exploration. It's kind of an interesting thought given how inspiring, for example, the extra upgraded super
cool version of flying, which is flying to other planets. There's going to be,
hopefully it's possible, this century, a child born, no, not this century, maybe this century, a child born on another planet that looks up and looks back at earth, has to be educated by his
or her parents that like, there's another place. There's another place-
- [Paul] That creeps me out. - where life is way easier. - [Paul] Oh God, it's so easy. There's water everywhere. - Yeah, exactly. People
complain about earth, man, earth is really, really nice. - [Paul] It's really, really good here. - Water everywhere, anything. - Oh man, I wouldn't even leave. Given, like right now, if somebody said, like,
you could go to the moon, I'd be like, no, I'm good. If I died in space, I'd be so pissed. I love it here. - Yeah, but you're still, there's a longing to explore for you. - There's a longing to explore but I really think I'm such a... Like, my longing to explore is like river streams, oceans, jungles. - [Lex] Life.
- Yeah. I would watch the hell
out of the live stream of Elon touching down on Mars. Like, I'd be like, this is incredible, it's amazing that I get
to be around to see this. I'm staying where, I'll be right here. - Yeah, but it's good that
the human spirit pushes us. - [Paul] Oh, it's amazing. - That it was possible. And it does that for you. Just a out-there question. What's the most dangerous
animal in the Amazon, would you say? Mammal, let's go with mammal. - [Paul] Dangerous mammal. - Like, dangerous in terms of you walking around doing the solo hike. - I'm gonna disappoint
everybody with this, but it's humans. It's nothing, there's no... If I'm out in the Amazon, there's nothing that's going to attack me. And in India you might have an old leopard or a tiger that's missing a
tooth that decides you're prey, or you might have an angry
elephant that's in must that just decides to flatten you. In the Amazon, you're not, jaguars won't even let you see them, and there's really nothing else. One of my friends, a brilliant scientist friend of mine, Pat, got attacked by a rabid ocelot once, but that's like a diesel
house cat just having a fit, you know, it wasn't the
worst thing in the world. - Just the assholes of the animal kingdom. In terms of humans, you've said that the tribes, some of them uncontacted can be exceptionally dangerous. What's your experience with
them? What should people learn? Because it's such a
fascinating part of life here on earth that there's
tribes that don't have much or any contact with the quote, unquote "civilized world." - Most of the people that
I meet don't actually really understand how
isolated these people are or how weird it is that we're sitting here and that we have iPhones and
airplanes and all this stuff and these people are
living naked in the forest at this moment. The thing though, you know, and I also was recently somebody showed me all this
like paleolithic tribes, and it's like, no, no. Just by default they're
modern tribes living now, they just happen to be
living out in the jungle. And there's a huge debate about
do we try and contact them and bring them in? And there's two camps of people
on this who they say that it was the trauma of the
rubber boom that sent them out that far into the forest
and made them terrified of the outside world. And so that's also what
made them so hyper violent. One of the guys we work
with on our team, Victor, was in, I think it was 2004, he's coming downriver and he
had a load of mahogany wood. And he's piloting this boat. And he sent two people, husband and wife, ahead to go start cooking
breakfast on the beach so they could put the little
kitchenette thing down and put the propane. He sent them ahead. He's going nice and slow with the barge coming down the river. They go ahead, reach
the beach, they get out, he starts cutting some cane
to start making a fire. Tribe comes out, no warning,
they just start screaming, they start shooting arrows. The man instantly gets
an arrow through the leg and it pins his leg so he can't run. He tells his wife, go, save yourself, and she does. She jumps in the water, there's arrows falling around her too. And as she's floating down the river, she looks back and the last
thing she sees is these guys getting to her husband and
beginning to rip him apart. As Victor comes down the river, this is a guy we work with every day, he comes down the river
and sees his friend disemboweled, opened up, dissected, his parts are all over the
beach, the beach is red. And they only found out what
happened because they found her later on holding onto a stick in the river and they were like, what happened? And she was like, "They just attacked." They don't want people on their land. On the sort of the underground
WhatsApp chain of the Amazon, a few, in August, like this was not internationally known, some loggers went up and
tried to steal a few trees from where the tribes were. And then everybody sent the pictures of what the loggers looked
like after a few days because the tribes
porcupined them with arrows. They were laying there on the ground with just arrows sticking
outta their bodies. And then eventually the
authorities came out and looked, and there was just these white body, I'll show you the pictures later, there's just these white puffy bodies with like the skulls sticking out. And it was like, you don't
mess with these tribes. - I wonder what's the mythology around, that they construct around
who these outsiders are? Are they gods, are they demons? Are they humans? Who are they? Who are we to them? - Well, you gotta go
back to the rubber boom. The rubber barons went down there and at the start of the
industrial revolution, the only way to get rubber
was to mine it from the trees that are out in the forest. And so the only way to do that, 'cause you can't make a rubber
plantation in the jungle. The rubber, when it's in plantation form, when it's a monoculture, it gets this leaf blight and it all dies. Henry Ford tried, it didn't work. And so what they did was
they sent these people down who just whipped, burned, enslaved, raped and pillaged the people. It's one of the worst
periods in human suffering that I've ever read about. One missionary said they
were killing the locals the way you or I would kill a mosquito. They just went nuts. And so they sent them out
and they would come back with rubber and this would go to fuel the industrial revolution for
hoses and gaskets and tires and all this stuff that
suddenly we needed. And it was during that
time that these, you know, gangs of foreigners
would go into the jungle to enslave the natives that these uncontacted tribes
went back into the jungle and said, "Not us." And they have six-foot
bows and seven-foot arrows with bamboo tips. They make the bamboo
tips into razor blades. And so when those things fly, actually one of my rangers,
one of the Junglekeepers team was present when the tribes
had come out onto the river, and he tried to help them
'cause they're nomadic and they live out there. And so there's an element of like brother, you know, they're trying to be like, you don't need to be like this, like, we're friendly. So they sent a canoe across
the river with bananas. And so he's up to his waist in the river and the tribes are right across the river. And they shot, and he sees the arrow coming right at his head. And as he moved to the side,
it hit him at the temple and sliced them back towards the ear, opening him to the skull, he's fine. But let me tell you something, when he goes and gets a crew cut, it's the most badass scar
you've ever seen, man. And so he always keeps it
real short on that side. But even if you try to help them they're not necessarily friendly. - [Lex] That's a tough lesson. - Yeah. - [Lex] I suppose they have a point. - They have a point and
protecting them is a default of, you know, now that we're
protecting all this ecosystems and all these other
indigenous communities, it's like we all sort of
live with this knowledge that they're the hermanos, the brothers are out there, and that's the way they want to keep it. And so we just have to
be respectful of like, you don't camp on certain beaches at certain times of the year because we know that they might be there. You really have to be careful about that. - Have you yourself interacted with any? - My interaction with them came on a solo where I pushed it a little bit too far. I was planning to do a three week, this was like the big one. I got dropped off by poachers up a river and I went past the point where
they were like names there. I said what tributary are we on? And they were like, "Tributary." And I was like okay. And I said, "Leave me here." And I remember the guy being like, "Are you committing suicide?" And he didn't understand that. I was like, "No, I have a
backpack and I have food. I'm gonna like take videos
and I have a tripod." And I was, like, we're cool here. They looked at me, like,
they were like, "Goodbye." And I was like, "All right." And I like went up this river. And again, you learn these
things like, you know, it was only when I'd been alone for a week that you realize you're, there's that saying, like, you're born alone and you die alone. It's like, no, you're not. You're born into a room
full of people usually, at the very least your
mother's there for everybody. So you've been around people probably if you're a normal person
every single day of your life, you've seen dozens if
not hundreds of people. And all of a sudden you realize what a social creature we are, because on day six, it gets weird. For me, it got weird, I know there's people
that can do it longer. - So what does that mean? Like, longing for contact? Like, lonely? - Longing for contact,
the distortion of reality in the sense that like, you know, you wake up
and there's no one there and you start to, you know, you're going up a river. I kept looking back downriver and almost thinking of
my life as something, it was almost like I had already died and I had gone to somewhere else, and I was looking back
on that life as like something that I had experienced. And then there came this
panic of, what if it's gone? Or like, what if World War III broke out and I just don't know about it? My family in New York is
vaporizing. Something. - So actually, your ability to comprehend and interpret reality kind
of requires other people. It's not just that you're lonely, you need that contact to
actually just perceive the world, makes sense of it, all of that, so you start basically hallucinating in a certain kind of way. - I started feeling very uncomfortable. And it doesn't help also that, like, Santiago told me these
stories where he's like, "If you hear capuchins
sounding not quite monkeys, if you hear capuchin monkeys sounding not quite like capuchin," he goes, "It's the tribe and
they're coming to get ya." And then, so the guy
who was shot, Ignacio, they showed me videos where
we saw them on the beach and they're communicating in monkey calls. They're using it as code so
that we don't understand them, even though we don't speak their language. But they're using animal calls. And so every night you go
to sleep and then you go, did that tinamou sound off? And you're like, "Shit." You know, and it's really
hard to fall asleep. And then one night, I messed up, and I left a fish. I cleaned this fish, I
ate like this huge fish, I just ate it to my face. You're putting out marathon
levels of energy every day, like, you know, Goggins would love solos. He'd be like, "This is awesome." - Do you eat fish raw? - This one I actually cooked it. But the skeleton was laying there right outside my tent, stupid. And in the middle of the night I wake up, I just could tell there
was something there, you know, and then you
almost don't wanna look. It's like when you're a
kid at the basement door and you're like, is there a ghost? I unzipped the tent, and I open it up, and
there's like 27 black caiman outside of my tent all
looking at me like this. And some of their heads are
this big and they're like, "This fish there, can we have it?" And I'm like, "Holy shit." I kind of like had to scooch the tent back and move back and let
them have their fish, and there was a host of
crocodiles outside of my tent. But no, so then there was--
- Wait, how many? - Like 27, maybe? There was a lot. Big ones, small ones, medium-sized one, every type were all there. Their eyes glow in the night. You know, you shine a light at animals and they have a tapetum lucidum and so their eye shine comes back at you. If you shine a headlamp
at a jaguar or a frog, almost every animal has a tapetum. - There's a croc, there's
a whole lot of them. Can we go back to the
part of the conversation where you said the
jungle is not dangerous, the humans are the most dangerous? - Well, did they eat me? No. - [Lex] Why didn't they eat you? - They wanted the fish. - Is there some way of
you interacting with them that shows that you're not source of harm? - I don't believe so. I'm sure there's someone out there that thinks they can talk to crocs, but. - Because there's a story
of you grabbing a croc by the tail. What did you learn from that? - [Paul] Learned to not
always listen to JJ. - So JJ was testing you. - Yeah, to see how stupid it was. - [Lex] How do you hold
the crocodile exactly? - You have to get 'em by the head, like an anaconda, like this. - So you're one of the world experts of grabbing creature by the head? - I wouldn't say world expert,
but I've done a lot of it. I also have, you see how there's
like kind of a ball there? That's where a crocodile
tooth went in that side and came out that side. That was a really good chomp. And the watch I was wearing
at the time saved me, 'cause that (imitates
crocodile snapping) like that. - [Lex] Just real fast, just chomp. - Just whack. Like, somebody
took a sledgehammer, you put your hand on the table and it just went (imitates
sledgehammer slamming). Really hurt, shouldn't
have been doing that. - [Lex] How did that come up? - Because I caught a
croc that was too big. So usually when we catch
little caiman in the streams and we measure them to
monitor the populations, you get it by the neck and then I tuck the tail
under my arm and I hold it. And you're talking about a little, you know, four-foot croc, nothing. This one, I dove into a swamp, and I caught like a
six-foot spectacle caiman. And her head was big, and
I had her by the neck. And I realized I couldn't
get her tail under my arm 'cause her tail was all the way back there and she started thrashing. And it was like probably croc
number 375 that I'd caught, and I just got a little
cocky and I said, "Haha." You know, I just like
grabbed her by a leg, I was like I got this. And she just came back and tagged me. And I went, okay, gonna
go back to being safe. - Just to linger on it. Is it one of the bigger
predators in the Amazon? Are they going extinct? Black caimans? - Black caimans were, I believe, they were critically
endangered for a while because for a while the fashion
industry loved their skin, it's soft and it's black. They're bouncing back a little bit now. Like, most animals, if
you leave them alone, they'll be fine. I mean, crocs have been through, you know, how many millions and millions
of years on earth before us. I mean, that's even
the joke with the joke, but that's the grim reality
of tiger conservation. There was 100,000 tigers in 1900, now there's 4,000 tigers left on earth. It's not rocket science. All you have to do is
not bulldoze their forest and allow there to be some
deer and tigers will be fine. That's it. It's so simple. And that's like sometimes
where I feel like I have the dumbest job in the world. I'm like, guys, please
stop killing the things that keep us alive. The Amazon regulates our global
climate, produces medicine, it's home to indigenous
people, it's beautiful. Rainforests only cover 3%
of the planet's land mass, like, it's not that much to ask. - If you leave their home untouched, they'll figure out how
to have sex and multiply. Except for pandas, apparently, 'cause pandas you have to convince. - Yeah. Humpbacks, they went down to, they went from 130,000 down
to, I think, about 8,000 at wailing times. And then when we banned
wailing, since that time, I think we're back up to
over 100,000 humpback whales. They've bounced back,
it's a success story. We're not gonna lose 'em. - Okay. So you're on a solo, with the crocs looking at you. - See, this is why you're good at this. I would've lost, we would've
been on tangent forever. - [Lex] That's pretty epic with the fish, that was your mistake. - That was my mistake, the fish. - I don't understand
how you're still alive. (Paul laughs) It's really inspiring. - When you come, I'm gonna show you. You told me you're coming earlier. - Hundred percent coming,
yeah, but you know. (both chuckles) If there's any place, I mean, sort of a grim joke, but if there's any way to
die, that's a good one, if I'm being honest. - [Paul] It's a cool one. - It's a pretty cool one. - [Paul] You'll become part of the- - Part, yeah. I'm not even joking, there's a oneness to the whole thing. All the stories, just reading your work, looking at your work, it seems like you are a part
of this machine that is nature, this incredible machine. Like, we all die and we're
all part of this big thing that humans do have the capability to also construct narratives
and stories and myths and tell 'em to each other and share them with each other and have more sophisticated ways therefore to communicate
love to each other, but animals do as well. They communicate love, maybe more simply, maybe more honestly. Anyway, so you were with
the crocs and the fish. - Yeah. So I messed up,
I left the fish out, crocs showed up outside my tent. But in the end it was fine. I backed off, they had
their way with the fish, and then they all started
biting each other, it was fun to watch. - Is that a general, sorry to interrupt, is that a general rule,
you want to not leave food? - Yeah, just like if you're
camping in the northeast, you don't leave like, you do
a bear bag or a bear canister, you don't want to invite the wild animals. I really did mess up, I kind of was just like,
you know, whatever, I do this every now and then,
I get a little too cavalier, and the ocean has almost taken
me down for that a few times. But yeah, so the crocs, and then you keep going for a few days. And my plan was to get to a point where I reached the end of the tributary. And this had a very... You know, again, for me,
this is like a pilgrimage. This is like me going into the heart of the very center and soul
and essence of everything that I am fascinated with, like, as close to God as you can get because you're leaving
every type of security, every human relationship, you're also pushing all your chips in. Every step I took further upriver, it got weirder and
weirder and more intense. And every day and every moment it changed. I brought pictures, and at the time, there's no
way to keep a phone charged, I didn't have like a
power bank or anything. You know, I brought pictures from home. I brought a National Geographic magazine, something just to, you know. And there came a day right
when I was getting to the end, like to the point where the
river was so shallow that it was just a trickle. And I was walking on the rocks and the Andes mountains
were in front of me. And I was like reaching the place and the music was swelling, and then all of a sudden I saw
smoke around the next bend. Like, my spine is reacting
right now as I talk about it because I knew what I was gonna see 'cause I knew that it was
impossible for loggers to be out there, there's no motor that could take you, the boat would've run a ground miles ago. And so, I went. This is the other idiot thing. It's like, just turn around. Just do it. I'm that kid though when you
see like a wet paint sign, like I walk by and I touch the wall. And so I went around the bend and I see a few naked people on the beach and they see me. And we're like a good distance apart, they're on the other side of the river. But, you know, arrow in hand, bow in hand. The intention of pose,
they're looking at me, they're clearly conversing. And that moment lasted for a long moment where I said, "This is
the part of the story where they are going to rip me apart, dissect me to see what I eat." I mean, every other story in
the region that we've heard, that's the ending of it. If you're alone with these people, it's not gonna go well, and I have nothing to defend myself with. And I turned and I ran
for like three hours and I got in the river
and I swam for a while. And all my food got
wet, I mean everything. - [Lex] Just ran for dear life. - Just ran for dear life. And my get out plan, the thing after I crossed the mountains and came down into the next
tributary was I had a pack raft. It's a tiny little inflatable raft, good enough to handle rapids. And I inflated the pack
raft once the river was like six inches deep, I inflated the pack raft and I went. And I went for the rest of
that day into the night, I went into the point
that my headlamp died and I was just floating
in a raft down the Amazon and hitting into things. And then I was like, okay,
I'm gonna pop this raft. So I got out of the raft, set up my tent, and I was like, I need some
sleep, I was freaking out. I hadn't had food in
hours and hours and hours. As soon as I fell asleep, my asshole brain comes
up with the dream of that I hear voices, they're
right outside the tent. Sleeping was worse than being awake. So I woke up, got back in the tent, and then at one point it was really cool 'cause one of the same
black caiman that had come for the fish as I'm going downriver, he came right up next to me
and the two of us were going and he was just like motoring downriver, this giant, like, 16-foot crocodile. He just came up to me and
looked at me as I was going. And it was funny 'cause
I wasn't scared of him, I was scared of them. And yeah, it took me like
a week to get back to town. And again, the things you
learn in these moments, the appreciation for your parents, what a hug feels like. When you are faced with
pretty much certainty that you're not gonna
get those things again, whether it's from MRSA or uncontacted tribes or, you know. I find that it brings you this
new joy for life where you-- - [Lex] Just being that close to death. - Yeah. You go, "My god,
this is all a miracle." - It's sad because they're
human just like you. Actually, how different are they? Like, if you were forced to
interact for a week together, where they can't, they're
not allowed to kill you. - [Paul] Not allowed to kill me. - How fundamentally different
are they, do you think? - I don't think they're different, I think they're like any
other Amazonian natives. They're tall, they seem
to have tall genetics. And there's places, you know, again, there's what is known and then there's what we know down there. Like, there's one community where, I don't know whether it
was like a bad rainstorm or something, but some kid
from the uncontacted tribes did end up in a village. And so he learned Spanish, or he learned whatever dialect
they speak in that village. And so he's told us a little bit about what life was like with them. But like, they're just
people. They're just people. They have their own culture, they know about medicines
that we don't know about. They definitely have hunting practices that we don't understand. They can hit a spider
monkey out of 160-foot tree with a bamboo arrow, we can't do that. I mean, they are incredible hunters. And also like, living naked in the jungle with the botflies and the mosquitoes, I don't know how they do it. Like, sometimes at night, and again, we don't have night vision, whereas almost every other animal does. And sometimes we'll be sitting, you know, at the research station at night and we'll be just drinking
and like looking out, you know, we'll scare each other. We'll go, you realize if they
were out there right now, they could be looking at us. And it's like, the truth is is that when it's dark out there, they can't see, it's not easy to start a fire with matches in a lighter and gasoline, they do it with friction. They have some beads on survival that we could really learn from. Not to mention that then you
have people that believe that they're actually the guardians of the extinct giant ground sloth, and what they're doing is living out there because they're protecting
a secret population of previously extinct megafauna. But there's all kinds, I mean, it's like you go into
the crypto world so quick I've heard so many people be like. - But then again, you have to be humble at how little we know about that world, about the world of life. Like, you said, there's so
much of life in the Amazon that we don't, creatures with no names. - Tons of 'em. We could go out on a night walk right now and I could show you
something that, you know. I've done it. You pick
up a bug and you go, "That doesn't look right. That's not right, he's got three heads." You know, and then you send
it to the greatest expert on that genus of insects. And they go, "Look, I got no idea," and you're talking to a world expert. And it's like, that's it. And 50% of the life is up in the canopy. And so like, we started
climbing the trees, like rock climbing, like
what Alex Honnold does. I'll climb up 50 feet and
then I'll put a safety, like I'm basically trad climbing. And then I'll climb up another 50 feet and I'll have JJ belaying me from below. And then he'll be like,
"Ooh, look a snake." I'm like, "JJ, pay attention." Like, to get up there and the branches are
as thick as this table so you can walk around freely. It's like total like "Avatar" when they're in the floating islands. You can go run around
if that's what you want. Bromeliads, orchids, cactuses, because up there it's against the sun so it's a different environment up there. - [Lex] Oh wow, interesting. - And then you start seeing
lizards and snakes and birds and things that aren't down on the ground. And so how many scientists
have actually gotten to really spend time up there
and really inventory the life? And that's why when you hear about, and it's like a taxonomical discussion of how many species they're on earth. They're like between 10 and 30 million. And it's like, well that's a big swing. - What about stuff on the ground? So you mentioned some insects. What about bullet ants? So it's supposed to be the
most painful bite in the world. You've been bitten by one? - Seven or eight times, yeah. - Cool. What does it feel like? - Okay, so the first time
that we ever did bullet ants, JJ said, you know, okay, this is what we're gonna do. He goes, you know, it's
bullet ant roulette. We're gonna get a bullet ant and you're gonna get like chopsticks. You like, pick up this
bullet ant, and they're big, they're big and they're tough. He goes, "We're gonna
put our forearms together and we're gonna drop the bullet ant and clamp our forearms
together and just rub. And whoever it takes, it takes." Of course, JJ did not get stung and I did. And it hurts every bit as
much as they say it hurts, it really let me have it. And then I was like hitting
my arm against the table to try and kill it or get it off. But it was holding on and just like really injecting the venom. And yeah, really letting you have it. And then it travels up and
it goes into your lymph nodes and into your here and you get a headache. And I think the brilliant thing about the venom of a bullet ant
is that it makes you feel like this feeling of alarm, it makes you feel like something's wrong. You don't just go, "Ow, this hurts" like it's like a bee sting, where you "Ah, this
really hurts on my hand." It's like, no, no, no, no. Your whole nervous system is freaking out and you start sweating
and then you get cold and then you're tired and then you get a little blurry vision. And it's like, yeah
that's actually that bad. I mean now after six or seven I get bitten and I'm like kind of okay. - [Lex] So it's a full
body, full mind experience. - It's a full body, full mind experience. But then there's places in the
Amazon where they, you know, stick their hand in a
glove with like 70 of them. And I think Steve-O did that, which I just don't understand
how you could do that without going into complete
anaphylactic shock and dying 'cause one really sucks. - Well just like we said, with animals and with humans
there's different kinds. - [Paul] There's different kinds. - Steve-O is definitely, specially unique. - [Paul] The first of its species. - Whew. On the point of uncontacted tribes, it's interesting to think about what kind of civilizations
have there been? This is something that you've
talked about a little bit. Graham Hancock has written about ancient civilizations and sort of challenging the conventionals or the mainstream thinking
about the civilizations that have been there in the Amazon. Can you steelman and criticize the idea, so the pro and the con of the idea that there have been ancient, advanced ancient
civilizations in the Amazon? Like, how much do we know? Or what are all the possibilities
of what's in the Amazon in its past? - So like, when Orellana
went down the Amazon, the reports were that there
was great civilizations in the Amazon. And then, you know, a
few hundred years later when people got to actually
check up on this stuff, it was all gone. And so was that because of disease that we wiped out all these civilizations and these communities of people? Potentially, probably. Was he just wrong? Probably not. This is a guy that navigated
by the stars back to Spain after building his own
boat. Or did he, you know? Or was he trying to just,
I don't know. I don't know. But there clearly is a long history of complex civilizations in the Amazon. A hundred percent, there's
no one that can deny that. The thing that I reacted to was that I've heard videos, I've seen
moments in podcasts where the narrative becomes not, there's more ancient civilization
information in the Amazon than we previously
thought, true statement. We're discovering with lidar, and this is what Graham
Hancock is talking about, that we're discovering constantly that there is more civilizations
than we thought in various places. The place where I take offense is where they start to
say that the Amazon, there's actually articles
that are titled this, that the Amazon is a manmade garden, which is not true. - So the actual, which I think
is a really different idea that the entire ecosystem, everything we've been talking
about, all the species, all the forestry and the
different, just life, life, one of the most
diverse ecosystems on earth is initially created by humans. - It's ridiculous. - Well, it's not. First
of all, it's unlikely, but it's not ridiculous. So we can't, there's no
ridiculous in science. - [Paul] No. - But the complexity of life
is very difficult to engineer the more you study about
biological systems and so on, it's very difficult to
create the kind of things that nature is able to do. That said, I don't know if you've heard, but the entire earth, the world has gone through
a pandemic recently. And everybody said of
course it's natural origins, viruses mutate all the time. And nevertheless, it
seems more and more likely in this particular case, it was of an artificial
origin, leaked from a lab. So humans are able to create stuff, at least modern technological
genetic engineering. - We made golden retrievers. Come on. - You can't be that nice
and that good looking. It used to be a wolf, yeah. So that bothers you because
it allows you to think that we don't need to preserve the Amazon, we can always engineer it. - Yeah, exactly. This is just to me,
that's a slippery slope. It's so quick from, I'm a fan of expeditions
to find ecological ruins and to learn more about the
ancient civilizations to, which I don't think is what
he's putting out is that, then sort of like news articles, which I think they're trying to bait you, where they're going,
was the Amazon manmade? And it's like, you know. Because then you get a
Brazilian president that go, "See? See what they said? It's manmade. So we might as well continue
to engineer it and manage it." And it's like, there's such
complex systems and interactions and such a giant web of life there that, at least in my opinion, is clearly one of the most
authentically natural things. And again, are there things
that we've engineered, the uncontacted tribes,
sometimes they have banana plants that they've stolen and we
could see it from the air that they have banana plants. We've made banana plants,
that's engineered by us, we know for a fact. - [Lex] Agricultural engineering. - Agricultural engineering
and stuff like that. But suggesting that the
Amazon basin, you know, it's just a weird way to think about it. I've just heard people dismiss
the protection of the Amazon based on the fact they're like,
oh well, if people made it, and it's such a giant leap
from zero to a hundred. Is there slash and burn that
the ancient civilizations did? Of course. Are there areas that were
affected by people? Of course. I just get worried when
we start talking about it was a man-made thing. - Yeah, here you loud and clear on that. And I personally think
that's completely separate from wondering about what
the ancient civilization have been able to accomplish. It's almost really sad because
if all the humans on earth die now, how long does it take before all signs of humans ever existing disappear for the most part, from an alien perspective? - What timeline are we talking about? I mean, like a hundred thousand years? - It could be less, it could be less. It could be like a few thousand because a hundred thousand
is complete destruction. - [Paul] Hundred thousand is like nothing. - But then it could be in
just a few hundred years, it starts becoming, the government of the alien
civilization is gonna have to pay quite a bit of money
to do the research to find, 'cause they're gonna
find other life first. They're gonna find the dolphins
and the fish and so on. They're gonna find the trees, maybe the trees are the interesting thing. The buildings are not that
interesting without humans. They crumble.
- But there must be examples of cities that have been left unattended for a few
decades and like how quickly the plants push up through the street and everything starts to get broken down. - If you really look, you'll be like, oh, there's some interesting geometry here for the buildings and so on. But most of the computer stuff, all the stuff of the past hundred years, the airplanes, all of
that, all the technologies, all of the paperwork, all the hard drives that
store all the information. - I want to actually
know how long it takes like a 747 to biodegrade. Like, if you just leave it
there sitting on the runway, society stops, how long does it take for
that thing to disappear? Like, that's a weird one. - Completely versus to a point
where it's unidentifiable might be different, but. I mean, the point I'm
trying to say here is, as you've brilliantly
put, the Amazon churns. - [Paul] Yeah, oh yeah. - And the fact there, I wonder throughout its history, what are the peaks of the awesomeness? How many banana, how many agricultural Einsteins of bananas were there? They're creating different kinds of ideas, different kinds of geometries,
different kinds of tools. - Well, yeah, look what the Incas did. I mean the Incas, you know, Machu Picchu. When Hiram Bingham found Machu Picchu, it was covered in jungle, you could hardly see it. And I mean the stonework they did, much like what the Egyptians
did with the pyramids, a lot of it we don't really
understand how they did it. If you come to the jungle, you gotta go to Machu Picchu
'cause it's not far from there. And I usually, like, I'm the person, like, I don't usually go see like the, you know, I've never been to see the Taj Mahal after living in India for
five years, like I'm just not. But when you look up and you
see Machu Picchu, you go, either they were communicating
with the gods there or these people were
so smart that they knew that anybody they brought,
they were gonna impress. They've built something there that when you look up at that
mountain, you go, "Whoa," with those giant stones,
the beauty of it, you know. It's just stunning to imagine that there was this culture of people that could achieve this. And so through the Amazon, I mean that's sort of up in the Andes, but there's all kinds
of stuff in the Amazon. There are places where
they say there's pyramids beneath the canopy that
we just don't know about. I mean, it's endless. - If you had billions of
dollars, trillions of dollars, what would be the efforts in the Amazon, for both conservation and for exploration? Which are tied together. - Yeah, exactly. First,
arrest the deforestation so we don't have an ecological
crisis on our hands. We don't wanna keep losing species, losing indigenous cultures, losing the climate stabilizing services that the Amazon provides as a whole. Stop that, that's my first mission. Next, then we can play. And then it's like, let's go find, I mean, I've flown over
the Amazon in a Cessna and it's like, you see
things where you go, we have to go see what that is. You know, weird lakes, or shapes in the jungle
that don't make sense that are strange. - So even at that level,
you can see weirdness, you can see different, like,
signs of possible awesomeness. - Oh, the jungle is so weird. And here's the other thing is that most, so like the region I've been working in, you see where the researchers go. There's certain biological stations, there's certain places where like, oh, this university has
a relationship with this, this university with this. So everybody goes to the
same few study sites, and then they walk on the same trails and they have the same guides. When you fly in a Cessna and you fly a few hours away from all that and you see a tiny little tributary, and then you fly for 40
minutes over unbroken green, just wild, before you
reach another tributary. Even if somebody could survive
going up that tributary, had the expeditionary expertise
and the ability to survive getting shot at by arrows, if they could get up that tributary, now cut perpendicular into
the jungle, which I don't do. On the solos, you can never,
don't ever leave the river. But you're telling me that
in that span of 70 miles between tiny tributaries
at the edge of the world, no one's been there, none
of us have been there. You know, maybe somebody
10,000 years ago was there, but we don't know what
populations of things are there, we don't know what ruins are there. And so there's so much
undiscovered stuff in the Amazon that is just waiting, just waiting. - What is the process of exploring that? So how does money get
converted towards exploration? Is there safe ways of doing that? - There's places where, you know, we've found out about things
that have to be explored. You come up with, well how do we do this without getting shot. And not only without getting shot, but also without endangering them too, 'cause how stupid are we if we go in there to people that are living in
the jungle, not bothering us, and we go insert ourselves into there because we're curious about some rocks. That doesn't seem fair for
the loss of life, and so like. But yeah, that's something
that we're working on. And one thing of course
is like lidar and stuff, but eventually, at the end of everything, it comes down to boots on the ground. - As somebody who has to
ask that very question about how to deal with uncontacted tribes, they're going to kill you, but you also don't wanna
disturb their environment. If you were an intelligent
alien civilization - [Paul] Oh boy. - and you came about earth, how would you interact with it? Can you put yourself in the
mind of an alien civilization? 'Cause there seems to
be some parallels here. - [Paul] That is actually right,
it's like a microcosm of... - We're very aggressive, human civilization is very aggressive. So if we were easily, we get threatened easily
for stupid reasons, 'cause we start, like, American military probably thinks it's like the Chinese or the Russians if we see any kind of flying objects, it gets very on edge. - I don't know, I mean. 'Cause you know, part of it is like, you just want to ask. Like that's the thing, I
just want to ask questions. - Yeah, but you don't
know the same language. - [Paul] What you gonna get? First of all--
- You send a boat of bananas. - You send a boat of
bananas, you get shot. I mean picture if aliens
landed in New York, how long would it take for
one of them to get shot? It'd be minutes, it'd
be matter of minutes. - [Lex] Yeah, but that's
'cause it's New York, and everywhere else. - Look where we are right now. (chuckles) - That's true, it'd be
even worse here, yeah. Makes me wonder what is the
right way to interact with intelligent life that's not like our own. I dream of in our lifetime
we would interact with possibly life on Mars or on one of the moons
of Jupiter or Saturn. And like, how do you
interact with that thing? This very technical, biological
and chemical processes, but also if there's any
kind of intelligence, how do you try to communicate
with that intelligence? - So we're not talking
about like a cockroach, we're talking about like some
something that's clearly like doing things, making things. - Well, cockroach, possibly. How do you know the difference
between a cockroach? Like, how do you know? We were just talking
about those elephants. We don't know, we don't know. - Just like a race of like
philosopher cockroaches just chilling on the rocks. - Well, here on earth we kind of, there seems to be a strong correlation between size and intelligence. It seems like the bigger things
have bigger nervous systems and brains and so they're usually smarter, but that doesn't. - I think it's the ratio, brain to body, 'cause you have like crows that are up among the most intelligent. And it's like the size of the
brain to the size of the body. - But there also could
be kinds of intelligence who we're completely,
- [Paul] That we have no idea. - we're not appreciating. Maybe cockroaches, they've
survived the longest. They're talking about us
right now, this dumb humans. - [Paul] Like, dude.
These rocks are so great. - A couple of hundred years, exactly. - Did you hear that Kurt Vonnegut where the two space travelers get lost? This really impacted me as a kid 'cause my dad was an English teacher so he is always quoting
Dostoevsky and Kurt Vonnegut. And there's this two space travelers get crash landed in a cave. And on the walls of the
cave are the Harmoniums, and these kite-shaped animals and they feed off the
vibrations of the cave. And that's all they do, they don't hurt each
other, they just do that. And so for like two years,
these travelers are stuck and they're trying to fix their ship. One of them starts playing
music for the Harmoniums, and the Harmoniums love him for the music and they all come around him and he plays this music for him. And finally they fix the ship. And the one guy is like, "All
right, let's get outta here." And the other guy's like,
"You know what, I'm staying." He goes, "I found a place
where I can do good. I'm not hurting anybody and they love me. I'm staying right here." - Yeah, this whole ambition
thing we've got going on, always trying to build the
bigger boat, bigger thing, that might not be the ultimate conclusion of a happy existence as a civilization. That's one of the possibilities
why we haven't met the aliens yet at scale. 'Cause once you get good
enough at technology, you realize that happiness
lies in a peaceful coexistence. It's possible. - So where do you stand
on like aliens now? Like, there's a lot coming
out about the pilots and the things people have been seeing. And again, I kind of come
in and out of this stuff, like I'll be in the
jungle for three months. I miss a lot, so like, update me. Are we being contacted right now? - Of course nobody knows,
but I tend to believe. My intuition says there's
aliens everywhere, even our galaxy. That's a bigger leap
but I believe our galaxy has probably billions, hundreds of millions of
planets with life on it, like bacteria type of life. And I believe there is, I don't know, thousands of intelligent
alien civilizations that exist or have existed. The problem is there's a lot of time, and it's very difficult
to contact each other. So to achieve a kind of
civilization that's able to actually send out enough signal or radiate enough energy
where we would notice, I think that's really tough. That said, statistically speaking, it seems like that
should have been possible inside our galaxy or maybe nearby. And so, I suspect that once an alien civilization is
just many orders of magnitude smarter than us humans, the way it would contact us is going to be very difficult
for us humans to understand. We're very ego-centric. We want the message to be
sent as like a, in English, versus, you know, I think
consciousness itself, emotion, thoughts, could be like fingertips, could be words in the story
that aliens are telling us, or things that are just like a low-dimensional projection of a much higher dimensional message that's being sent by aliens. And that maybe are striving
to create technology is to create the kind of sensor that's actually able to
hear some of the message, maybe that's what AI is trying to do. So I think that bridging
that barrier of communication between us and cockroaches, I think that's the biggest challenge. - [Paul] Interesting. - Like, the messages are
all around us, they're here. I suspect that the
alien messages are here. The aliens are here, we're
just too dumb to see it. - So first of all, the imagining planets
where there are, like, just picturing, not a silent planet, but just like a planet
of alternate life forms. You know, maybe it's not
something that we can communicate and have a conversation with, but just a planet of like
butterflies and centipedes and weird, you know, things. - Unfortunately, bacterias,
for billions of years, it was bacteria as single cell, prokaryotes and eukaryotes, but they're boring, but yeah. - Animals of some sort in
an environment of some sort. Imagine that, it would just
be such an interesting, beautiful, amazing thing,
and I'm sure they're out. On that, I'm yeah. - The kind of viruses they got going on. But they could also not
be biologically based, they could be different chemistry so you have to be humble to that too. - [Paul] Sure. - But then, you know,
it depends on the day. Like, I think you caught
me on that day today, an optimistic one. Sometimes I think we're all, this is all there is because
you ask that question the fermi paradox, like,
why aren't they here? You can't imagine an
advancing civilization that would not be explorers,
because we're explorers. - Why is that depressing to you? The idea that... Let's just say you
found out right now that there isn't anything else. Let's just say that
for example's sake that the earth is the earth and
the universe is the universe, and it's sort of like the
backdrop of a video game, and it's just what's out there. Would that be tremendously
depressing to you? - I think it's exciting for an engineer, it's probably exciting for an explorer. But I would equate that
to your going out hiking for three days with one match. It kind of terrifies me
that we only got one match. - Really?
- [Lex] Yeah. - Really? - Yeah, one. All you got is one match. No, no, no, hold on a
second. Hold on a second. Paul, wait a minute. You're going out, there's no more matches, this is the only match you got. - But no one's gonna
extinguish the planet. Like there's not, as far as we know, there's no meteor coming. I'm saying like, do you live in a, so what I'm saying is that is your worry then that we
need to have a backup plan? - [Lex] Yeah.
- Really? So what if we do mess it up so bad that we can't live here anymore? - Well, there's different
ways to mess it up. There's ways to mess it up to
make life really difficult. - [Paul] You have "Mad
Max" type of things. - But there's nuclear war with a further and further
advancement of technology that can destroy all of our, it just feels like that's going
to be exponentially growing. - [Paul] Yes, it's gonna get worse. - Listen, I'm very optimistic, but it's a heck of a Russian
roulette we're playing. - Okay. But I'm still curious
about your intention though, or like where your passion
for this comes from. Or maybe it's both, but is it the need to have a backup plan for humans, which is admirable for your
intense love of humanity and our consciousness and
love and art and everything, or is it also just that
the raw fascination of imagining what's out there? Because the way you said that about like, oh, you caught me on a positive
day where I think it's, there was something in
there that made me think that you need there to be. - Ah, yeah. I think I'm the kind of person that sees beauty in everything, but to me, a universe full of diverse life is more beautiful than one
where it's just humans. It's just the earth life. - [Paul] Interesting. - There's more beauty. I mean, I'm not egotistical
about the awesomeness of humans. I like if humans are not the smartest in our galaxy, or not even
close to being the smartest. And that to me is, I don't know. That that to me is exciting
about the possibility of what the universe can create. - Yes, I'm with you on that, that it's wildly exciting to... Like if we found, even if it was just a distant inkling that we found out that there
is a planet that has life. There's no communication coming from it, but we know for a fact
there's stuff going on there. It would just change how we
think about our entire reality. We know now. - And it could be, to me, I guess the little
inkling of a thing, that is depressing. If all there is is earth and humans destroy it, then we are the coolest thing that the universe has
ever created. (chuckles) It's over. - I'm interested to
have this conversation. I'm really, I'm saying like, I would be interested to
bring you to the jungle. Now I'm also wondering, I'm wondering like what your
wilderness experience is because I feel like for me, I'm so earth-centric to
the point where I'm like, we differ in that. For me, this is, like, it's a curiosity. I feel wonder and I feel
it's fun to talk about like what's at the edge of space, like, you know, there's the
conundrums of space time. To me I'm like, what if the aliens are watching us, or what if the aliens aren't watching us? But what if the challenge here
is we've been put on earth as the most intellectually
complex of these creatures and we're being observed
to see how we manage it. And it's like, we haven't made a good job of managing each other. You know, before Orellana
went down the Amazon they showed up and just sacked the Incas. I mean, read our history, I
mean, I don't have to tell you, just got back. Sometimes I wonder, you know, is there a grand narrative with what we're doing to wildlife? Because it's like we have
all these other species and we're struggling even
here in this conversation to sort of quantify like, you know. And I think that most people don't think outside of the human framework,
you know what I mean, like, just driving around. For me, living outside of the jungle, even just for a few weeks I get, you don't even think about the fact that there's other species around us, we really don't day to day. You look at TV and you listen
to the radio and it doesn't, it's not very consequential
to the average person living in a city that
there are these, you know, islands covered in walruses
and that there's rainforests filled with birds and frogs and all these things happening. The salmon are contributing
to our fresh water and that life is literally
given to us and made possible by these ecological systems. To me, that's where like the whole essence of my existence comes from. - Yeah, thank you for that reminder, because you're basically saying
like the alien civilizations you dream about are here on earth. Those worlds are here. - [Paul] For me, yeah. - No, I agree with you. I think I agree with you, and I think that's actually the way I think most of the time. I think I'm on mushrooms all the time, genetically somehow because
when I go out in nature, it's just the beauty, even of nothing, you talk about the Amazon, man, just basics of nature fill me with awe. The other thing that fills me with awe is our own mind, like the
biology of these things firing. Basically, not our own mind, but biology of any living organisms 'cause it's like an ecosystem. These cells came together,
they somehow function, they delegate, they mostly
operate in a local way. First of all, it's just like
you said with the anacondas, you start out as a tiny
snake and you become giant. When you're a tiny snake,
you're prey for everything, when you're a giant
snake, you're a predator, or you're prey to no one. And just that whole process, same starting with a single
embryo, single cell as a human. And through the embryogenic process, constructing this giant human
that's able to have limbs, move about the world, think about things, write books and so on. So you see that that is
incredibly beautiful, and all of that is here on earth, yes. And so actually I was being
sort of poetic about aliens and so on. I think I can spend 99.99% in terms of filling my
mind with awe and beauty just looking down here on earth. For sure, I agree with you. - Yeah, and they shouldn't cancel out. Like, I think it's beautiful that there's people that are
fascinated and obsessed with looking out into space
and that will travel there. I mean, just to me, the idea of, I mean I have a little
piece of meteorite at home that I hold. It does amazing things to
my mind 'cause I'm like, everything I've ever
touched is from this earth, and I'm holding this
thing that's been places that we can't even think about. And it blows my mind and I love it. But when it comes to like intelligence, I think it's like, I'm so
concerned with the fact that we're at this moment in history, and it's interesting to me that, you know, we had the internet and now
that with the emergence of AI and more and more I feel like
we are starting to resemble like an ant colony, where
there's more and more connection, and there's more and more interaction globally between everybody. In the next 10 years,
we're gonna have to decide, are we gonna let our ocean
ecosystems just collapse? Are we gonna just take
that 3% of rainforest and just let them log the shit
out of it until it's gone? And it's like, we're gonna be in a very different reality then, then it's gonna be very dystopian future. Or, can we keep the good things
about earth, transcend that, realize that we have these
incredible alien species around us that are animals
that we grew up with, that we wouldn't be here without,
that we owe something to. And I feel like at that stage then the outward look becomes something else. It's almost like we've proven, if aliens came up to us,
that's when I'd feel good. Aliens would come up to us and they said, you know, Louie has the
thing where he goes, God comes back and he
goes, what did you do? He goes, the polar bears are brown. He's like, I left food for you. And it's like, if the aliens
came and were like, you know, and they interviewed the elephants and they said, "How are you feeling?" And the elephants would be like, "Listen, fuck these little primates. You know what they've done to us?" And it's like, I mean, you know, I've seen people break an elephant, I've seen it all with that stuff. And it's like, if anybody was to ask them, they'd be screaming. And so like to me, it's just, you know, I have trouble looking out into space, I have trouble looking out
into normal life as a human because I'm so concerned
with trying to make sure that they're okay because not
enough people are doing that. - Well, the interesting thing
about all the development with AI and just that we're living more and more of our life online, I think we're actually learning what's missing when it's online. Like, I think people realize that online interaction is shallow, but we're just learning
that that's a reality, that we need that human connection. And I think there's going to
be the swing back to like, sadly, AI systems of the future might be able to live
fulfilling lives online, but us humans have to have
a deep connection with earth and like with each other
and physical connection. I think there's going to be a
phase somewhere in the century where we go back to deep
physical connection, and there'll be a digital
world that we visit that will be separate. You have discussion
with that, with Twitter, with Instagram, with all
these social networks that they seem to be dividing us, they seem to not be bringing happiness. And you have to try to
figure out like, okay, so how do we use them in a way that does connect us, does educate
us, grow our knowledge base, but also keeps our lives fulfilling in a deep human way that we're for good and for bad genetically designed that we can't overcome,
that we can't escape these meat vehicles. - Yeah, but to me that's so reassuring. We all have those friends
that are like, you know, we gotta live forever. And it's like, I don't know man, do you? I don't know. Is it that bad
that this is how it works, like, that we don't understand it? - Yeah, and it's often
from the tech sector that you have discussions
about immortality and so on. I think that's somehow trying to escape the beauty of this earth that there's something beautiful. - [Paul] Too bright to look at. - Yeah. And I perhaps
like you am worried about the unintended negative
consequences of trying to escape the way things are on this earth because this is an incredible mechanism. - How many times in the past
has new technology come out that people have hailed as
blasphemy, or it's not gonna work or it goes against nature. And now, well, heart
transplants are pretty cool. You could say what you
want about like television and like, you know, it rots your brain. It's like, yeah, but also how many times have you sat in a room full
of people being entertained and all laughing and
interacting and eating popcorn because of the televisions there? And it's not one or the other. And so I feel like with AI, we'll learn our way through it, you know. - Like with the legged robots especially, and humanoid also. So anything on legs,
four legs or two legs. I remember like the
first time I interacted with a legged robot, I saw a magic there, that this too can have consciousness, this too can have this life-like quality that a human being loves
about other human beings, about other living creatures. Now, while I'm still, I grew up in the place with no internet in a time with no internet, so I still like biological dogs better. I noticed the magic in robotic dogs, and it makes me wonder, same way we're just talking
about aliens looking up, it makes you wonder about
other aliens civilizations. Now the deep love is for
dogs, for other humans, but there's still this wander. - Ah, I struggle with that. Like you said, whatever's
going on in here, the idea, and there's so
much talk about the fact, like at what point does an
artificially-intelligent robot become something that has, and it's like I get very
uncomfortable with that. It makes me... I don't know how to handle the things 'cause I don't know
enough about it probably. But it's like, I don't know how to handle. - I don't know how to handle either, nobody knows anything about
it because it's really, everything is terrifying here. It could be as simple as
consciousness is easy to fake. So what if we live in a world
10 to 20 years from now where your toaster, there's a
bunch of robots in your room that are faking consciousness. And then you fall in love with them and you have a deep connection with them, and then you actually
have a deeper connection with your toaster than you do with any romantic human partner you've ever had. And you start to-- - I was upset about the dogs. I was like, at least the robot doesn't take a shit on the floor. You just took it way worse. - Yeah, yeah. And then they start to, I don't know if you've seen AI porn, but it gets pretty intense. - Like, fully AI porn?
Like, they're fake people? - [Lex] Fake people take people that can-- - Things I've missed in the jungle. - Things. (chuckles) Boy do I have a lot to show you, or not show you, not show you. Let me ask you about a touchy topic, climate change. What's the effect of climate
change on the Amazon, maybe species diversity. What is something that
people should think about? Because there's different views on, I think most people
believe that climate change is human-caused and that it's happening, but there is different
perspectives on the degree of damage that it's
going to do over the next several decades and what
our response should be as a society. And so it would be amazing to
hear your perspective on it, in small slices of your
experience or in large. - To me, there's no denying the fact that we are experiencing changes. I think anybody that
doesn't agree with that hasn't been outside in the last 20 years, or hasn't interviewed old farmers who will tell you that
it changed or, you know. I think a lot of us can agree with that. Where I deviate is that I
am not a climate scientist, I am not qualified, and so I just like
everybody else am listening. And what happens to me is I see that someone like Santiago Durand, JJ's father, will tell me, "It's totally
different than it was when I was a kid, the seasons have changed and moved." In New York when I was a kid, we used to get like white Christmas, like we used to get snow. I was in shorts. I came off the plane right before coming here and
I was in shorts for a second. I was like, this is a different reality. But my ability or my
interpretation of climate change, you know, I feel like is just as dumb as those people that go like, it's really cold, I thought
they said it was getting warmer. It's like, it's a very rudimentary thing. And so as a someone that's fighting for the preservation of biodiversity, I don't feel like I'm any more qualified than the average person. I can only provide anecdotal evidence of the stuff I've seen. What I do do though, and I always make a
strong delineation here, is that I can speak to the
fact that I've been places where the ocean fisheries
have been depleted and the local fishermen can tell you, and the scientists can tell
you there's no more fish here. I've been to the places
where the rainforest line is being pushed back in Borneo and it's getting smaller
and smaller and smaller. And I've been in the Amazon and I've walked through the killing fields and through the fires and
I've burnt my lungs on it. And I'm a big believer, personally, in instead of trying to take on all of it, I've tried very hard in
my life to pick one thing. And to me that one thing is protecting as many wild heartbeats as I can because they're under constant fire. And so climate change, you know, there's so much arguing over it, and like you said, the
degree to which we affect it. And how do you, you know what I mean? Like, I like to have provable data points. I can show you tropical deforestation, I can show you the decline in tigers over the last a hundred years, I can't prove, you know what I mean? Like, I can't answer that
question, I don't think, probably you can better than I can. - No, I think one of the criticism I'd love to get your opinion on is one of the criticisms that somebody like Jordan Peterson provides is that the climate is
such a complex system, there's so many variables that making conclusive statements about what's going to happen with
the quote, unquote "climate" in the next 10, 20, 50 years is a nearly impossible task. Therefore, as he would say, as people like Björn Loberg would say, the kind of fear mongering that is done saying we should spend
humongous amounts of money to change the trajectory
of everything we're doing in terms of energy, in terms of infrastructure and so on, in terms of how we allocate
money is not justified because predicting is very difficult. And instead, it's better
exactly what you're saying, which is focusing on local problem, (chuckles) local, saying we need to protect the Amazon. What are the things attacking
the Amazon this year in the next five years? How can we stop the deforestation? How can we stop different things? And humans are exceptionally good at coming up with solutions for that, especially when you put money behind it, you put attention to it. And that's the way we solve
all the different problems that are projected for the climate change in its worst case scenarios
to be realized on this earth. So that's kind of the case he would make. And I should also mention
that one of the reasons I was fortunate enough
to discover your work is, first, a friend mentioned that I should definitely talk to you, and then I Googled you. And I saw that somebody recommended that Jordan Peterson
absolutely must talk to you on his podcast.
- Oh, wow. - [Lex] I think it was like a Reddit post. - Thank you, Reddit poster, that's great. - And I was like, oh, interesting. And then I looked, and Jordan hasn't yet. I thought my goal is
for you to talk to Rogan and to Jordan Peterson
for different reasons, but for the same reason, they get connected to a human being that deeply cares about this earth. And I think that's probably
the right lens through which to look at the effects of climate change in terms of focusing
on the different things that are threatening
the diversity of species in this most magical place on
earth, which is the Amazon. But also, as you talk about
with elephants and tigers in India, and focusing on
how to solve those problems. I don't know if there's
any comment you wanna make on folks like Jordan Peterson who are sort of raising questions about how much do we really
understand about the climate. - First of all, I'm such
a Jordan Peterson fan, and I think the guy is heroic
for a number of reasons. And I find his use of language
and his use of theology and the message that
he puts out wonderful. I cringe a little bit when he says, I feel like, and I might not
even be accurate on this, but I cringe a little bit
when I feel like he dismisses that there is an ecological
emergency happening right now. Now, I'm not saying, I'm not talking about
climate change specifically, but I've heard him say, you know, "Environmentalists upset me." And he goes, "Well, what do
you mean by the environment, everything?" And it sort
of seems to outrage him. And I kind of agree
with him there because, so are you telling me that we need to halt our global process and progress and economies and everything? I don't know, I don't know. So to me, that doesn't bother me because he's exploring what the hell are these
people talking about. I personally have friends and students and people filling my inboxes, I have young kids telling
me that they've become vegan and they ride a bicycle and
sometimes they don't watch TV 'cause it uses electricity, and I mean, they're just
becoming so terrified of they're killing the earth. And so it's this doomsday
anti-human sentimentalist thing that we're evil. It's almost like a new
religion about your evil. And so to me, it almost makes me in a totally different camp where like climate change
and the right/left politics, and you know, I can sit at a family, I can see the Thanksgiving dinner and listen to the climate
thing go back and forth. And I'm like, I'm not even here. And that might actually annoy some people in the environmental field that might feel betrayed
by me saying that. But I don't care. My job, and it's not just the Amazon, and that's one note that
I wanted to make is that my career has taken place
largely in the Amazon and also in India and now a lot in Africa. It's not even just these
exotic places either it's people realizing that, you know, the salmon runs in Canada and the butterfly
gardens in our backyards. There's biodiversity everywhere. And I strongly feel like, you know, the idea of Junglekeepers, the idea of stewards of nature. And so for me, my job, my one thing, and I try to tell this to
these kids that message me and my inboxes are full
of this where they go, you know, the climate is burning and elephants are in decline
and tigers, and this and that. I'm like, guys look, first of all, calm down, first of all. Like, go outside, go get laid, do something, have fun. Next, pick something that you can affect and it doesn't have to
be with the environment. Do something good on earth. Go help somebody that needs food. Go help your elderly
neighbor, whatever it is. Practice with being effective
at one thing at a time. And so for me, like I
said from those early days of sitting there with JJ on
the side of a river and going, someone has to protect this. My concern is that we've
lost 70% of the wildlife on this planet in the last 50
years, that's a huge problem. Wildlife maintain the ecosystems. And so I have a very
clear cut, very definable, very measurable and provable thing that I'm fighting against, and to me, it's a very small ask, don't cut down the 3% of the world that has 50% of the biodiversity in it. Maybe let's keep some wild
tigers for future generations because tigers have their own
inherent right to exist here. That's my thing. In terms of when we get to, you know, I get attacked for, you
know, you should be a vegan. Okay. You have me roll into a village in the Amazon when they
offer me spider monkey and you tell me that I should be a vegan, you see how much they respect you when you tell them that you're a vegan. But no. So for someone like Peterson, I think it's actually good that he's first of all telling everyone
to make their damn beds, and exploring it through a different lens. He's coming at it from a totally
different thing and saying, are we just being alarmist here? I mean, again, imagine
if there isn't a problem and they're making one out of it and all the implications that
that could have for progress. So I think what he's doing
is perfectly reasonable. There is a podcast though where he's, it was a great one though, where he's discussing animal intelligence. And I could really see that the human psyche and theology and religion is so much his world that really the idea of animals
being intelligent was novel, and it was fascinating. - Yeah, that's why I would love
for the two of you to talk. I don't know, and hopefully
I'm not outta line here, but he is so focused on the human mind that I think he forgets that there's other life out there. There's this whole
machine of intelligence, of a kind of intelligence out there. This entire trillions of
species, tiny and big, just everywhere, and we're actually part of it. So to look at it, human
psychology is distinct from that is missing at least some of the picture. - Some of the picture. I do believe though I would
agree with him on that humans are unique. Human psychology is unique, we just are. He's in such an interesting
place because usually you have, you know, environmentalists
who are like, you know, nature, nature, nature, and that's very anti-human, and then you have the other side. And it's like he's on this path where he's starting to explore what those diverse intelligences mean. And that to me is really amazing 'cause I love hearing
what he'll do with that. - And I think also on top of that, I think if you're aware of
nature, deeply aware of nature, it gives you another perspective on the evolutionary history of humans. Like, it is one thing to be
an evolutionary biologist and kind of study it from
a philosophical perspective and it's the other to
really I think experience it and deeply know and to see, I don't know, the fact that we came from fish and really be cognizant of that. That's something else. That's like, I don't know, to realize that we're part
of a computing machine that created intelligence. We're part of the thing
that started bacteria and is now creating AI and I don't know, Dunking Donuts, I don't know what else is impressive. - [Paul] The other
great human achievement. - It is the other great human. I was thinking, what's
interesting about Boston? - But I feel like we keep
scratching up against this thing in this conversation that it's so easy, I think something like 50 or more percent of the humans on this
planet live in cities. And I think it's so easy for people to forget
that we share this planet with so many other things. And I think that that sort of, in a way, we're almost
like ecological orphans and that we've left the things that actually make us feel at home. And that's a bit of a stretch 'cause I don't know if
everybody feels that way, but for me, I mean professionally
as an expedition guide, when I take people into nature, I see what happens to them. And they leave going, I mean it doesn't have to be the Amazon, it could be, you know, upstate New York. But it's like, if you do it the right way, if you remove the fear of breaking an ankle, seeing a snake, being bitten by a
mosquito, all that stuff, if you can get people to a peaceful moment and you're fly fishing, a lot of times they'll take that moment and they'll talk about
it the rest of their life if they don't live in that, then there's those of us who
spend our lives doing that, but for a reason because it's
the only place we feel sane. - And you were kind enough to suggest that we might travel together
for a time at some point. If we do that, if we journey together, where would you recommend we should go? - So what I would wanna show you is sort of, I'd want
to take you to church, I'd want to take you
to see the giant trees, take you to meet the old gods, really. There's places when you
walk in off the river that are so deep in the forest, you know, and again, now we do this, we have the boats, we have the rangers, we protect this ecological corridor now. And so it would be taking you
to meet some of those loggers that we converted. It'd be taking you, we'd have
to go to the floating forest, meet some of the trees
that I love the most, go piranha fishing. And like, really just spend, my ideal trip for you would be to spend five days of airplane-mode phone, completely living out comfortable. I'm not saying, I don't wanna torture you, I'm saying go and live
comfortably on an expedition in the Amazon. And that means a few days
at this research station, maybe go upriver three days and camp up here just on the edge of where the uncontacted are, and then come back and then
see the Junglekeepers station. But along the way, seeing all
the special sacred places, it would be almost like
saying, like, let's go see all the treasures of Italy. It's like, this is one of the most beautiful things on earth, and I've had the incredible,
almost unbelievable fortune to be responsible for protecting it. I think it's a privilege to be able to share that with people. - To be able to witness
what this earth has created. It's been just a gift just
even to follow your Instagram, the window you create on
this part of the world is just really beautiful. I do wanna ask on that, maybe it's like behind
the scenes a little bit, like, how do you keep the equipment dry? How do you, like how hard is bringing
equipment, the cameras? You're an incredible
filmmaker and photographer, so how do you make it work? - I don't know, it's not that hard. - [Lex] Really? It's wet.
- It's not that bad. It is wet. The new iPhones are waterproof. And if they don't get, I'm telling you dude,
it's been such a weapon, it's been awesome. If you drop it in the river, my one thing is you gotta have a tether 'cause I drop it all the time. And so I'll be hanging off a boat and I'll be trying to take a video, and I'll be like, here
we are in the Amazon, you can see the line and
(imitates water plopping). That's the biggest thing. We shoot on Canons. I don't know, it's worked
out, it's not that bad. - Oh really? So you can
keep the equipment dry. - I keep the equipment
dry and I actually don't, a lot of people put
their in silica at night and keep it dry and then they take it out. And I find that when you do that, the temperature change creates
moisture inside the camera. So what I do is I never do that, I just keep my cameras in
my backpack with a zipper so they're more or less
exposed to the elements. And so it sort of always has
a little bit of equilibrium, and that's it. I mean, I shoot on some pretty
fancy equipment sometimes and it's great. But I mean the awesome thing
though now is that like, with a cell phone, I mean like, I put my phone down on
the ground a few weeks ago and let this rhino walk
up to it and stuff. And it's like, you can get video footage that you can literally put on Netflix. It's getting really exciting, and that's where I deviate
from the nature people that are like we need to
go back and live in cabins. I'm like, dude, this is awesome. And I love taking slowmos, like, no way. - It makes you re-appreciate,
but just by yourself, just re-appreciate over and over and over and then you can also
share it with the world. - Well, that's the thing
of sharing it with people, there's nothing better than like teaching a kid to catch a fish. In a way Instagram has
allowed us to do that where it's like, I can
have this crazy ass moment that is so unique and then
put it up for people to see. I mean, I remember one
of the most recent things that got people, you never know what's
gonna get people excited. I literally just like, there was like 3000 butterflies on the beach and they were all like
black, red, and blue, beautiful butterflies. And I just like panned the phone across it and then like jumped in
the river and swam away. And threw that up on Instagram
and people went berserk. They're like, this is
the most amazing thing and like four different
accounts reached out to try and share it. And I was like, butterflies,
they're everywhere. There's is 4,000 species
of butterfly in the Amazon. But sharing that with people is beautiful. - How do you find the thing to shoot? How do you come up with the butterflies? How do you notice the
thing that's beautiful and say, I'm going to
wait a minute, like pause, this is beautiful, let me
take a picture of this, because like sometimes
you might get used to the beauty, right? - Yeah. Or like sometimes
simple crazy things like leafcutter ants,
they're just walking by, it becomes pedestrian. It's like, well. I mean, just like when you're
living at the elephant camp and it's like the elephant comes out and he starts like
trashing the water bucket. We're like, "Would you stop? We're trying to watch
'Peaky Blinders' here. Just leave us alone." It becomes normal after a while. But no, in the jungle, that's never a struggle for
me, because as a photographer, it's like whenever my eye
hits on something I went, I've never seen that
many of those butterflies all the same species together. Oh yeah, I'm trying to get this one thing that the butterflies do
is in the dry season, the salt deposits, you'll
get like three or four, maybe 5,000 butterflies all
coming onto this one area of sand 'cause there'll
be like some leaching, there'll be some salt
deposit there or something. And they'll all be wings
flat against the ground with their proboscises on the sand. And if you go walk near them, they will vortex up and
you have a rainbow vortex of butterflies, and you can
like go run through that. And it's surreal. What I wanna do is get the shot where I, I guess leave the phone
recording in slowmo facing up, and leave it there for an hour. Let the butterflies come in and settle and then disturb them so I get the bottom of
the vortex of the bug. I'm like, these are the
ways I think where I'm like, how can I show people the
absolute mind-blowing, you know, perfection.
- [Lex] With an iPhone? That's amazing.
- I mean, that's what I have, I'm sure that somebody
else could do it with a red and nail it, but it's like, that's what I have in the jungle because I have to travel light. - Yeah, I think that works. It was the same thing when
I was traveling in Ukraine. The equipment was just that suitcase over there with the foam. And you just shove it full of equipment and who cares?
- [Paul] Do the best you can. - You can go to war
zone, it doesn't matter. It has to do with the, you were talking about like
protecting your camera or not, it feels like the more you protect stuff, the more it's gonna get damaged. - Yeah. Like, see my
cameras, they're all missing, this is amazing to me. So all my cameras are missing the, how you can see the
metal through the paint, so all this because I'm constantly, I'll like slide in and take a picture. They're banged up but
they're good machines. - I think they get tough over
time if you put 'em through, it's like the immune. - It's like muscles. It's like David Goggin's cameras, you gotta make 'em suffer every day. - Yeah. What's your view on hunting? So you really hate poachers. - I really hate poachers. - How do they operate? Who are they? What are they up to? What do they do? - Poachers to me are the
people that are going in and annihilating wildlife
for profit without any, you know, the people that are going in and machine-gunning an
elephant to take its tusks. The people that are sneaking
into protected areas in Africa and shooting rhinos so that they can cut off their horns before the animal's even dead
while it's baby is beside it. And there's a difference
between a poacher and a hunter. I'm a hunter, JJ's a hunter. I work with an organization
called VETPAW in Africa, and they use United States
veterans who have come back, post 9/11 veterans who
have come back from the war and have these skills. And they've been using
these guys to protect the last black rhinos,
white rhinos, elephants. And so, I've gotten to see this play out on a private reserve in Africa
where these incredible people have decided to protect
zebra's, wildebeest, all types of impala, giraffes, several herds of elephants,
white rhinos, black rhinos, all of this stuff is protected. And what's interesting is
it's a hunting preserve. And so it's been very
interesting and challenging sharing my work there with the
public because, for instance, I went to a very high-profile
photographer recently and I said, "You have to
get over here and see this." It's amazing what these people have done, it's this reserve called Buffalo Kloof. This rescued families of
elephants and they have, you can see a black rhino
every day if you want to. They're critically endangered. And it's because of the
work that VETPAW does, protecting these animals from poachers. But what people don't
understand is that hunting happens all the time on the reserve, not for the elephants and the rhinos, those are special and they
will never be hunted there. But things like an impala,
things like an inhala, a wildebeest, a zebra. There aren't as many
predators as there used to be. So if you leave those animals unhunted, you know, without the
wolf to chase the herd to thin off the ones that
are old and dying or sick, well then you just have animals that are old and dying and
sick walking around suffering. And so on reserves like this, they hunt, and they take the old ones, and they use the funding from hunting. No one's gonna pay you $30,000 to take a picture of a buffalo, but they'll pay you
$30,000 to hunt a buffalo. And so these reserves
responsibly and ethically on foot can go hunting and manage. And again, if they were hunting rhinos or if they were hunting
elephants, I'd be out in a second. - They're hunting non-endangered species. - They're hunting non-endangered species, they're hunting game species. And the difference is
that a poacher is gonna, and so those are responsible
hunters that are ecologists and conservationists, whereas a poacher is
someone that will come in and kill recklessly and murder an animal for no reason for a part to sell. - I would love to travel
together actually. So we'll talk offline, I would love to make that
happen, if you allow me. - I'm a hundred percent serious, man. I've tremendous respect for your work and I've been watching
you since the beginning. I would love to do that together. - I've talked to Joe quite a bit about it, and I really love the
idea of eating the meat that I've hunted. It's mostly what I eat is meat, not for dietary, I don't
have any weird constraints on my diet and so on, I just really enjoy eating meat. - [Paul] It's really good. - And there is a part
of me that's bothered by factory farming, that it's very easily-accessible meat but there's something
deeply wrong with it. Part of the reason I love fishing and eating the fish that I catch, it just seems to be more ethical, but also a more intimate, deep connection, honest connection with nature. You get to see the killing of
the food that you're consuming versus removing that from the picture, not even thinking about it, not thinking about that
this came from the meat. I love the idea that I kill one animal and I eat that animal
basically for the whole year. - Yeah. An ethically-slaughtered animal, whether it's a fish or
a deer or whatever else, to me that's, oh God, I'm gonna use the
wrong religious term here, but there's a, I feel like I wanna use
the word like sacrament, but it's like, there's a deeply profound ritual. And honestly, if you teach
a kid to grow a vegetable, you show a kid how to grow a carrot and the miracle of like, wait I put a, this thing just grew in there, it just appeared because
there was sunlight? And it's like, yeah. To me, yes, when you feel
that fish tug on the line, to me it does something that awakens a deep primal
something, this satisfaction. And then when you eat that you feel good. The other thing sort of
functionally speaking is that, aside from the fact that I
think it's one of the original, we are so disconnected,
like we should be hunting. We should be gathering, walking more. I mean, look at what we discussed now, like people are like, oh,
you gotta get your steps in for the day. And it's like, that never
used to be a problem. You know, people are like,
should we be eating animals? And it's like, what do you
think we do here on earth? Like, I'm not sure how
you got so confused, but Walmart did it to you. Like, I don't know. Living where I've lived, I mean, from 18 to 35, I
feel like I've grown up, I've lived more outside
than I have inside. It just to me like showing
people these things, I can see this miraculous
wonder in their eyes when they realize that they
can reach out into the world and interact with something. So when I hear these frantic
people talking about, you know, whether or not it's right, no, of course it is. Then again, factory farming is awful, but I try and walk the line. I'm worried about wild animals, I'm worried about wild ecosystems. The other thing that's sort of important about hunting is that if people's livelihoods
depend on salmon and elk and ocean fisheries, well then they'll fight
to protect it naturally because it's part of their life. If everybody's going to Burger King and everybody's getting
chicken wrapped in plastic, they forget that the fish are there because they're too busy watching sitcoms. And so when the conglomerate
comes in and builds a dam, nobody really cares. And then you just end up
with a few hippies and signs standing next to the river
and it becomes silly. We forget the meaning. - You mentioned that ayahuasca reveals... - [Paul] Oh boy. Oh no. - the darkness that's there in the jungle. There's beauty, but there's darkness. So what is it that ayahuasca reveals? What is the heart of darkness? - Fuck, it opens the heart
of darkness right up. I'm gonna show you a picture of our shaman and then I'm gonna ask you if
you wanna do ayahuasca here, not here in that sense, it can only be done in the jungle. Anybody that tells you,
I've heard people be like, "Oh, I did ayahuasca
in Brooklyn last week" and I'm like, no you didn't. I actually told that to my native friends. I went, "Hey, guess what?" I said, "A bunch of gringos keep thinking they're doing
ayahuasca in Brooklyn." And they were like, howling, laughing. They're like, "You can't
do it outside the jungle." And I was like, "Exactly." - I've never done
ayahuasca, I would love to. I've done or eaten whatever mushrooms, it's a wonderful experience. - I think it's wonderful. But ayahuasca, oh man, see I had done mushrooms,
I thought I was okay. You know, I was like I got this. I had my notebook, I was like, I'm gonna
journal a little bit. I quickly, quickly realized
how out of my depth I was and how unprepared I was
for what was happening 'cause you sit in a circle
with these native guys. And there's one, he's got
the feathers and he is old, and he is got a face like
the map of the world, and he's smoking this
fat, old tobacco thing. He calls you forward and
you kneel before him, and you're going, is
it too late to back up? And everyone's, you
know, he has one candle and he blows smoke over the
cup and he hands it to you. And you're like, again, it's these things that you can't argue
with, it's these facts. You're like, as soon as this
goes down, I'm gone. I know it. And this is a moment in my
life that I have to either embarrass myself in front of everybody or I'm going forward with this. And then I went and sat. And you're sitting in the dark. Again, so we're on a platform
with palm-thatched roof, the jungle is all around you, so all those tens of millions
of frogs and insects. And I'm like, all right, cool. And I remember, I tried to
light a cigarette or something, and I went, oh, that's not gonna happen. And then I put my hands on the floor. My experience, I mean, like, you've done mushrooms so you know, it's interesting, it's introspective. No, this was like somebody
unzipped the universe. Without boring people with it,
I spent a lot of time in like unconstructed dream space,
like, floating between nebulas. Like, there's a long period where there was no physical shape
where I lived without a name. It's like you get brought so deep down, so elementally lost in the universe where I truly felt like I was experiencing moving through places like that asteroid that I have. It's like a piece of, you're a piece of something
detached from the earth. And so I got back from it, had a interesting new
appreciation for life. I strongly suggest that
people just do mushrooms like a normal person, unless you're ready. - [Lex] So it was really intense. - It was really intense. But to be fair, the shaman who did it was like the old school guy. And he was getting up there in years and he had forgotten
and overboiled the brew. And so we came back and it
was like four in the morning, and I had, you know, all this crazy shit, I had been on journeys
and years down there. And so when I came back and I had hands, I started crying, I
started absolutely weeping. - [Lex] Gratitude or what? - Gratitude that I was alive, I was gonna get to see my people again. I was like, I'm gonna get
to see my parents again. I'm gonna get to talk-- - So you kinda thought
you might have been gone. - I was gone, I was gone. I was a dimly-conscious
something floating in dark space and spent what felt like years down there. I really did feel like being reborn, which I was like, cheap trick. But no, the way it moves
you through the jungle, the way the jungle
moves through your skin, there are moments of absolute majesty and incredible discovery
that happen along the way. And on the way up, the
jungle brings you up and the shaman brings you up and you get to move through
the forest in a way that it's almost like you're inhabiting the consciousness of animals. Very, very, very, like, I didn't think that
hallucinogenics could do this to a brain, you know. Mushrooms, you're like, "Oh,
I feel like I can feel music." Like, cool, you know. You guys wanna watch
"March of the Penguins?" - This is transformative. Did that change you? - I don't know. I think it definitely, I almost feel like it showed me the thing that I was scared the most of that it's all just cold, dark, nothing, and like brought me to the
basement of the universe. And I felt like the point
of that was to come back to this place where there's all
this life and light and love and all this amazing
stuff that we experience on a day-to-day basis and
don't take for granted. And so just like almost dying, this was like fully dying, you know. But the great part is is that, usually it's not that intense. This guy had overboiled the brew. He'd also, I saw the vine afterwards, most ayahuasca vines are
like as thick as your arm, this one was like as
thick as a garbage can. It was like the oldest
ayahuasca vine you can imagine. And at like four in the morning, I like crawled over to my friend Chris, who's a tough New York City firefighter. We were holding each
other, just like weeping, just like, "Thank God we're back." Then we had to go looking for the shaman. Where the hell is this guy? He's gone. We found him in the morning and he was laying in the stream naked, like ET at the end when he
is like laying, like in the. Yeah, he kicked his own ass with that brew and he retired after that. - [Lex] Oh shit. - So we really got, like, we had somebody turn the
dial all the way up on us and so we got blasted. It's not supposed to be that bad. - But I think you're
somebody who's fearless and sort of diving into
those kinds of places. - I think I also retire from ayahuasca. I could be fearless with other things, but I think I'm good. - It sounds kind of, to me personally, kind of exciting. - Well, I think that you
have a severely fearless aspect to you. When you come up with
something that intrigues you, like if somebody told you right now that you could go
physically into deep space, I feel like you would do it. - Yeah, I'd go to Mars, yeah. And some of it is... I don't even know if you have that. Some of that is more Goggins like, I want to see where my mind breaks by pushing it to tough places. There's a curiosity of exploring the mind, the limits of the mind. I feel like your--
- That's not a cold plunge, that's like, you're not coming back. - [Lex] Right, and that's okay. - See. I do. I'm with you on that I
love seeing my limits, I absolutely love seeing my limits. I love getting my ass kicked, I love being shown how insignificant I am. But when it comes to something like that where you gotta push your chips in, it's gotta be something for me, it's gotta be a hill that I
believe in before I die on it. Like to me, the promise of
exploring space isn't enough. But like, even just the way you said, you're like, "I'm going
to Ukraine. Here I go." You know, there's a certain dedication to curiosity at any expense. And I think that that is
something that maybe we share in different directions. - Something tells me with
those crocodiles outside I would've gotten eaten. Something tells me. There's something trying to
preserve you in this world, I'm not sure exactly what that is. Somehow you keep surviving. What do you think is the
meaning of this whole thing? Why are we here? Like, do you ever ask
yourself for that question? - I feel like that's every day. I feel like I'm someone
that lives with that a lot. And I think that it actually takes me away from the human world a little bit. I feel like I've always
been a little bit apart because I think that other people do, you know, mushrooms and they go, wow, it really made me think
about how amazing it is here. And I feel like on a daily basis, I find myself where I'm like, I can't believe that
any of this is possible. And that goes from how
delicious something tastes to being able to talk to
someone in your family, or have a phone. There's times where I'm in
the Amazon and I miss home, and even just FaceTiming with someone, I go, this is possible? Like, people were rubbing sticks together to try and survive sabertooth
tigers not that long ago and I'm over there like,
"Yo, mom, look at this." It's wild. Like, I'm in
a constant state of awe. I actually hope that this is a testing ground. And whether it's aliens
or God or whatever it is, that this is something
crucially important. That would be nice, because
it feels like it is. - Yeah, I hope that too, that the universe almost created
us to see what's possible. And that I'd like to believe that beauty and good is possible. - And those are the things
that make me say that it's not, it's impossible for it
to just mean nothing. And just like you said,
there could be life forms that we can't even understand. I'm very open to the idea that there's meanings that
we have no idea about. The few things I know or
the things that I love and some of the things that I love are being pushed to extinction
so I try to protect them. That's my mission. But I'm saying like in terms
of what are we doing here, I'm just always amazed at the simplest things, you know, that we can sit here
doing this exchanging. - Using our imagination
to fill in the gaps, exchanging feelings, experiences, images. Yeah, it fills you with awe. And every once in a while you get a little glimpse of something, like a deeper meaning that might be there. And you don't really know what it is, but you get a glimpse
and you keep searching. And then it's over
before you know it, Paul. Hopefully for you, you
got many more years. - [Paul] That's dark, man. - You're an important,
important and a beautiful man. Paul, thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for being who you are, for everything you're doing. I hope to see you again soon, many times and maybe one day soon in the jungle. - I hope that happens. Thank you, Lex. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Paul Rosalie. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with
some words from Jane Goodall. If we kill off the wild, then we're killing off
a part of our souls. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.