#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God

0:00:00 The following is a conversation with Paul Rosalie, his second time in the podcast.
0:00:05 But this time, we did the conversation deep in the Amazon jungle.
0:00:10 I traveled there to hang out with Paul, and it turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime.
0:00:16 I will post a video capturing some aspects of that adventure in a week or so.
0:00:22 It included everything from getting lost in dense unexplored wilderness with no contact
0:00:27 to the outside world to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more.
0:00:36 Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist, explorer, author,
0:00:44 and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the rainforest.
0:00:48 For this mission, he founded Jungle Keepers.
0:00:52 You can help him if you go to junglekeepers.org.
0:00:57 This trip, for me, was life-changing.
0:01:00 It expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world I’m fortunate to exist
0:01:06 in with all of you.
0:01:09 So I’m glad I went, and I’m glad I made it out alive.
0:01:17 And now, a quick use that can mention the sponsor.
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0:01:39 Choose-wise, my friends, also if you want to work with our amazing team or just want
0:01:43 to get in touch with me, go to lexfreeman.com/contact.
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0:02:18 to just ship stuff.
0:02:21 I’m a huge fan of logistics and supply chains.
0:02:26 And looking at that incredibly complicated network of how one package gets from point
0:02:34 A to point B. Part of that is the theoretical computer scientist in me, because when you
0:02:40 simplify that problem and formulate it as a graph theory problem, then you can perform
0:02:45 all kinds of optimizations on it, which takes me back to some of my favorite courses on
0:02:51 the theory and the practice.
0:02:53 So numerical optimization when you’re talking about nonlinear programming and then the multiradical
0:02:57 stuff with convex programming.
0:02:59 A particular kind of formulation of an optimization problem can be easily to solve or hard to
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0:03:11 there’s like a million point A’s and a million point B’s and the combinatorial madness of
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0:03:40 This episode is also brought to you by Yahoo Finance, a site that provides financial management,
0:03:47 reports information and news for investors.
0:03:49 I use it for the cool little feature of it letting you add your portfolio and thereby
0:03:56 letting you monitor it and get news about religious things.
0:04:02 So they have a TD Ameritrade account and mutual fund there, which I guess got switched over
0:04:07 to Charles Schwaben.
0:04:09 So there’s a really nice interface that lets you monitor that, but of course as part of
0:04:13 that interface, you can also see news of the crazy stuff that’s going on in the markets.
0:04:18 It gives you an insight into what the people who really have money invested in the success
0:04:24 of companies are thinking about, where they’re excited about, where they’re cynical about,
0:04:30 all that kind of stuff.
0:04:31 So it’s a nice lens that we should see the world, one that contrasts with a more kind
0:04:35 of political and geopolitical lens, which I often look at, and also contrasts with the
0:04:42 historical lens.
0:04:43 You know, I read a lot of history books and their times slow down.
0:04:49 The ephemeral ups and downs of every day are not as important, but of course when you’re
0:04:53 living in the moment, in the day, this week, the ups and downs of the world are extremely
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0:05:06 So I use Yahoo Finance for monitoring that perspective on the world.
0:05:11 For comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to yahoofinance.com, that’s yahoofinance.com.
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0:05:47 Talking about a network, so I was just talking about the logistics of shipping stuff from
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0:05:59 psyche of the human species, seeking to explore the shadow of the individual minds, but in
0:06:05 so doing, exploring the collective shadow of our species.
0:06:10 It’d be cool to visualize all that.
0:06:12 Anyway, we’re just individuals.
0:06:13 We don’t have a way to take the perspective of the species, we only have our own mind,
0:06:20 our own conscious mind, and the subjective view that it provides of the world.
0:06:24 For that subjective view, it’s good to clean the lens, so to speak, every once in a while.
0:06:30 That’s what I think talk therapy does.
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0:06:54 As always, deep in nature, disconnected completely from the world.
0:06:59 The sounds of the urban world, no machinery, no people, nothing, just nature.
0:07:07 You can hear water, you can hear the wind, you can hear the animals, the insects, the
0:07:14 little and the big, and just that, no people.
0:07:19 As I was in that, I got a chance to really think about the productive world, let’s say,
0:07:27 the world of companies.
0:07:28 It is indeed, out of the many things that make me happy, it is one of the things that
0:07:32 makes me really happy, and that is to build, to create stuff in this world that helps people.
0:07:40 Whether that is as an individual programmer or on a larger scale by starting a company,
0:07:46 all of that makes me truly happy, and somehow in the jungle, full of gratitude, to be able
0:07:52 to exist on this beautiful earth, I also was full of gratitude for all the cool things
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0:08:24 One of the things when I was in the jungle, I mean, there’s a few creature comforts that
0:08:28 are taken away when you’re out in nature, especially when you’re deep out in nature,
0:08:36 and of course, one of the things you remember is the ability to have a bed to go to that’s
0:08:42 not full of insects and all that kind of stuff, but a bed that can be cool.
0:08:47 Man, it would be amazing to get the Aidsleep bed out into the middle of the jungle, because
0:08:53 it’s hot out there, and to be able to cool down, which I do, with Aidsleep would be a
0:08:59 really cool experience.
0:09:00 Anyway, they’ve upgraded from Pod 3 to Pod 4.
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0:09:22 That’s a really, really cool idea.
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0:09:29 the sleep time, the sleep phase, and the HRV and heart rate and all that kind of stuff.
0:09:33 It does the cooling of both sides of the bed separately, and now we can control the positioning
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0:10:29 fulfillment, all that kind of stuff, and all of it is seamlessly integrated, super easy
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0:10:35 Once again, there is a kind of theme in this discussion of networks, of networks of human
0:10:41 buying and selling, shipping, communicating, all of that, and I’m just so glad that people
0:10:47 have created systems, products, services, many of which are available online to connect
0:10:56 humans together and let humans do their human things and help them flourish and enjoy life
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0:11:32 And now, dear friends, here’s Paul Rosely.
0:11:36 Where are we right now, Paul?
0:11:55 Lex, we are in the middle of nowhere.
0:11:58 It’s the Amazon jungle.
0:12:00 There’s vegetation, there’s insects, there’s all kinds of creatures.
0:12:04 A million heartbeats, a million eyes.
0:12:06 So really, where are we right now?
0:12:09 We are in Peru in a very remote part of the western Amazon basin, and because of the proximity
0:12:16 of the Andean cloud forests to the lowland tropical rainforest, we are in the most biodiverse
0:12:21 part of planet Earth.
0:12:22 There’s more life per square acre, per square mile out here than there is anywhere else
0:12:26 on Earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record.
0:12:29 I can’t believe we’re actually here.
0:12:31 I can’t believe you actually came.
0:12:32 And I can’t believe you forced me to wear a suit.
0:12:35 That was the people’s choice, trust me.
0:12:38 We’ve been through quite a lot over the last few days.
0:12:42 We’ve been through a bit.
0:12:43 Let me ask you a ridiculous question.
0:12:46 What are all the creatures right now, if they wanted to, could cause us harm?
0:12:52 The thing is, the Amazon rainforest has been described as the greatest natural battlefield
0:12:56 on Earth because there’s more life here than anywhere else, which means that everything
0:13:01 here is fighting for survival.
0:13:03 The trees are fighting for sunlight.
0:13:05 The animals are fighting for prey.
0:13:07 Everybody’s fighting for survival.
0:13:08 And so everything that you see here, everything around us will be killed, eaten, digested,
0:13:13 recycled at some point.
0:13:14 The jungle is really just a giant churning machine of death, and life is kind of this
0:13:19 moment of stasis where you maintain this collection of cells in a particular DNA sequence, and
0:13:26 then it gets digested again and recycled back and renamed into everything.
0:13:32 The things in this forest, while they don’t want to hurt us, there are things that are
0:13:37 heavily defended because, for instance, a giant anteater needs claws to fight off a
0:13:41 jaguar.
0:13:42 A stingray needs a stinger on its tail, which is basically a serrated knife with venom on
0:13:47 it to deter anything that would hunt that stingray.
0:13:50 Even the catfish have pectoral fins that have razor-long, steak-knife-sized defense systems.
0:13:58 Then you have, of course, the jaguars, the harp eagles, the piranha, the candieroo fish
0:14:02 that can swim up the penis, lodge themselves inside.
0:14:04 It’s the Amazon rainforest.
0:14:06 The thing is, as you’ve learned this week, nothing here wants to get us, except for an
0:14:11 exception of maybe mosquitoes.
0:14:14 Every other animal just wants to eat and exist in peace.
0:14:18 That’s it.
0:14:19 But there is, each of those animals that you describe have a radius of defense.
0:14:25 If you accidentally step into its home, into that radius, it can cause harm.
0:14:32 Or make them feel threatened.
0:14:34 Make them feel threatened.
0:14:35 There is a defense mechanism that is activated.
0:14:37 Some incredible defense mechanisms.
0:14:39 You’re talking about 17-foot black caiman, crocodiles that with significant size that
0:14:44 could rip you in half, anacondas, the largest snake on earth, bushmasters that can grow
0:14:50 up to be nine to, I think, even 11 feet long.
0:14:52 I’ve caught bushmasters that are thicker than my arms.
0:14:55 For people who don’t know, bushmasters, snakes, what are these things?
0:14:58 These are vipers.
0:14:59 I believe it’s the largest viper on earth.
0:15:02 Venomous.
0:15:03 Extremely venomous with hinged teeth, tissue-destroying venom.
0:15:07 If you get bitten by a bushmaster, they say, “You don’t rush and try and save your own
0:15:12 life.
0:15:13 You try to savor what’s around you.
0:15:14 Look around at the world.
0:15:15 Smoke your last cigarette, call your mom.”
0:15:18 That’s it.
0:15:19 So that moment of stasis that is life is going to end abruptly when you interact with one
0:15:24 of those.
0:15:25 Yeah.
0:15:26 I even have, even this seemingly- Can I just pause at how incredibly beautiful it is
0:15:32 that you could just reach to your right and grab a piece of the chocolate?
0:15:37 Even this seemingly-beautiful little fern.
0:15:39 If you go this way on the fern, you’re fine.
0:15:41 As soon as you go this way, there’s invisible little spikes on there.
0:15:44 If you want to…
0:15:45 Oh, I see.
0:15:46 I feel that.
0:15:47 Yeah.
0:15:48 See that?
0:15:49 It’s like everything is defended.
0:15:50 If you’re driving on the road and you have your arm out the side, or if you’re on a motorcycle
0:15:52 going through the jungle and you get one of these, it’ll just tear all the skin right
0:15:56 off your body.
0:15:57 It’s kind of doing that to me now.
0:15:59 So what would you do?
0:16:00 Like we’re going through the dense jungle yesterday, and you slide down the hill, your
0:16:07 foot slips, you slide down, and then you find yourself staring a couple feet away from a
0:16:12 bushmaster snake.
0:16:13 What are you doing?
0:16:14 You’re, for people who somehow don’t know, somebody who loves, admires snakes, who has
0:16:20 met thousands of snakes, has worked with them, respects them, celebrates them.
0:16:26 What would you do with a bushmaster snake?
0:16:28 Face to face.
0:16:29 Face to face.
0:16:30 This has happened.
0:16:31 It’s happened.
0:16:32 It’s nice.
0:16:33 I’ve come face to face with a bushmaster, and there’s two things, there’s two reactions
0:16:38 that you might get.
0:16:39 One is if the bushmaster decides that it’s vacation time, if it’s sleeping, if he just
0:16:43 had a meal, they’ll come to the edges of trails or beneath a tree, and they’ll just circle
0:16:47 up, little spiral, big spiral, big pile of snake on the trail, and they’ll just sit there.
0:16:52 And one time there was a snake sitting on the side of a trail beneath a tree.
0:16:56 For two weeks, this snake was just sitting there, resting, digesting his food out in
0:17:00 the open, in the rain, in the sun, in the night.
0:17:03 It didn’t matter.
0:17:04 You go near it, barely even crack a tongue.
0:17:08 Now the other option is that you get a bushmaster that’s alert, and hunting, and out looking
0:17:12 for something to eat, and they’re ready to defend themselves.
0:17:15 And so I once came across a bushmaster in the jungle at night, and this bushmaster
0:17:20 turned its head towards me, looked at me, and made it very clear, I’m going to go this
0:17:25 way.
0:17:26 And so I did the natural thing that any snake enthusiast would do, and I grabbed its tail.
0:17:30 Now 11 feet later, by the head, the snake turned around and just said, “If you want
0:17:33 to meet God, I can arrange the meeting, I will oblige.”
0:17:38 And I decided to let the bushmaster go.
0:17:40 And so it’s like that with most animals, you know, a jaguar will turn and look at you and
0:17:44 just remind you of how small you are.
0:17:45 Like, what did you see in the snake’s eyes?
0:17:48 How did you sense that this is not the right, this is not, this is going to be your end
0:17:52 if you proceed?
0:17:54 His readiness.
0:17:55 I wanted to get him by the tail and show him to the people that were there, and maybe
0:17:58 work with the snake a little bit.
0:18:00 As an 11-foot snake, the snake turned around and made it very clear, like, not today, pal.
0:18:05 It’s not going to happen.
0:18:06 Is it in the eyes and the movement and the tension of the body?
0:18:09 It was the movement and the S of the neck.
0:18:11 It was as if you pushed me, and I went, “Let’s go.
0:18:13 Make my day.”
0:18:14 Yeah.
0:18:15 Like, he just looked a little bit too…
0:18:16 Yeah.
0:18:17 Too ready.
0:18:18 He’s like, “I love this.”
0:18:19 Okay.
0:18:20 All right.
0:18:21 So you know.
0:18:22 He’s like the snake you met last night.
0:18:24 Yeah.
0:18:25 Beautiful snake.
0:18:26 Such a calm little thing.
0:18:27 He just focuses on eating baby lizards and little snails and things, and that snake has
0:18:31 no concept of defending itself.
0:18:33 It has no way to defend itself.
0:18:34 So even something the size of a blue jay could just come and just peck that thing in the
0:18:39 head and swallow it, and it’s a helpless little snake.
0:18:41 So it’s really…
0:18:42 It kind of depends on the animal, it depends on the mood you catch them in.
0:18:45 Each one has a different temperament.
0:18:47 The grace of its movement was mesmerizing, curious almost.
0:18:50 Maybe anthropomorphizing, projecting onto it, but it was…
0:18:54 The tongue flicking was a sign of curiosity.
0:18:56 He was trying to figure out what was going on.
0:18:57 He was like, “Why am I on this treadmill of human skin?”
0:19:00 You know.
0:19:01 They’re just trying to get to the next thing, trying to get hidden, trying to get away from
0:19:03 the light.
0:19:04 Also, the texture of the scales is really fascinating.
0:19:06 I mean, it’s my first snake I’ve ever touched is so interesting.
0:19:09 It was just such an incredible system of muscles that are all interacting together to make
0:19:15 that kind of movement work and all the texture of its skin, of its scales.
0:19:20 What do you love about snakes?
0:19:22 From my first experience of the snake to all the thousands of experiences you had with
0:19:26 snakes, what do you love about these creatures?
0:19:29 I think it’s…
0:19:31 When you just spoke about it, it was…
0:19:33 That’s the first snake you’ve met, and it was a tiny little snake in the jungle.
0:19:36 And you spoke about it with so much light in your eyes.
0:19:39 And I think that because we’ve been programmed to be scared of snakes, there’s something
0:19:44 wondrous that happens in our brain.
0:19:46 Maybe it’s just this joy of discovery that there’s nothing to be scared of.
0:19:51 And whether it’s a rattlesnake that is dangerous and that you need to give distance to, but
0:19:54 you look at it from a distance and you go, “Whoa!”
0:19:57 Or it’s a harmless little grass snake that you can pick up and enjoy and give to a child.
0:20:03 They’re just these strange legless animals that just exist.
0:20:07 They don’t even have eyelids.
0:20:08 They’re so different than us.
0:20:09 They have a tongue that senses the air, and they, to me, are so beautiful.
0:20:15 And I’ve my whole life been defending snakes from humans, and they seem misunderstood.
0:20:20 I think they’re incredibly beautiful.
0:20:22 There’s every color and variety of snakes.
0:20:25 There’s venomous snakes.
0:20:26 There’s tree snakes.
0:20:27 There’s huge crushing anacondas.
0:20:28 It’s just of the 2,600 species of snakes that exist on Earth.
0:20:34 There’s just such beauty, such complexity, and such simplicity.
0:20:40 To me, I feel like I’m friend with snake, and they rely on me to protect them from
0:20:47 my people.
0:20:49 Friend with snake.
0:20:50 Me, friend, snake.
0:20:51 Me, friend, snake.
0:20:53 You said some of them are sometimes aggressive.
0:20:55 Some of them are peaceful.
0:20:57 Is this a mood thing, a personality thing, a species thing?
0:21:00 What is it?
0:21:01 So, as far as I know, there’s only really two snakes on Earth that could be aggressive,
0:21:05 because aggression indicates offense.
0:21:09 And so, a reticulated python has been documented as eating humans.
0:21:13 Anacondas, although while it hasn’t been publicized, they have eaten humans.
0:21:18 Every single other snake, from boa constrictor to bushmasters to spitting cobra to grass
0:21:23 snake to garter snake to everything else, every single other snake does not want to
0:21:28 interact with you.
0:21:29 They have no interest.
0:21:30 So, there’s no such thing as an aggressive snake once you get outside of anaconda and
0:21:34 reticulated python.
0:21:35 Everyone could be trying to eat you, that’s predation, but for every other snake, a rattlesnake,
0:21:41 if it was there, would either go escape and hide itself or it would rattle its tail and
0:21:45 tell us, “Don’t come closer.
0:21:46 A cobra will hood up and begin to hiss and say, ‘Don’t approach me.
0:21:50 I’m asking you nicely, not to mess with me.'”
0:21:54 And most other snakes are fast or they stay in the trees or they’re extremely camouflaged,
0:21:57 but their whole MO is just, “Don’t bother me.
0:21:59 I don’t want to be seen.
0:22:00 I don’t want to be messed with.
0:22:01 In fact, all I want to do is be left alone.
0:22:04 And once in a while, I just want to eat.”
0:22:06 And by the way, when you see a snake drink, your heart will break.
0:22:11 It’s like seeing, it’s the only thing that’s cuter than a puppy.
0:22:14 Like, watching a snake touch its mouth to water and just, you just see that little mouth
0:22:19 going as they suck water in and it’s like, it’s just so adorable watching this scaled
0:22:23 animal just be like, “I need water.”
0:22:25 In a state of vulnerability, bro, there’s nothing cuter than a little puppy with a
0:22:30 tongue.
0:22:31 A baby ball python?
0:22:32 All right.
0:22:33 A cobra man?
0:22:34 What’s it take you?
0:22:35 A baby elephant?
0:22:36 So what are they?
0:22:37 They’re like at a puddle and they just take it in.
0:22:39 They can be at a puddle and they just take it in or one time in India, I was with a snake
0:22:42 rescuer and we found this nine-foot king cobra, this god of a snake.
0:22:47 They’re Ophio-Fegus Hannah is their Latin name and they’re snake eaters.
0:22:50 They’re the king of the snakes, the largest venomous snake.
0:22:54 And the people that called this snake rescuer, because that’s a profession in India, had gotten
0:23:02 into their kitchen or their backyard and so we showed up and we got the snake and the
0:23:06 snake rescuer he knew.
0:23:07 He looked at the snake and he went to me, he said, “Why do you think the snake would
0:23:11 go in a house?”
0:23:12 And he was quizzing me and I actually went, “You know, I don’t know.
0:23:15 Is it warm?
0:23:16 Is it cold?”
0:23:17 You know, like sometimes cats like to go into the warm cars in the winter and he was
0:23:20 like, “He’s thirsty.”
0:23:21 He goes, “Watch this.”
0:23:22 He took a water bottle, poured it over the, now the snake is standing up, snake stands
0:23:27 up three feet tall.
0:23:28 This is a huge king cobra with a hood, terrifying snake to be around.
0:23:32 He leans over to the snake and the snake is standing there trusting him and he takes a
0:23:36 water bottle and pours it onto the snake’s nose and the snake turns up its nose and just
0:23:40 starts drinking from the water bottle.
0:23:42 Human giving water to snake, big, scary snake, but this human understood.
0:23:48 Snake gets water, snake gets released in jungle, everybody’s okay.
0:23:52 So sometimes the needs are simple.
0:23:55 They just don’t have the words to communicate them to us humans.
0:23:59 And is it disinterest or is it fear?
0:24:01 Almost like they don’t notice us or is it where the unknown aspect of it, the uncertainty
0:24:08 is a source of danger?
0:24:10 Well, animals live in a constant state of danger.
0:24:13 Like if you look at that deer that we saw last night, it’s stalking through the jungle,
0:24:17 wondering what’s going to eat it, wondering if this is the last moment it’s going to
0:24:20 be alive.
0:24:21 It’s like the animals are constantly terrified of that this is their last moment.
0:24:24 Yeah.
0:24:25 Just for the listener, we’re walking through the jungle late at night.
0:24:28 So it’s darkness except our head lamps on.
0:24:32 And then all of a sudden ball stops, zig, he looks in the distance and sees two eyes.
0:24:38 He’s, I think you thought, is that a jaguar or is that a deer?
0:24:42 And it was moving its head like this, like scared or maybe trying to figure it, trying
0:24:48 to localize itself, trying to figure it out.
0:24:50 Trying to see around.
0:24:51 You’re doing the same to it, the two of you like moving your head and like deep into the
0:24:56 jungle.
0:24:57 Like, I don’t know.
0:24:58 It’s pretty far away through the trees, you can still see it.
0:25:01 30 feet or so.
0:25:02 Yeah.
0:25:03 That’s the thing to actually mention.
0:25:04 I mean, with the head lamp, you see the reflection in their eyes.
0:25:08 It’s kind of incredible to see a creature, to try to identify a creature by just the reflection
0:25:13 from its eyes.
0:25:14 Yeah.
0:25:15 And so the cats, sometimes you’ll get like a greenish or a bluish glow from the cats.
0:25:19 The deer are usually white to orange, caiman, orange, night jars, orange snakes can usually
0:25:25 be like orange moths, spiders, sparkle.
0:25:29 And so you have all these different, as you walk through the jungle, you can see all these
0:25:32 different eyes.
0:25:34 And when something large looks at you, like that deer did, your first thing is, what animal
0:25:39 is this that I am staring back at?
0:25:41 Because through the light, you kind of get, you see the reflection off the bright light
0:25:46 off the leaves.
0:25:47 And I couldn’t tell at first, because that actually, those big bright eyes, it could have
0:25:50 been an ocelot, it could have been a jaguar, it could have been a deer.
0:25:53 And then when it did this movement, that’s what the cats do, they try to see around your
0:25:57 light.
0:25:58 I thought maybe Lex Freedman’s here, we’re going to get lucky, it’s going to be a jag
0:26:02 right off trail.
0:26:03 Okay.
0:26:04 Your definition of lucky is a complicated one.
0:26:05 Yeah.
0:26:06 It’s a fascinating process when you see those two eyes, try to figure out what it is.
0:26:10 And it is trying to figure out what you are in that process.
0:26:14 Let’s talk about caiman.
0:26:15 Sure.
0:26:16 We’ve seen a lot of different kinds of sides.
0:26:17 We’ve seen a baby one, a bigger one.
0:26:19 Tell me about these 16 foot plus apex predators of the Amazon rainforest.
0:26:25 The big bad black caiman, which is the largest reptilian predator in the Amazon, except for
0:26:32 the Anaconda, they kind of both share that, that, that notch of apex predator.
0:26:37 They were actually hunted to endangered species level in the seventies because they’re, they’re
0:26:42 leather black scale leather, but they’re coming back.
0:26:47 They’re coming back and they’re huge and they’re beautiful.
0:26:50 And I was, I was walking near a lake and I never understood how big they could get except
0:26:54 for I was walking near a lake last year and I was following this stream.
0:26:58 You know what it’s like when you’re following a little stream and there’s just a little
0:27:00 trickle of water and all of a sudden this river otter had been running the other direction
0:27:03 on the tree, on the stream, river otter comes up to me and I swear to God, this animal looked
0:27:06 to me and went, Hey, and I went, Hey, he was like, didn’t expect to see me there.
0:27:10 And he turned around and he did a little spin, started running down the stream, then he turned
0:27:14 around and you could tell he was like, let’s go.
0:27:16 And I, you know, I’m not anthropomorphizing here.
0:27:18 The animal was asking me to come with him.
0:27:20 So I followed the river otter down the stream.
0:27:22 We started running down the stream.
0:27:23 And the river otter looks at me one more time is like, yo, jumps into the lake and I’m like,
0:27:27 what does he want me to see?
0:27:29 Now in the lake, this river otter is doing dives and freaking out and going up and down
0:27:33 and up and down.
0:27:34 And they’re very excited.
0:27:35 They’re screaming.
0:27:36 They’re screeching.
0:27:37 All of a sudden, and I’ve never seen anything like this except for like Game of Thrones.
0:27:43 This crock head comes flying out of the water.
0:27:45 All of the river otters were attacking this huge black caiman, 16 feet, head half the size
0:27:52 of this table.
0:27:53 And she was thrashing her tail around, creating these huge waves in the water, trying to catch
0:27:58 an otter.
0:27:59 And they’re so fast that they were zipping around or biting her.
0:28:02 And then going around in this otter, swear to God, interspecies looked at me and went,
0:28:06 watch this.
0:28:07 We’re fucking with this caiman.
0:28:09 It was amazing.
0:28:10 And for the first time, I got to stand there watching this incredible interspecies fight
0:28:15 happening.
0:28:16 They weren’t trying to kill the caiman.
0:28:17 They were just trying to mess with it.
0:28:18 And the caiman was doing his best to try and kill these otters.
0:28:22 And they were just having a good time in that sick sort of hyper-intelligent animal like
0:28:27 wolf sort of way where they were just going, you can’t catch us.
0:28:29 Yeah.
0:28:30 Like intelligence and agility versus like raw power and dominance.
0:28:33 I mean, I got to handle some smaller caiman and just the power they had, you scale that
0:28:42 up to imagine what a 16 foot, even a 10 foot, any kind of black caiman, the kind of power
0:28:48 they deliver.
0:28:49 Maybe you can talk to that, like the power they can generate with their tail, with their
0:28:54 neck, with their jaw.
0:28:56 Alligators and caiman and crocodiles have some of the strongest bite forces on earth.
0:29:00 I think a saltwater crocodile wins as the strongest bite force on earth.
0:29:04 And you got to hold about, what was it, a four foot spectacle caiman.
0:29:11 And you got to feel, I mean, you’re a black belt in jujitsu.
0:29:14 How do you compare the explosive force you felt from that animal compared to what a human
0:29:20 can generate?
0:29:22 It’s difficult to describe in words.
0:29:25 There’s a lot of power.
0:29:26 We’re talking about the power of the neck, like the, what is it, I mean, there’s a lot,
0:29:30 it can generate power all up and down the body.
0:29:32 So probably the tail is a monster, but just the neck and not to mention the power of the
0:29:39 bite that, and the speed too, because the thing I saw and got to experience is how still
0:29:46 and calm, at least from my amateur perspective, it seems calm, still, and then from that sort
0:29:55 of zero to 60 could just go wild.
0:29:58 Just thrash.
0:30:01 And then there’s also a decision it makes in that split second, whether, as it thrashes,
0:30:06 is it going to kind of bite you on the way or not?
0:30:11 And that’s where, that’s where of the four species of caiman that we have here, you see
0:30:15 differences in their personalities as a species.
0:30:18 And so you can like, just like, you know, like generally golden retrievers are viewed
0:30:22 as a, as a friendly dog generally, not every single one of them, but as a rule.
0:30:28 Spectacle caiman, puppies, you released one in the river and it did nothing, didn’t bite
0:30:33 one of your fingers, it just swam away.
0:30:36 We dropped one in the river and what did it do?
0:30:39 It chose peace.
0:30:40 Now, I had a smooth fronted caiman a few weeks ago, and this is probably about a three and
0:30:43 a half footer, not big enough to kill you, but very much big enough to grab one of your
0:30:47 fingers and just shake it off your body, just death roll it right off.
0:30:51 And as I was being careful, totally different caiman than the one that you got to see.
0:30:55 This one has spikes coming off it.
0:30:56 They’re like, like, like leftover dinosaurs.
0:30:59 It’s like they evolved during the dinosaur times and never changed.
0:31:03 They have spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growths that you don’t see on the
0:31:08 other smoother caiman.
0:31:09 And I tried to release this one without getting bitten and I threw it into the stream, gently
0:31:14 into the water, just went, wow, and tried to pull my hands back.
0:31:17 And as I pulled my hand back, this caiman in the air turned around and just tried to give
0:31:22 me one parting blow and just got one tooth whack right to the bone in my finger and bone
0:31:28 injury feels different than a skin injury.
0:31:30 So you instantly, and it just reminds you of that’s a caiman with a head this big and
0:31:36 it hurt.
0:31:37 And I know that it could have taken off my finger now.
0:31:39 If you scale that up to a black caiman, it’s rib crushing.
0:31:44 It’s zebra head removing size, just meat destroying.
0:31:49 It’s incredible.
0:31:50 It’s nature is metal, sort of just raw power.
0:31:54 So what’s the biggest croc you’ve been able to handle?
0:31:58 We were doing caiman surveys for years and we would go out at night and you want to figure
0:32:02 out what are the populations of black caiman, spectacle caiman, smooth friends of caiman,
0:32:06 dwarf caiman.
0:32:07 And the only way to see which caiman you’re dealing with is to catch it because a lot
0:32:11 of times you get up close with the light and you can see the eyes at night, but you can’t
0:32:14 quite see what species it is.
0:32:16 For instance, this past few months, we found two baby black caiman on the river, which is
0:32:21 unprecedented here.
0:32:22 We haven’t seen that in decades.
0:32:24 So it’s important that we monitor our croc population.
0:32:27 So I started catching small ones in Mother of God, I write about the first one that me
0:32:31 and JJ caught together, which was probably a little bigger than this table.
0:32:35 And probably mid-20s bravado and competition with other young males of my species led to
0:32:43 me trying to go as big as I could.
0:32:48 And I jumped on a spectacle caiman that was slightly longer than I am.
0:32:53 And I’m five nine.
0:32:54 So I jumped on this probably six foot croc and quickly realized that my hands couldn’t
0:33:02 get around its neck and my legs were wrapped around the base of its tail and the thrash
0:33:07 was so intense that as it took me one side, I barely had enough time to realize what was
0:33:12 happening before it beat me against the ground.
0:33:15 My headlamp came off.
0:33:16 So now I’m blind in the dark, laying in a river in the Amazon rainforest, hugging a
0:33:19 six foot crocodile.
0:33:22 And I went, JJ, as I always do.
0:33:26 But in that moment before I even let go, I knew I couldn’t let go of the croc because
0:33:29 if I let go of the croc, I thought she was going to destroy my face.
0:33:32 So I said, okay, now I’m stuck here.
0:33:33 If I just stay here, I can’t release or I need help.
0:33:37 But I was like, I’m never ever, ever, ever going to try and solo catch a croc this big
0:33:41 again.
0:33:42 I knew in that moment, I was like, this is good enough.
0:33:44 So anything longer than you, you don’t control the tail, you don’t have, you have barely
0:33:48 control of anything really.
0:33:49 Yeah.
0:33:50 And that’s a spectacle came in.
0:33:51 A black came in as a whole other order of magnitude there.
0:33:53 It’s like saying like, oh, I was play fighting with my golden retriever versus I was play
0:33:58 fighting with like, what’s the biggest, scariest dog you could think of?
0:34:03 The dog from Sandlot, a giant gorilla dog thing, like a Malamute, something huge.
0:34:09 What do they call it?
0:34:10 Mastiffs.
0:34:11 I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs.
0:34:13 What do you admire about black came in?
0:34:16 They’ve been here for a very, very long time.
0:34:19 There’s something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way of being, about
0:34:24 their presence in this jungle.
0:34:25 With crocodiles, you’re looking at this, this mega survivor, they’re in a class with
0:34:30 sharks where it’s like, they’ve been here so long.
0:34:33 When you talk about multiple extinctions, you talk about the sixth extinction, earth’s
0:34:37 going through all this stuff, the crocodiles and the cockroaches have seen it all before.
0:34:41 They’re like, man, we remember what that comet looked like.
0:34:45 And they’re not impressed.
0:34:46 Yeah, they have this, they carry this wisdom and their power in the simplicity of their
0:34:51 power.
0:34:52 They carry the wisdom.
0:34:53 Yeah.
0:34:54 And they’re just sitting there in the streams and they don’t care.
0:34:55 And even if there’s a nuclear Holocaust, you know that there would just be some crocs
0:34:59 sitting there dead eyed in that stagnant water waiting for the life to regenerate so they
0:35:03 could eat again.
0:35:04 It’s going to be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches and the cockroaches
0:35:09 are just background noise.
0:35:11 Yeah, they’ll always be there, sons of bitches.
0:35:15 You know, we’re talking about individual black caiman and caiman and different species of
0:35:18 caiman.
0:35:19 But whenever they’re together and you see multiple eyes, which I’ve gotten to experience,
0:35:24 it’s quite a feeling.
0:35:25 There’s just multiple eyes looking back at you.
0:35:28 Of course, for you, that’s immediate excitement.
0:35:35 You immediately go towards that.
0:35:37 You want to see it.
0:35:38 You want to explore it.
0:35:39 Maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff.
0:35:41 Yeah.
0:35:42 Can you just describe that feeling when they’re together and they’re looking at you?
0:35:47 So head above water, eyes reflecting the light.
0:35:49 Yeah.
0:35:50 So the other night, Lex and I were in the river with JJ surviving a thunderstorm.
0:35:57 We were in the rain and we had covered our equipment with our boats.
0:36:03 And the only thing that we could do was get in the river to keep ourselves dry.
0:36:08 And so we were in the river at night, in the dark, no stars, just a little bit of canopy
0:36:12 silhouetted with all this rain coming down.
0:36:14 It was such a din, you could hardly hear anything.
0:36:16 And all the way down river, I just see this caiman eye in my headlamp light.
0:36:23 And I started walking towards it because I was like, this is even better.
0:36:27 We can catch a caiman while we’re in this thunderstorm in the Amazon river.
0:36:31 And when JJ went, Paul, it’s too far.
0:36:34 JJ, very rarely, very rarely, he’ll make a suggestion.
0:36:39 He’ll usually go, maybe it’s far.
0:36:42 But in that situation, deep in the wilderness, unknown came in size.
0:36:46 He went, Paul, it’s too far.
0:36:48 Don’t leave the three of us right now.
0:36:50 Yeah.
0:36:51 We’re too far out to take risks.
0:36:53 We’re too far out to be walking along the riverbed at night.
0:36:55 Because then, right here at the research station, if you step on a stingray, you get evac.
0:37:01 Out where we went, nothing.
0:37:05 So for me, seeing those eyes, I think I’ve become so comfortable with so many of these
0:37:08 animals that I may have crossed into the territory where I feel so comfortable with many of these
0:37:15 animals that they just don’t worry me anymore.
0:37:18 I mean, I looked at you in a raft while you had a sizable, probably about 12 foot black
0:37:24 caiman right next to your raft.
0:37:26 I watched its head go under.
0:37:27 Bubbles, bubbles.
0:37:28 The bubbles.
0:37:29 It was all coming up right next to your raft as he was just moving along the bottom of
0:37:32 the river.
0:37:33 Because he looked at me, went under, and then my raft passed and yours came over him.
0:37:36 So now I’m looking back and your raft is going over this black caiman.
0:37:40 And I’m going, I’m not worried at all.
0:37:43 I was not worried.
0:37:44 I was not worried that the caiman would freak out.
0:37:47 I was not worried that it would try to attack you.
0:37:49 I knew 100% that caiman just wanted us to go so you could go back to eating fish.
0:37:54 That’s it.
0:37:55 Man, it’s humbling.
0:37:56 It’s humbling these giant creatures.
0:37:58 And especially at night, like you were talking about, for me, it’s both scary, but it’s just
0:38:05 beautiful when the head goes under because underwater, it’s their domain.
0:38:10 So anything can happen.
0:38:12 So what is it doing that its head is going under?
0:38:14 It could be bored.
0:38:16 It could be hungry, looking for some fish.
0:38:19 It could be maybe wanting to come closer to you to investigate.
0:38:23 Maybe you have some food around you.
0:38:25 Maybe it’s an old friend of yours and just wants to say hi.
0:38:27 I don’t know.
0:38:28 I have a few on the river.
0:38:30 No, when we see their heads go under, it’s just, they’re just getting out of the way.
0:38:36 We’re shining a light at them and they’re going, why is there a light at night?
0:38:38 I’m uncomfortable.
0:38:40 Head under.
0:38:41 So these caiman, again, you think of it as this big aggressive animal, but I don’t know
0:38:45 anybody that’s been eaten by a black caiman.
0:38:47 And the smaller species, smoothfronted caiman, dwarf caiman, spectacle caiman, they’re not
0:38:51 going to eat any.
0:38:52 But again, at the worst, if you were doing something inappropriate with a caiman, you
0:38:57 jumped on it and were trying to do research and it could take your hand off, but that’s
0:39:03 the only time.
0:39:04 I’ve been walking down the river and stepped on a caiman and the caiman just swims away.
0:39:08 And so in my mind, caiman are just these, they’re peaceful dragons that sit on the side
0:39:12 of the river.
0:39:13 And they are my friends and I worry about them because two months ago we were coming
0:39:18 up river and on one of the beaches was a beautiful about five foot black caiman with a big machete
0:39:25 cut right through the head.
0:39:27 The whole caiman was wasted.
0:39:29 Nothing was eaten, but the caiman was dead.
0:39:33 What do you think that was?
0:39:35 Curious humans.
0:39:37 Just committing violence.
0:39:38 Yeah.
0:39:39 Just loggers, people who aren’t from this part of the Amazon because a local person
0:39:44 would either eat the animal or not mess with it.
0:39:47 Like Pico would never kill a caiman for no reason because it doesn’t make any sense.
0:39:52 So these are clearly people who aren’t from the region, which usually means loggers because
0:39:55 they’ve come from somewhere else.
0:39:57 They’re doing a job here and they’re just cleaning their pots in the river at night
0:40:00 and they see eyes come near them because the caiman probably smells fish and then they just
0:40:04 whack because they want to see it and they’re just curious monkeys on a beach.
0:40:09 And again, me friend of caiman I protect from my type.
0:40:13 That said, you protect your friends and you analyze and study your friends, but sometimes
0:40:21 friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding and if you have a bit of a misunderstanding
0:40:25 with a black caiman, I feel like just a bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a bone
0:40:33 crushing situation.
0:40:34 But not for a little five-foot caiman and I think that’s incredibly speciesist of you.
0:40:40 A ball, humans are a ball caiman.
0:40:43 No, like all my friends do the same thing.
0:40:45 They go, “You swim in the Amazon rainforest, you swim in that river?”
0:40:48 And I go, “Yes, every day.”
0:40:51 Backflips into the river.
0:40:52 We’ve been swimming in the river how many times with the piranha and the stingray and
0:40:56 the kandiru and the caiman and the anacondas, all of it in the river with us and we just
0:41:02 do it.
0:41:03 And what’s that for you?
0:41:04 What allows you to do that, knowing and having researched all the different things that can
0:41:09 kill you, which I feel like most of them are in the river?
0:41:12 What allows you to just get in there with us?
0:41:15 Well, I think it’s something about you, where you become like this portal through which
0:41:21 it’s possible to see nature as not threatening but beautiful.
0:41:24 And so in that, you’re kind of naturally by hanging out with you, I get to see the beauty
0:41:29 of it.
0:41:31 There is danger out there, but the danger is part of it.
0:41:34 Just like there’s a lot of danger in the city, there’s danger in life, there’s a lot
0:41:37 of ways to get hurt.
0:41:38 Emotionally, physically, there’s a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of ways.
0:41:42 We went on an expedition to the forest just twisting your ankle, breaking your foot, getting
0:41:48 a bite from a thing that gets infected, there’s a lot of ways to die and get hurt in the stupidest
0:41:53 of ways, in a non-dramatic Cayman eating you alive kind of way.
0:42:00 It strikes me as unfair because humans were still in our minds so programmed to worry
0:42:08 about that predator, that predator, that predator.
0:42:10 What predator?
0:42:11 We’ve killed everything.
0:42:12 Black Caymans are coming off the endangered species list.
0:42:14 We exterminated wolves from North America.
0:42:16 I actually heard a suburban lady one time tell her son, “Watch out, foxes will get you.”
0:42:22 The baby rabbits and mice.
0:42:26 Well, in the case of apex predators, I think when people say dangerous animals, they really
0:42:32 are talking about just the power of the animal and the black Cayman have a lot of power.
0:42:40 It’s almost just a way to celebrate the power of the animal.
0:42:43 Sure.
0:42:44 If it’s in celebration, then I’m all for it because my God is that power.
0:42:47 The waves of fury that you saw, like when you saw the tail of the spectacle, that perfect,
0:42:54 amazing thing with all those interlocking scales that works, so it’s like a perfect creation
0:42:58 of engineering.
0:42:59 Then when you have one that’s this thick and all of a sudden that thing is moving with
0:43:03 all the acceleration of that power, wow, the volume of water, the sound that comes out
0:43:10 of their throat, they’re dragons.
0:43:13 We talked about the scales of the snake with the Cayman just the way it felt was incredible,
0:43:20 just the armor, the texture was so cool.
0:43:24 I don’t know, the bottom one Cayman has a certain kind of texture and it just all feels
0:43:28 like power, but also all feels designed really well.
0:43:33 It’s like exploring through touch, like a World War II tank or something like that.
0:43:39 It’s the engineering that went into this thing that the mechanism of evolution that
0:43:45 created a thing that could survive for such a long time, it’s just incredible.
0:43:50 This is a work of art, the defense mechanisms, the power of it, the damage you can do, how
0:43:58 effective it is as a hunter, all of that, you can feel that in just by touching it.
0:44:03 Do you ever see the mashup where they put side by side the image of, I think it’s a
0:44:09 falcon in flight next to a stealth bomber and they’re almost the exact same design?
0:44:14 It’s incredible.
0:44:15 Like that.
0:44:16 What’s the equivalent for a croc?
0:44:18 Like you said, maybe a tank, but then more like an armadillo turtle.
0:44:23 Like hippos.
0:44:24 Yeah, there may not be a machine, a war machine equivalent of a crocodile, you’d have to have
0:44:29 like a big jaw element to it.
0:44:32 In the water, we talked also about hippos, those are interesting creatures from all the
0:44:37 way across the world, just monsters, hippos and rhinos.
0:44:42 Hippos are bigger, usually or rhinos are bigger.
0:44:46 Rhinos, after elephants is the largest, white rhinos.
0:44:50 They can be terrifying too, again, when you step into the defense.
0:44:53 Absolutely, but I have to tell you after being around so many rhinos, I have rhino friends,
0:44:59 black and white rhinos and they’re all sweethearts.
0:45:03 And I mean, I mean sweethearts.
0:45:05 And I mean, when you look at a rhino, it’s like a living dinosaur, I know it’s a mammal,
0:45:10 but somehow it screams dinosaur because it seems like Pleistocenic and from another age
0:45:15 with the giant horn.
0:45:16 And they’re so much bigger than you think.
0:45:17 Like they’re mini van sized animals, like we’re not taller than they are at the shoulder
0:45:23 and they have the strange shaped head and the huge horn and they sit there eating grass
0:45:27 all day.
0:45:29 So if a rhino is dangerous to a human, it’s because the rhino is going, “Don’t hurt me.
0:45:35 Don’t hurt me.
0:45:36 Don’t hurt my baby.”
0:45:37 And then they’re like, “You know what?
0:45:38 I’ll just kill you.
0:45:39 It would be easier because you’re scaring me right now.
0:45:40 You’re too close to that rhino.”
0:45:42 And so there again, I just think it’s funny because humans were so quickly to go, “Which
0:45:47 snakes are aggressive?”
0:45:48 There are no aggressive snakes.
0:45:50 Rhinos can be dangerous if provoked, otherwise they’re peaceful fat grass unicorns.
0:45:56 You know, like they’re really pretty calm, that we have these incredible giant animals
0:46:01 and the largest animals on our planet, the black came in, the rhinos, the elephants, all
0:46:06 the big beautiful stuff is becoming less and less.
0:46:10 And it almost reminds me like in Game of Thrones, they’re like, “Yeah, in the beginning
0:46:13 they’re like, “Yeah, there used to be dragons.”
0:46:15 And it was like this memory and it’s like, “Yeah, we used to have mammoths and we used
0:46:20 to have stellar sea cows that were 16 feet long manatees and it’s, there are things we
0:46:26 used to have, the Caspian tiger that only went extinct in the 90s, our lifetimes.”
0:46:33 And that’s mind blowing to me.
0:46:35 That has haunted me since I’m a child.
0:46:37 I remember learning about extinction and I went, “Wait, you’re telling me that…”
0:46:41 I remember being a kid and going, “By the time I grow up you’re saying that gorillas
0:46:44 could be gone, elephants could be gone, and because we’re doing it and then I just, I
0:46:51 remember looking at the nightlight being blurry because I was crying.
0:46:56 I was so upset and oh, and it was Lonesome George, that turtle, the Galapagos towards
0:47:00 where there was one left.
0:47:01 And they said, “If we just had a female he could live and I was a six, seven, eight-year-old
0:47:06 that destroyed me.”
0:47:07 We’re all just starting to get laid, including that turtle.
0:47:10 Including that turtle for a few hundred years.
0:47:15 So for young people out there, you think of having trouble, think about that turtle.
0:47:18 Think about that turtle.
0:47:19 Yeah.
0:47:20 There’s a turtle that Darwin and Steve Erwin both own.
0:47:23 Yeah.
0:47:24 Yeah.
0:47:25 I heard about that turtle.
0:47:26 Man, they live a long time.
0:47:27 Yeah.
0:47:28 They’ve seen things.
0:47:29 They’ve seen things.
0:47:30 There’s a great like internet joke where they’re like accusing him of like being incongruous
0:47:36 with modern times.
0:47:37 They’re like, “He did nothing to stop slavery.
0:47:39 He didn’t fight in World War II.”
0:47:41 Cancel the turtle.
0:47:42 Yeah.
0:47:43 Cancel the turtle.
0:47:44 Oh, shit.
0:47:45 What a world we live in.
0:47:47 So it’s interesting you mentioned Black Cayman and Anacondas are both apex predators.
0:47:54 So it seems like the reason they can exist in similar environments is because they feed
0:47:59 on slightly different things.
0:48:02 How is it possible for them to coexist?
0:48:05 I read that Anacondas can eat Cayman, but not Black Cayman.
0:48:09 How often do they come in conflict?
0:48:11 So Anacondas and Cayman occupy the exact same niche.
0:48:16 And they’re born at almost the exact same size.
0:48:19 And unlike most species, they don’t have sort of a size range that they’re confined to.
0:48:24 They start at this big, baby Cayman or this big, baby Anacondas are a little longer, but
0:48:29 they’re thinner and they don’t have legs.
0:48:30 So it’s the same thing in terms of mass.
0:48:34 And they’re all in the streams or at the edges of lakes or swamps.
0:48:38 And so the baby Anacondas eat the baby Cayman.
0:48:40 Baby Cayman can’t really take down an Anaconda.
0:48:43 They’re going for little insects and fish.
0:48:45 They have quite a small mouth.
0:48:47 So again, it’s in their interest to hide from everything.
0:48:50 A bird, a heron can eat a baby Cayman, pop it back.
0:48:55 And so they have to survive, but the Anaconda and the Cayman kind of joust as they grow.
0:49:01 Can you actually explain how the Anaconda would take down a Cayman?
0:49:04 Like would it first use constriction and then eat it?
0:49:08 What’s the methodology?
0:49:09 Yeah. So Anacondas have kind of like a three-point constriction system where their first thing
0:49:16 is anchor.
0:49:17 So like jujitsu.
0:49:19 So the first thing is latch on to you.
0:49:21 I like how I’m writing this down like, this is jujitsu like a masterclass here.
0:49:27 This is for when you’re wrestling an Anaconda just in case.
0:49:30 And you’ll be like the coach in the sideline screw me.
0:49:33 You got an axe.
0:49:34 Don’t let him take the back.
0:49:38 Yeah.
0:49:39 So one time me and JJ were following a herd of collared peccary and JJ is teaching me
0:49:43 tracking.
0:49:44 So we’re following the hoof prints through the mud and we’re doing this and I’m talking
0:49:47 about no backpacks, just machetes bare feet running through the jungle.
0:49:52 And we come to this stream and JJ is like, I think we missed him.
0:49:56 You know, I think they went.
0:49:57 And I’m like, no, no, no, they went here.
0:49:58 Look.
0:49:59 And not because I’m a great tracker because I can see a few dozen footprints, hundreds
0:50:03 of individual footprints right there.
0:50:04 And I’m going, no, no, they just crossed here and JJ was like, you know what, we’re not going
0:50:08 to get eyes on him today.
0:50:10 He was like, it’s okay.
0:50:11 He’s like, we did good.
0:50:12 We followed him for a long time.
0:50:13 And I was like, cool.
0:50:14 And then I was trying to gauge, like, can I drink this stream?
0:50:16 And I see a culpa.
0:50:17 And a culpa is a salt deposit where animals come to feed because sodium is a deficiency
0:50:23 that most herbivores have here.
0:50:26 And all of a sudden I just hear like the sound of a wet stick snapping, just that bone crunch.
0:50:33 And I looked down and there’s about a 16 foot anaconda wrapped around a freshly killed
0:50:39 peccary, wild boar.
0:50:41 And what this anaconda had done was as the, all the pigs were going across the stream,
0:50:47 the anaconda had grabbed it by the jaw, swiped the legs, wrapped around it, bent it in half,
0:50:55 and then crushed its ribs.
0:50:57 And that’s what the anaconda do, whether it’s to mammals to Cayman, it’s all the
0:51:01 same thing.
0:51:02 It’s grab on.
0:51:03 They have six rows of backwards facing teeth.
0:51:06 So once they hit you, they’re never going to come off.
0:51:09 You actually have to go deeper in and then open before you can come out.
0:51:13 All those backward facing teeth.
0:51:14 So they have an incredible anchor system and then they use their weight to pull you down
0:51:18 to hell, to pull you down into that water, wrap around you, and then start breaking you.
0:51:24 And every breath you take, you go, and you’re up against a barrier.
0:51:28 And then when you, when you exhale, they go a little tighter and you’re never going to
0:51:32 get that space back.
0:51:33 Your lungs are never going to expand again.
0:51:35 And I know this because I’ve been in that crush before JJ pulled me out of it.
0:51:39 And so this pig, the anaconda had gotten it.
0:51:42 And as the pig was thrashing and the anaconda was wrapping around, I had bent it in half.
0:51:46 And I just heard those vertebrae going.
0:51:48 And so for Cayman, it’s the same thing.
0:51:49 They just grab them, they wrap around it, and then they have to crush it until there’s
0:51:52 no response.
0:51:53 They’ll wait an hour.
0:51:54 They’ll wait a long time until there’s no response from the animal to overpower it.
0:51:59 Then they’ll, then they’ll reposition, probably yawn a little bit, open their jaw, and then
0:52:05 start forcing that entire, now here’s the crazy thing is that an anaconda has stomach
0:52:11 acid capable of digesting an entire crocodile where nothing comes out the other side.
0:52:18 And when you see how thick the bony plate of a crocodile skull is, that that can go
0:52:23 in the mouth and nothing comes out the other side.
0:52:25 That’s insane.
0:52:26 And so it always made me wonder on a chemistry level, how you can have such incredible acid
0:52:31 in the stomach that doesn’t harm the anaconda itself.
0:52:35 And someone said the mucus.
0:52:36 It’s able to digest.
0:52:37 Oh, it’s some kind of mucus.
0:52:38 Oh, the mucus.
0:52:39 Oh, interesting.
0:52:40 There’s levels of protection from the anaconda itself.
0:52:43 But it seems like the anaconda is such a simple system as an organism, like that simplicity
0:52:49 taking a scale could just do the, can swallow a came and digest it slowly.
0:52:55 I know, but my question was how, how on earth is it physically possible to have this hellish
0:53:00 bile that can digest anything, even something as, as, as horrendous as a, as a came in scales
0:53:06 and bones and all the hardest shit in nature.
0:53:10 And then not hurt the snake itself.
0:53:12 And I had a chemist explain to me that it’s probably some sort of mucus system that, that
0:53:16 lines the stomach and, and neutralizes the acid and keeps it floating in there.
0:53:20 But my God, that must be powerful stuff.
0:53:22 So what does it feel like being crushed, choked by an anaconda?
0:53:30 Uh, you, when an anaconda is wrapped around you and you, you find yourself in, in the,
0:53:38 in the shocking realization that these could be your last moments breathing, you are confronted
0:53:44 with the vast disparity in power, that there is so much power in these animals.
0:53:51 So much crushing deliberate reptilian ancient power that doesn’t care.
0:53:57 They’re just trying to get you to stop.
0:53:59 They just want you to stop ticking and there’s nothing you can do.
0:54:03 And there’s, I find it very awe inspiring when I encounter that kind of power when you, even
0:54:07 if it’s that you see, you know, you see a dog run, you know, you ever try and outrun
0:54:10 a dog and they just zip by you and you go, wow, you know, or you see a horse kick and
0:54:16 you go, Oh my God, if that, if that hoof hit anyone’s head, it’d knock them three states
0:54:21 over and it’s like, it’s like, there, there is muscular power that is so far that, like
0:54:25 you said, that explosive that we, we dream of doing it.
0:54:28 Like imagine if like a, a Muay Thai kickboxer could, could harness that sort of Cayman
0:54:32 power that smash.
0:54:34 Um, and so it’s, it’s just awe inspiring.
0:54:37 I think it’s really, really impressive what animals can do.
0:54:39 And we’re, we’re all, you know, we’re all the same sort of makeup for the most part,
0:54:44 all the mammals, you know, we all have our skeleton, skeletons look so similar.
0:54:47 We all have like, you know, if you look at like a kangaroo’s biceps and chest, it looks
0:54:51 so much like a, like a, like a, a man’s.
0:54:53 And if same thing goes for a bear or you ever see a naked chimp, there’s like chimps with
0:54:58 alopecia.
0:54:59 Oh shit.
0:55:00 And so it looks like a bodybuilder, like it’s got cuts and huge, huge everything.
0:55:07 It’s got pecs and they got that face.
0:55:09 It’s just like, just let me in.
0:55:12 What now?
0:55:13 Yeah.
0:55:14 Where’s your wallet?
0:55:15 Yeah.
0:55:16 Do something.
0:55:17 But yeah, but there’s a, the specialization of a lifetime of doing damage to the world
0:55:23 and using those muscles.
0:55:24 It just makes you, makes you just that much more powerful than the most humans.
0:55:28 Cause humans, I guess have more brain.
0:55:32 So they get lazy.
0:55:34 They start puzzle solving versus, you know, using the biceps directly.
0:55:38 Well, yes and no.
0:55:39 And I have this question.
0:55:40 Okay.
0:55:41 So I, you know, that whole you are what you eat thing.
0:55:43 Now we one time here had two chickens.
0:55:46 Now one of them was a wild chicken, like from the farm had walked around its whole life finding
0:55:50 insects and the other chicken was like factory raised.
0:55:55 And so we cut the heads off of both of them and started getting ready to cook them.
0:55:59 Now the factory raised chicken was like a much higher percentage of fat had less muscle on
0:56:04 its body with softer tissue, a lighter color.
0:56:09 The farm raised chicken had darker, more sinewy muscles, less fat was clearly a better made
0:56:15 machine.
0:56:16 And so my question is, is that what’s happening with us?
0:56:20 You know, like if you go see a Sherpa who’s been walking his whole life and pulling, you
0:56:24 know, and walking behind muskoxes and lifting things up mountains and breathing clean air
0:56:29 and not being in the city versus someone that’s just been chowing down at IHOP for 40 years
0:56:35 and never getting off the couch, like I imagine it’s the same thing that you, you become what
0:56:40 you eat.
0:56:41 Yeah.
0:56:42 I mean, like you and I were like, have dead running up a mountain.
0:56:46 Meanwhile, there’s a grandma just like walking and she’s been walking that road and she’s
0:56:50 just built different with her pack on her shoulders or the baby is just, they’re just
0:56:56 built different.
0:56:58 When you, when you apply your body in the physical way your whole life.
0:57:01 Yeah.
0:57:02 Like you can’t replicate that.
0:57:04 Like, like just like that chimp has those, from constantly moving through the canopy,
0:57:09 constantly using those arms.
0:57:10 Just like if you’re, you know, if you see an Olympic athlete or you hug Rogan, you just
0:57:17 go, why is there so much muscle here?
0:57:21 That’s exactly what I, what I feel like when you give them a hug.
0:57:24 This is definitely a chimp of some sort.
0:57:28 How does that, just that, that the constriction of the anaconda, just the, the, the feeling
0:57:34 of that as, are they doing that based on instinct or is there some brain stuff going
0:57:42 on?
0:57:43 Like, is this just like a basic procedure that they’re doing and they just really don’t
0:57:48 give a damn.
0:57:49 They’re not like thinking, oh, Paul, this is this kind of species who would taste good
0:57:55 or is it just a mechanism to start activating and you can’t stop it?
0:57:59 With an anaconda, I really think it’s the second one.
0:58:02 I do think that they’re impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane.
0:58:07 I think they’re a very simple system, a very ancient system.
0:58:11 And I think that once you, once you hit predation mode, it’s going down no matter what.
0:58:18 The stupid mosquito, I’m going like this and every time he just flies around my hand, like
0:58:21 I’m a big, slow giant and he just goes around my hand and then he goes back to the same
0:58:26 spot.
0:58:27 Like, and I’m like, no.
0:58:28 And then he comes right back to the same spot.
0:58:29 It’s like, it’s like, he’s just going, fuck you.
0:58:31 No, here’s the question.
0:58:33 If the mosquito is stupid and you can’t catch it, what does that make you?
0:58:36 Fucking stupid.
0:58:37 Dude, I flicked a wasp off me the other day.
0:58:39 It flew back like 12 feet and in the air corrected and then flew back at my face.
0:58:44 It made so many correct, like calculations and corrections and decided to come back and
0:58:49 let me know about it.
0:58:50 And it was like.
0:58:51 That wasp probably went back to the nest, said, guess what happened today?
0:58:54 This bitch ass kid from Brooklyn tried to flick me and I showed him what’s up.
0:58:57 I had him running.
0:58:58 And they had a good chuckle on that one.
0:59:01 You actually mentioned to me, just on the topic of Anacondas, that you’ve been participating
0:59:06 a lot of scientific work on, on the topic.
0:59:09 It’s like really, in everything you’ve been doing here, you are celebrating the animals.
0:59:16 You’re respecting the animals.
0:59:18 You’re protecting the animals.
0:59:19 But you’re also excited about studying the animals and their environment.
0:59:24 So you’re actually a co-author on a paper, on a couple of papers, but one of them is
0:59:29 on Anacondas and studying green Anaconda hunting patterns.
0:59:34 What’s that about?
0:59:35 So the lead authors of that paper, Pat Champagne and Carter Paine, friends of mine.
0:59:42 And what we started noticing for me began at that story, I told you where we were coming
0:59:47 across the stream and we saw the Anaconda had been positioned just below a copa.
0:59:56 And then other people began noticing that Anacondas seemed to always be beneath these
1:00:01 copas, where mammals were going to be coming.
1:00:03 And that contrasted with what we knew about Anacondas, because what we understood about
1:00:07 Anacondas is that they’re purely ambush predators and they don’t pursue their prey.
1:00:12 But what we began finding out here, and Pat led the process of amazing scientists, he
1:00:19 worked with the Katie University for a long time, worked with us for a long time.
1:00:24 And he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an Anaconda right around here and we were
1:00:30 able to see their movements.
1:00:32 And that’s what these papers are showing is that they actually do pursue their prey.
1:00:36 They do move up and down using the streams as corridors through the forest.
1:00:40 They actually do pursue their prey.
1:00:41 They actually do seek out food.
1:00:43 So I mean, think about it, it’s a giant Anaconda, obviously it’s not, you can’t just sit in
1:00:47 one spot.
1:00:48 It has to put some work into it.
1:00:50 And so they’re using scent and they’re using communication to use the streams so you could
1:00:54 be walking in the forest in a very shallow stream and see a sizable Anaconda looking
1:00:59 for a meal.
1:01:00 So in the shallow stream, it moves not just in the water, but in the sand.
1:01:06 So it also likes to borrow a little bit.
1:01:09 They borrow quite a bit.
1:01:10 So these large snakes operate subterranean more than we think.
1:01:17 Interesting.
1:01:18 Like there’s times that you’ll go with a tracker, you go with the telemetry set and it’ll say,
1:01:23 like we’ll be over the snake, snake’s underground.
1:01:27 Snake has found either a recess under the sides of the stream.
1:01:29 You saw it last night where all the fish have their holes under the side of the stream.
1:01:35 There was a six foot dwarf came in right in the stream, right where we were standing.
1:01:40 And he had his cave.
1:01:41 He goes under there.
1:01:42 They know.
1:01:43 They have their system.
1:01:44 Yeah.
1:01:45 We walked by it.
1:01:46 We walked by it.
1:01:47 And he stuck his head out because he thought we had gone and then we turned around and
1:01:50 I just got a glimpse of him because I was in the front of the line and he just went right
1:01:54 back into his cave.
1:01:56 You guys are not going to touch me.
1:01:58 And so yeah, with the Anacondas, it’s been really exciting.
1:02:01 And in 2014, JJ and me and Mohsen and Pat and Lee, we all, we ended up catching what
1:02:09 at the time was the record for you Nectis marinas scientifically measured.
1:02:13 It was 18 feet, six inches, 220 pounds, one of the largest female Anacondas on record.
1:02:19 And since that time, these guys have been continuing to study the species, continuing
1:02:24 to just again, just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge we have of the species
1:02:29 and studying green Anacondas in lowland tropical rainforest.
1:02:33 You’ve seen how hard it is to move, to operate, to navigate in this environment.
1:02:38 And so when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about this species,
1:02:44 you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them and then finding out a way to
1:02:50 keep tabs on them.
1:02:51 Because even if you get lucky enough to see an Anaconda by the edge of a stream to be
1:02:57 able to observe it over time to learn its habits or to put a radio transmitter on it
1:03:02 or to take any sort of valuable information from the experience is almost impossible.
1:03:08 And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote about Mother of God, us jumping on Anacondas and
1:03:12 trying to catch them.
1:03:13 And at first it just seemed like something we were doing to learn to just try and see
1:03:19 them.
1:03:20 But it ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would
1:03:23 have scientific implications later on because now it’s allowing us to try and find the largest
1:03:29 Anacondas.
1:03:30 And people used to say there’s no way this 25 foot, 27 foot, well, there’s just that
1:03:33 video of the guy swimming with the 20 foot Anaconda.
1:03:36 And so now as we keep going, I’m going, well, maybe through drone identification, we could
1:03:41 find where the largest Anacondas are sitting on top of floating vegetation.
1:03:45 And even then, how do we restrain them so that we could measure them and prove this
1:03:50 to the world?
1:03:51 It’s sort of a side quest.
1:03:53 So by doing these kinds of studies, you figure out how they move about the world, what motivates
1:03:58 them in terms of when they hunt, where they hide in the world, as the size of the Anaconda
1:04:04 changed.
1:04:05 So all of that, those are scientific studies.
1:04:07 Yeah.
1:04:08 I mean, look, there’s so much that we don’t know about this forest.
1:04:10 We don’t know what medicines are in this forest.
1:04:13 We don’t know with a lot of the 1500, something like 4,000 species of butterflies in the Amazon
1:04:18 rainforest, and of the 1500 species that are here in this region, all of them have a larval
1:04:24 stage caterpillars.
1:04:25 Right?
1:04:26 And each of the caterpillars has a specific host plant that they need to eat in order to
1:04:30 become a successful butterfly to enter the next life cycle.
1:04:34 And for most of the species that fill the butterfly book, we don’t know what those interactions
1:04:39 are.
1:04:40 I recently got to see the White Witch, which is a huge moth.
1:04:45 It’s one of the two largest moths in the world.
1:04:47 It’s the largest moth by wing span.
1:04:50 Wow.
1:04:51 Huge.
1:04:52 It looks like a bird.
1:04:53 Big, white moth.
1:04:54 We still, I believe, I believe that we still don’t know what the caterpillar looks like.
1:05:01 It’s 2024.
1:05:02 We have iPhones and penis-shaped rocket ships.
1:05:04 Like, we don’t know where that moth starts its life.
1:05:08 We still haven’t figured that out.
1:05:09 By the way, the rocket ships are shaped that way for efficiency purposes, not because they
1:05:13 want it to make it look like a penis.
1:05:15 But speaking of which, I have ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring and make
1:05:20 me very, I know it’s not just a figment of my imagination.
1:05:24 I’m pretty sure they’re real.
1:05:25 In fact, you explained it to me and they make me very uncomfortable because there’s just
1:05:29 a lot of penises hanging off of a tree.
1:05:31 Yes.
1:05:32 I don’t know what the purpose is.
1:05:33 I don’t know who they’re supposed to attract, but it certainly makes, but certainly Paul
1:05:39 really enjoys them.
1:05:40 Yeah.
1:05:41 Clearly, you’ve done some research and you’ve noticed a lot of them.
1:05:45 I haven’t even seen them.
1:05:46 There was a time when I almost fell and to catch my balance, I had to grab one of the
1:05:50 penises of the penis tree and unforgettable.
1:05:55 Anaconda, the biggest, baddest anaconda in the Amazon versus the biggest, baddest black
1:06:00 caiman.
1:06:01 Because you mentioned there like there’s a race.
1:06:03 If there’s a fight, there’s a UFC in cage who wins underwater.
1:06:06 This is the biggest and the baddest.
1:06:07 The biggest and the baddest.
1:06:09 You can imagine giving all the studies you’ve done of the two animals, species and the baddest.
1:06:16 You’re talking about an 18-foot, several hundred-pound black caiman versus a 26-foot,
1:06:22 350-pound anaconda.
1:06:27 I think it’s a death stalemate.
1:06:29 I think the caiman slams the anaconda, bites onto it.
1:06:32 The anaconda wraps the caiman and then they both thrash around until they both kill each
1:06:35 other because I think the caiman will tear them up so bad.
1:06:38 The caiman’s not going to let go.
1:06:39 The caiman’s never going to let go, but then he’s going to realize that he’s also being
1:06:44 constricted so then he’s going to stop and he’s going to keep slamming down on that anaconda.
1:06:48 The anaconda is just going to keep constricting, but if the caiman can do enough damage before
1:06:52 the anaconda, again, it’s almost like a striker versus a jiu-jitsu.
1:06:56 If you can get enough elbows in before they lock you.
1:06:59 How fast is the constriction?
1:07:01 It’s pretty slow.
1:07:02 No.
1:07:03 It’s incredibly quick.
1:07:05 If you take the back and get me in choke hold, it’s that.
1:07:10 I have maybe 30 seconds, maybe on the upward side, if you haven’t cinched it under my throat,
1:07:16 but if you’ve gotten good position, it’s over.
1:07:19 Is there any way to unwrap the choke, undo the choke, defending, scape?
1:07:21 No, not unless you have outside help, unless you have another human or another 10 humans
1:07:25 coming to unwrap the tail and help you, but for an animal, if a deer gets hit by an anaconda,
1:07:30 there’s no way.
1:07:31 They don’t stand a chance.
1:07:34 The black caiman would bite somewhere close to the head and just try to hold on a thrash.
1:07:41 I don’t think a large black caiman, here’s the thing.
1:07:45 Every fisherman knows this.
1:07:46 So like the biggest fish, they’re smart.
1:07:49 And more importantly, they’re shrewd.
1:07:52 They’re careful.
1:07:53 A huge black caiman that’s 16 feet long isn’t going to be messing with a big anaconda.
1:08:00 They won’t cross paths because while they technically occupy the same type of environment,
1:08:07 that black caiman is going to have this deep spot in the lake and that anaconda is going
1:08:11 to have found this floating forest like sort of black stream backwater where it’s going
1:08:15 to be.
1:08:16 And they’ll have made that their home for decades and they’ll already have cleaned out the competition.
1:08:19 So maybe if there was a flood and they got pushed together, they could have some sort
1:08:24 of a showdown.
1:08:25 But almost more certainly is that when they get to that size, that caiman, at any sign
1:08:30 of danger, right under the water, just be, it’s almost like, it’s like even if you,
1:08:35 what do you learn when you’re a black belt?
1:08:37 You know, what do you do with a street fight?
1:08:39 You still run away.
1:08:41 There’s no reason for a street fight.
1:08:43 And I think the animals really understand that there’s no reason for this.
1:08:47 So like a giant anaconda and a giant black caiman, they could probably even coexist in
1:08:52 the same environment, just knowing, using the wisdom to avoid the fight.
1:08:57 Why?
1:08:58 Or they would have a big showdown and one of them would either die or have to leave.
1:09:01 They would have a territorial dispute.
1:09:03 Yeah.
1:09:04 Yeah.
1:09:05 Without killing either of them.
1:09:07 Yeah.
1:09:08 I don’t, dude, nature, anything could happen.
1:09:11 One of the things that me and Pat wrote up was that I saw a yellow-tailed creepo, which
1:09:16 is like a six foot rat snake eating an oxyropus melanogenes, which is the red snake that we
1:09:21 found last night.
1:09:23 And just no one had ever, in scientific literature, we’d never seen a creepo eating an oxyropus
1:09:28 before.
1:09:29 And so I had the observation in the field, I sent it to Pat Champagne.
1:09:33 Pat writes it up, paper.
1:09:35 And so it’s like, it’s this really cool, that’s a really cool system because we’re just out
1:09:39 here all the time.
1:09:40 You end up seeing things.
1:09:41 JJ’s dad saw an anaconda eating a taper.
1:09:44 Taper is the size of a cow.
1:09:46 Damn.
1:09:47 That guy didn’t lie.
1:09:48 You trust your sources on that.
1:09:50 He saw enough stuff.
1:09:51 He didn’t need to make up stories.
1:09:53 And you know how you, you know what I love now is when you go to, so when you ask people,
1:09:57 when we were going up the mountain with Jimmy, JJ said to him, he goes, “Have you ever seen
1:10:03 a puma up here in the mountains?”
1:10:04 And Jimmy goes, “They’re up here.”
1:10:06 And JJ went, “No, no, no.
1:10:07 Have you seen it?”
1:10:08 And Jimmy went, “Nah, never seen one.”
1:10:11 And you know how most people will go, “Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
1:10:15 That makes me trust a person when they admit, “Nah, I haven’t seen it.”
1:10:20 Get up here.
1:10:21 I haven’t seen it.
1:10:22 And Jimmy has been living there his whole life, his whole life.
1:10:27 There’s pumas in the mountains.
1:10:28 You know, mountain lions, pumas, whatever the, you know, there’s all different names
1:10:31 for them.
1:10:32 They’re distributed from, I think from Alaska down through Argentina that’s, they’re everywhere.
1:10:37 It’s an extremely successful species, from deserts to high mountains, everything.
1:10:43 I think you’re saying pumas have a, have a curiosity to have a way about them where
1:10:47 they like explore, like follow people, like just to kind of figure out, like, just that
1:10:56 curiosity versus like, as opposed to causing harm or hunting and that kind of stuff, like,
1:11:01 what is this about?
1:11:02 I think it’s based in predatory instincts, but I also think there is a playfulness to
1:11:07 higher intelligence animals that you don’t see in lower intelligence animals.
1:11:10 And so something like a rabbit, for instance, you’re never going to see a rabbit come in
1:11:16 to check you out or you just, you just, you can’t even think of it like that.
1:11:20 Like a rabbit’s just going to either eat or run away.
1:11:22 There’s really two settings.
1:11:24 When you think of something like a river giant river otter or a Tyra, which is a, they call
1:11:30 it Monko here.
1:11:31 It’s a, it’s a huge arboreal weasel and they’ll come check you out.
1:11:35 I woke up at my house the other day and there was a Tyra climbing up the side of the house
1:11:40 and he was looking down at me sleeping.
1:11:43 And it’s like, he came to check me out.
1:11:46 Like it’s like, they’re smart enough and they’re brave enough.
1:11:48 Here’s the important thing.
1:11:49 They know that they can fend for themselves.
1:11:51 They can fight, they can climb, they can run.
1:11:53 And so they’re like, let me, I’m curious.
1:11:56 I got time.
1:11:57 Let me check this out.
1:11:58 Yeah.
1:11:59 They’re gathering information.
1:12:00 I wonder how complex and sophisticated their world model is.
1:12:02 Like how they’re integrating all the information about the environment, like where all the different
1:12:07 trees are, where all the different nests of the different insects are, what the different
1:12:11 creatures are by size, all that kind of stuff.
1:12:14 I’m sure they don’t have enough, you know, storage up there to like keep all that, but
1:12:19 they probably keep the important stuff based, you know, sort of integrate the experiences
1:12:24 they have into like what is dangerous, what is tasty, all that kind of stuff.
1:12:29 I think it’s more complex than we realize.
1:12:34 You go back to that friends to wall book, are we smart enough to know how smart animals
1:12:37 are?
1:12:38 There are so many incredible examples of controlled studies where the researchers weren’t understanding
1:12:44 how to shed being so insurmountably human and understand that there are other types
1:12:51 of intelligence.
1:12:53 And whether that’s elephants or cats.
1:12:55 So big cats, for instance, we just saw a camera trap video from last night where you
1:13:02 see one of our workers walk down the trail and then five minutes later a cat behind
1:13:07 him.
1:13:08 And we were walking just exactly the same area, also exactly the same time, yeah.
1:13:12 So we’re out there and there’s deer and there’s cats and there’s a jaguar and there’s a puma
1:13:16 and there’s all these animals out there.
1:13:18 And we’re out in the night in the inky black night in this ocean of darkness beneath the
1:13:22 trees and we’re just exploring and getting to see everything and there’s all these little
1:13:25 eyes and heartbeats.
1:13:26 I love the jungle at night, man.
1:13:28 It’s the most exciting thing.
1:13:29 You’re one of the things you do when you turn off the headlamp, complete darkness all around
1:13:33 you and just the sounds.
1:13:36 Everything you hear, the cicadas, the birds, they’re all screaming about sex all the time.
1:13:42 So they’re just trying to get late.
1:13:44 So all of them are making mating calls.
1:13:46 Now the trick is to make your mating call without attracting a predator.
1:13:50 But at night, what amazes me is that for us, it’s so, from the caveman logic of it’s hard
1:14:00 to make fire here, it’s hard to even light a fire here, to having this incredible beam
1:14:07 of it, all of a sudden we can look at the jungle and walk through that darkness, then
1:14:15 we’re seeing the frogs on those leaves and the snakes moving through the undergrowth
1:14:19 and the deer sneaking through the shadows, it’s almost as supernatural as skydiving.
1:14:26 It’s a strange thing to be able to do that technology allows us to do.
1:14:29 We’re doing something really complex and we’re walking on trails that have been cleared for
1:14:32 us that we’ve planned out.
1:14:34 And so walking through the jungle at night, you just get this freak show of biodiversity
1:14:40 and I’m addicted to it.
1:14:41 I truly love it.
1:14:42 Except for the times over the last few days when we walked on through the jungle without
1:14:47 a trail and that’s just a different experience.
1:14:51 How would you categorize?
1:14:52 If somebody said, “Lex, I think I’m going to go for a hike through the jungle,” not
1:14:57 on the trail.
1:14:58 Yeah.
1:14:59 So every step is really hard work.
1:15:03 Every step is a puzzle.
1:15:04 Every step is a full possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude of ways.
1:15:11 You’re just a wasp nest under a leaf, a hole under a leaf on the ground where if you step
1:15:19 in it, you’re going to break a knee, ankle, leg and not be able to move for a long time.
1:15:26 There’s all kinds of ants that can hurt you a little or can hurt you a lot, bullet ants.
1:15:34 There’s snakes and spiders and oh, my favorite that I’ve gotten to know intimately is different
1:15:46 plants with different defensive mechanisms, one of which is just spikes.
1:15:52 So sharp.
1:15:53 I don’t know if you brought it, but there’s an epic club with the spikes, but there’s
1:16:00 so many trees that have spikes on them.
1:16:03 Sometimes they’re obvious spikes, sometimes less than obvious spikes and it could be just
1:16:07 an innocent, as you take a step through a dense jungle, it could be an innocent placing
1:16:13 of a hand on that tree that could just completely transform your experience, your life by penetrating
1:16:22 your hand with like 20, 30, 40, 50 spikes and just changing everything.
1:16:29 That’s just a completely different experience than going on a trail where you’re observer
1:16:33 of the jungle versus the participant of it and it truly is extreme hard work to take
1:16:41 every single step.
1:16:42 Now, just think about this, I think scientifically, because people like to summarize, people like
1:16:45 to get really, really sort of cavalier with our scientific progress and they go, “We’ve
1:16:50 already explored the Amazon.”
1:16:51 It’s like, “Well, haven’t we?”
1:16:53 Because in between each tributary is, let’s say just between some of them, let’s just
1:16:57 say 100 miles of unbroken forest, who’s explored that?
1:17:02 Maybe some of the tribes have been there, maybe some areas they haven’t been.
1:17:07 Now, when you’re talking about scientists, whether they’re indigenous scientists, Western
1:17:11 scientists, whatever, so many of the areas in this jungle that is the size of the continental
1:17:18 US still have not been accessed.
1:17:20 The places where people are doing research, I’ve been down here long enough.
1:17:24 I see all the PhDs come down here and they all go to the same few research stations.
1:17:28 They’re safe, they have a bed.
1:17:30 If you get hella dropped into the middle of the jungle in the deepest, most remote parts,
1:17:35 you’re going to find micro ecosystems, you’re going to see little species variations.
1:17:39 You’re going to see a type of flower that JJ has never seen before, like what happened
1:17:43 the other day.
1:17:44 As you start walking through new patches of forest, you start finding new species and
1:17:47 everything here changes.
1:17:49 You just go a little bit upriver and the animals you see differ.
1:17:52 You go on this side of the river versus on the north side of the river, there’s two other
1:17:56 species of primates there that don’t exist here.
1:17:58 That’s in the mammal paper that we did with the emperor Tamarins and the pygmy marmosets
1:18:03 that the rangers found.
1:18:04 Yeah, the mammal paper is looking at the diversity of life in this one region of the Amazon.
1:18:13 People can talk more about that paper, mammal diversity along the Las Piedras River.
1:18:19 Once again, the mammal paper, Pat Champagne, the prodigy, he was leading on this with a
1:18:25 bunch of other scientists who have worked in the region, including Holly O’Donnell out
1:18:29 of Oxford.
1:18:30 Myself, I really just made a few observations.
1:18:33 The jungle keepers rangers got featured because they’re the ones that spotted a pygmy marmoset
1:18:37 that had previously been unrecorded on the river.
1:18:41 I got to contribute because I had the only photograph that I believe anyone has of an
1:18:47 emperor Tamarin on this river.
1:18:49 It’s the first proof of emperor Tamarin on this river.
1:18:53 That’s exciting.
1:18:54 It’s exciting because you can post a picture or share a scientific observation or write
1:19:01 about something, and then what happens is you get these couch experts, these armchair
1:19:06 experts who will come and say, “No, you don’t get blue and yellow macaws there.
1:19:10 I can tell from my bird book.
1:19:12 It says they’re not there, and they’ll tell you you’re wrong.
1:19:15 No, you don’t get woolly monkeys there or emperor Tamarins.”
1:19:18 But we have proof.
1:19:21 We’re coming together to try and add to that knowledge.
1:19:23 My general amateur experience of the species I’ve encountered here is like, “This should
1:19:28 not exist.”
1:19:29 Whatever this is, this is not real.
1:19:32 This is CGI.
1:19:35 Just the colors, the weirdness.
1:19:38 I think I called it the parasolten caterpillar because it’s like furry.
1:19:42 It looks like one of those little- Sounds like a parasolten’s dog.
1:19:45 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:19:46 It’s really furry and it’s transparent and all you see is this white beautiful fur and
1:19:53 it’s just like this caterpillar.
1:19:54 It doesn’t look real.
1:19:55 Yeah.
1:19:56 Do you think there are species, like how many species have we not discovered?
1:20:00 And is there a species there like extremely badass that we haven’t discovered yet?
1:20:05 If you look up how many trees are in the Amazon rainforest, it’s something in the order of
1:20:13 400 billion trees.
1:20:16 There’s something like 70 to 80,000 species of plants, individual types of plants here.
1:20:24 1500 species of trees.
1:20:26 It’s so vast that it’s comparable.
1:20:31 The scale is only comparable to the universe in terms of stars and galaxies and for the
1:20:40 sheer immensity of it.
1:20:42 We’re describing new species every year and just walking on the trail at night, you and
1:20:48 I have seen, you see a tiny little spider hidden in a crevice and has the scientific
1:20:54 eye ever seen that spider before?
1:20:56 Has it been documented?
1:20:57 Do we know anything about its life cycle?
1:20:59 There’s still so much that’s here that is completely unknown.
1:21:03 We have pictures of all these butterflies.
1:21:05 Somebody went out with a butterfly net and caught these butterflies, took a picture of
1:21:08 it, gave it a name, put it in a butterfly book, but what do we know?
1:21:12 What host plant do they use for their caterpillars?
1:21:14 What’s their geographical range?
1:21:16 What do we actually know not that much?
1:21:18 So are there creatures out here that haven’t been described?
1:21:21 Absolutely.
1:21:22 And some of them could be extremely effective predators in a niche environment.
1:21:27 Yeah.
1:21:28 Absolutely.
1:21:29 I mean certainly in the canopy, 50% of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy and
1:21:35 we’ve had very limited access to the canopy for all of history.
1:21:39 If you wanted to get up into the rainforest canopy, you basically have to climb a vine
1:21:43 or what scientists, when I was a kid, I always used to see them with the slingshots or the
1:21:47 bow and arrows.
1:21:48 They would shoot a piece of paracord over a branch, pull the rope up and then do the
1:21:53 ascension thing and then you’re up in this tree getting swarmed by sweat bees, getting
1:21:57 stung by wasps.
1:21:58 You’re trying to do science up there in that environment.
1:22:01 It’s incredibly hostile and so having canopy platforms.
1:22:05 I actually met a guy at a French film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over
1:22:11 the canopy of the Amazon and then lay these big nets over the broccoli of the trees.
1:22:18 And the nets were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets and then reach through
1:22:21 and pull cactuses and lizards and snakes, whatever, just take specimens from the canopy.
1:22:25 That’s how difficult it is that scientists have resorted to using hot air balloons.
1:22:32 And so having a treehouse, having canopy platforms, it’s starting to get, it’s starting to be
1:22:36 more and more access to the rainforest canopy and so we’re beginning to log more data.
1:22:44 We’ve even observed in our treehouse, which is supposed to be the tallest in the world,
1:22:47 we’re seeing lizards that we don’t see on the ground, lizards that have never been documented
1:22:52 on this river.
1:22:53 Like we’re seeing snakes where they’re saying, “We saw this snake inside a crevice on that
1:22:57 tree in the Stranglyphic and we don’t know what it is.”
1:23:01 It’s just people haven’t been up there.
1:23:03 And that’s where a lot of the monkeys are.
1:23:05 That’s where there’s just a lot of dynamic life up there.
1:23:09 Yeah.
1:23:10 I mean, when you wake up in the canopy in the morning in the Amazon rainforest, as soon
1:23:15 as the darkness lifts, as soon as that purple comes in the east in the morning, the howler
1:23:20 monkeys start up and then the parrots start up and then the tendomus start going and the
1:23:25 macaws start going and pretty soon everybody’s going and the spider monkey groups are all
1:23:28 calling to each other and it’s just the whole dawn chorus starts and it’s so exciting.
1:23:32 So what you’re saying when they’re screaming is usually about sex.
1:23:35 Sex or territory, usually.
1:23:37 Sex and violence or implied violence or the threat of violence.
1:23:41 Yeah.
1:23:42 I mean, howler monkeys in the morning, they’re letting other groups know this is where we’re
1:23:45 at.
1:23:46 We’re going to be foraging over here.
1:23:47 You better stay away.
1:23:48 And so it’s a little bit respectful as well.
1:23:50 There is order in the chaos.
1:23:52 So just speaking of screaming, macaws are like these beautiful creatures.
1:23:57 They’re lifelong partners.
1:23:59 They stick together.
1:24:00 So they’re monogamous.
1:24:01 They’re monogamous.
1:24:02 They see two of them together.
1:24:04 But when they communicate their love language, it seems to be very loud screaming.
1:24:09 Yeah.
1:24:10 What do you learn about relationships from macaws?
1:24:14 That it can be loud and rough and still be loving.
1:24:16 And it’s still be loving.
1:24:18 But is that interesting to you that there’s monogamy in some species, that they’re lifelong
1:24:22 partners and then there’s total lack of monogamy in other species?
1:24:26 It’s all interesting.
1:24:27 I mean, there’s the anti-monogamy crew who’s like, “We were never meant to be monogamous.
1:24:31 We’re supposed to just be animals.”
1:24:33 And then there’s the other side of the crew that’s like, “We were meant to be monogamous.
1:24:37 We are monogamous creatures.
1:24:39 That’s what God wanted between a man and a woman.”
1:24:41 And then other people are like, “Yeah, but I know about these two gay penguins and so
1:24:45 that’s natural too.”
1:24:46 And so then everyone tries to draw their identity, they’re trying to justify their
1:24:51 identity off of the laws of nature.
1:24:53 So the fact that macaws are monogamous really doesn’t have anything to do with anybody except
1:24:57 for that it’s beneficial for them to work together to raise chicks.
1:25:01 It’s difficult.
1:25:02 They rely on ironwood trees or agua hay palms and it’s difficult to find the right hole
1:25:08 in a tree.
1:25:09 There’s only so much macaw real estate and so they need to use those holes.
1:25:13 And each one of those ancient trees, it’s usually 500 years or more, is a valuable macaw
1:25:19 generating site in the forest.
1:25:21 And so if those trees go down, you lose exponential amounts of macaws and that’s how you get endangered
1:25:27 species.
1:25:28 And so that’s why we’re trying to protect the ironwood trees.
1:25:31 Another ridiculous question.
1:25:32 Tell me.
1:25:33 If every jungle creature was the same size, who would be the new apex predator, the new
1:25:38 alpha at the top of the food chain?
1:25:40 Dude, that’s like super smash brothers of the jungle.
1:25:43 That’s incredible.
1:25:44 Yeah.
1:25:45 Like bullet ants.
1:25:46 If you had a bullet ant that was the size.
1:25:49 Yeah.
1:25:50 Can it be like a tournament?
1:25:52 So everyone is pound for pound ratioed for efficiency.
1:25:55 So you have basically like a six foot bullet ant versus a huge black caiman versus an anaconda
1:26:01 versus oscelots are the size of jaguars versus.
1:26:04 Yeah.
1:26:05 Well, let’s go bullet ant versus black caiman.
1:26:07 But they’re comparable size.
1:26:09 Yeah.
1:26:10 I don’t know, man.
1:26:12 I never thought about it.
1:26:13 I mean, bullet ant has these giant, giant, giant mandibles that could probably grab the
1:26:17 black caiman and then at that amount of venom, you’re talking about a bucket of venom going
1:26:22 into that black caiman, black caiman is going to get paralyzed immediately.
1:26:25 Well, insects have just a tremendous amount of like strength.
1:26:29 I don’t know how they generate with the geometry that is the natural world can’t create that
1:26:32 same kind of power in the bigger thing.
1:26:35 It seems like.
1:26:36 It seems like.
1:26:37 The ants and like just these tiny creatures are the ones they’re able to have that much
1:26:41 strength.
1:26:42 I don’t know how that works.
1:26:43 What the physics of that is.
1:26:44 Yeah.
1:26:45 So like an ant, a leaf cutter ant lifting that leaf, that doesn’t make any sense.
1:26:47 Yeah.
1:26:48 It doesn’t make any sense.
1:26:49 It doesn’t make any sense.
1:26:50 I don’t know.
1:26:51 I don’t know if that’s a limit of physics.
1:26:52 I think it’s just the limit of evolution of how that works.
1:26:54 One of the most interesting limits that I heard somebody talking about recently was the reason
1:26:58 that dinosaurs didn’t get bigger, even bigger because the conditions on earth were favorable
1:27:04 towards it was that at some point their eggs reached this physical limits, that their eggs
1:27:09 reached a size that the eggs were so big that that eggs need to breathe for the embryo to
1:27:13 survive and their eggs reached a limit where in order to have a shell that could hold the
1:27:18 mass of the liquid and the young dinosaur, if they got bigger, it wouldn’t be permeable
1:27:23 anymore.
1:27:24 And I thought that was so interesting because the entire size of physical creatures was determined
1:27:28 by how thick shell can be before it breaks or before it can’t pass air through it.
1:27:34 Yeah.
1:27:35 There might be a lot of that like biophysics limits to fascinating stuff.
1:27:40 Just like the interplay between biology, chemistry and physics of like a life form is like this
1:27:46 thing, there’s a lot involved in creating a single living organism that could survive
1:27:51 in this world.
1:27:52 And being big is not always good, but being a big creature, it’s for many reasons like
1:27:58 you were saying, the big creature seemed to be going extinct for many reasons.
1:28:02 But in the human world is because there seemed to be a higher value.
1:28:08 Given the current size of the jungle, I think that the MVP, the pound for pound goat is
1:28:14 ocelots.
1:28:15 You’re talking about like a midsize 40, 50 pound cat that can climb, that does unlike
1:28:22 a jaguar, a jaguar every time it hunts, it’s going after a deer, it catches a deer.
1:28:27 The deer could hit it with its antlers, it could tear it with its hooves, it’s risking
1:28:31 its life for that meal.
1:28:33 An ocelot, ocelots walk around at night and they climb a tree, eat a whole bunch of eggs,
1:28:40 eat the mother bird too, kill a snake, maybe mess around and eat a baby came and they can
1:28:45 have whatever they like.
1:28:47 And they’re sleek enough and smart enough to get away from predators.
1:28:51 They don’t really have predators.
1:28:55 And so they sort of occupy this perfect niche where they can hunt small prey in high quantity
1:29:00 without taking on big risks.
1:29:02 And so if you had to choose an animal to be, it’d probably be like an ocelot or I would
1:29:06 say giant river otters, which are so damn cool because they’re…
1:29:11 The locals call them logos de río, river wolves, because they’re so tough and they’re so social
1:29:16 and they’re so like us because they’re intensely familial groups.
1:29:20 They live in holes by the sides of lakes and they swim through the water and they catch
1:29:23 fish all day long, piranhas.
1:29:25 They eat them just like the scales go flying as they eat these piranhas.
1:29:29 And they’re so joyous in the way they swim and they have friends and they have family
1:29:33 and I think we could relate to being a river otter really because I can’t picture being
1:29:38 a cat and being so solitary and just marching along a 15 mile route and making sure there’s
1:29:46 no other cats coming in on your territory and marking that territory.
1:29:50 It seems very solo and very cat-like.
1:29:54 So lonely existence.
1:29:56 Lonely existence.
1:29:57 And we humans are social beings.
1:29:58 It’s so social.
1:29:59 And so to me, river otters is like having a big Italian family.
1:30:02 You’re constantly eating, you’re freaking out, just like causing problems with the black
1:30:06 caiman.
1:30:07 Take down a black caiman.
1:30:08 Yeah.
1:30:09 Start a street fight.
1:30:10 Yeah.
1:30:11 It’s a family thing.
1:30:12 You mentioned piranhas.
1:30:13 Yeah.
1:30:14 What do you think?
1:30:15 You know, they’re a source of a lot of fear for people.
1:30:16 What do you find beautiful and fascinating about these creatures?
1:30:18 They’re also kind of social or at least they hunt and operate in groups.
1:30:22 Yeah.
1:30:23 Not in the mammalian way though.
1:30:24 Those are in large schools, but fish are so different.
1:30:28 Like I can talk to you all day about how much I’d love to be an otter also.
1:30:33 Going back to the fighting thing, otters and weasels, muscle a day, tend to be very loose
1:30:38 in their skin.
1:30:39 So if you grab an otter, it can still rotate around to bite you.
1:30:42 So it’s like, if I grab you by the back, you’re stuck.
1:30:44 You know, like we can’t, you grab them by the skin, they can rotate around and just shred
1:30:49 you apart.
1:30:50 So they’re really cool fighters.
1:30:54 Yeah.
1:30:55 Fish, fish, I don’t, I don’t, you know, I don’t identify with fish in terms like that.
1:30:58 I think living out here has made me think of fish as a kind of rapid food that can or
1:31:06 can’t be gotten.
1:31:07 Like, you know, to me, a piranha is just, is when I see a piranha, I think about how
1:31:10 I want to, how I want it to taste.
1:31:12 Yeah.
1:31:13 So like a fish is a, is a food source for so many creatures in the jungle.
1:31:17 So they’re primarily food source, but piranhas are predators.
1:31:21 They’re predators.
1:31:22 They’re serious predators.
1:31:23 They are serious predators.
1:31:24 I found a baby black caiman, not that long ago, and he was missing all of his toes because
1:31:28 the piranhas had eaten them off.
1:31:29 It was really sad.
1:31:30 He just had these stumps and he was swimming around the water and I was like, you are not
1:31:33 going to make it.
1:31:34 He was like eight inches and he was such a cute little puppy, you gotta do big eyes.
1:31:39 And I was just like, man, you were ready of missing all your toes.
1:31:41 I was like, it’s just a matter of time.
1:31:44 Now he can’t get away.
1:31:45 So some big agami heron is going to come and just nail and pop him down his throat.
1:31:50 And that’s the end of that for the caiman.
1:31:51 I mean, nature is metal.
1:31:53 Nature, sure as shit is metal.
1:31:55 Bite off a little bit and it makes you vulnerable and then that vulnerability is exploited by
1:31:59 some other species and then that’s it.
1:32:01 That’s the end.
1:32:02 Yeah, but humans are brutal too.
1:32:04 Like that story we heard about that guy the other day who caught a stingray on a fishing
1:32:08 hook, chopped its tail off to make it safe for humans, cut a piece of the stingray off
1:32:15 so that he could use it for bait and then threw the live fish back in the river.
1:32:18 To me, that is incomprehensible amounts of cruelty with flawed logic in every direction.
1:32:25 Like if you’re going to use the thing as bait, use it as bait.
1:32:28 If you’re going to remove its tail, well, then just kill it all together.
1:32:32 Or if you want to save the animal and not kill it, then don’t maim it before you return
1:32:37 it to it.
1:32:38 It was so weird.
1:32:39 So if you kill an animal, you want to use it to as full as by using it as a food source
1:32:44 by cooking it, by eating every part of it, all that kind of stuff.
1:32:48 So we’ve been eating Paco in your time here.
1:32:52 Fried Paco is great.
1:32:53 Fried Paco.
1:32:54 Amazing.
1:32:55 It’s delicious, full of nutrients.
1:32:56 You could tell it makes you healthy.
1:32:57 I feel like we have better workouts so that we can go harder in the jungle.
1:33:00 And so a few months ago in August when the river was down, there was a day that the river
1:33:06 was clear and a friend of mine, Victor, who’s married to a native gril, he said, “It’s time
1:33:12 to go Paco fishing.”
1:33:14 And at the time, we were stuck out here and we had no resupply.
1:33:18 He was busy.
1:33:19 And so everyone was demoralized.
1:33:21 The staff was hungry.
1:33:22 We were hungry.
1:33:23 And it really became this thing of like, “Hey, go catch us some Paco.”
1:33:27 They were working on the trails.
1:33:28 They were installing the solar.
1:33:29 We were working hard and we didn’t have food.
1:33:31 And so we went out to the river and what we did was we went up river, we camped on the
1:33:36 beach and in the morning, Victor’s wife was canoeing with the paddle dead quiet.
1:33:44 Don’t let the paddle touch the wooden boat.
1:33:47 And Nikita was balanced in the middle of the thing, Victor’s on the front with this huge
1:33:50 fishing rod and I’m sitting there and he goes, “I’ll catch the first one, you catch
1:33:54 the second one.”
1:33:55 And he’s got this huge fishing rod and a piece of half rotten meat from the day before
1:33:59 and he’s smacking it against the, well, 6 a.m., he’s just letting it smack against the water.
1:34:03 And I’m going, and we’re floating down the river.
1:34:07 And I’m going, “This is not going to work.”
1:34:09 And we’re floating and we’re floating and a half hour passes and I’m going, “It’s
1:34:12 dawn.
1:34:13 I want to go back to sleep.
1:34:14 I’m just not a morning person.”
1:34:16 And all of a sudden a fish hits that line, almost pulls this man off of his feet and
1:34:20 he swings the thing in, the fish comes on the boat and then I realize he’s got a big
1:34:24 metal mallet on the boat so that you could try to shut that fish off.
1:34:28 And it’s this huge ore-shaped, thick muscular Paco.
1:34:33 And as soon as I saw that fish, I just thought, “Wow, the strongest of this species for millions
1:34:42 of years have been swimming in this river.”
1:34:45 And suddenly we’ve, through this incredible combination of the boat and the cord and the
1:34:50 hook, none of which we made, and the skill that he had from knowing how to fish a Paco,
1:34:55 because otherwise there’s no chance that you’re getting that fish.
1:34:57 They hide.
1:34:58 They’re very, very suspicious of what you’re doing.
1:35:01 We had gotten this fish onto the boat and you hammer it like a caveman, boom, it doesn’t
1:35:06 die, boom, you have to crush its skull.
1:35:08 And now you have this fish and you’re holding this genetic material, this sustenance for
1:35:14 your life that has been developing since the dinosaur times.
1:35:18 It’s so beautiful, the act, the sacred act of eating that, of the fish, of the competition
1:35:27 with the fish.
1:35:28 And we spent the morning fishing.
1:35:29 We got three Pacos, three huge giant vegetarian piranha.
1:35:33 And I just remember touching them with so much reverence, thinking about the incredible
1:35:38 history and how that before these rivers existed, those Pacos were swimming through the water
1:35:43 and trying to survive through history, through history, through history until we took just
1:35:52 a few.
1:35:53 And we did it respectfully and we did it when we needed it most, not at a time when it was
1:35:57 just for fun and it was really, really special.
1:36:00 Well humans using them for sustenance, there’s a collaboration there.
1:36:04 That’s something also that I’ve seen in the jungle, that there’s creatures using each
1:36:08 other and it’s like a dance of either mutually using each other or it’s parasitic or symbiotic.
1:36:17 It’s interesting.
1:36:18 Like there’s a medicinal plant you grabbed that was full of ants that were like trying
1:36:26 to murder you by biting, but they were defending the plant that they were using for whatever
1:36:31 purpose.
1:36:32 But there’s a clear dance there of the ants using the plant and the plant existing there
1:36:36 for other applications and other use for humans and there’s that kind of circle of life happening.
1:36:42 But the ants were a defense mechanism.
1:36:44 So the plant didn’t have its own defense mechanism.
1:36:46 The ants, the army of ants was there to protect the plant.
1:36:52 And did you actually, when you remember we put our backpacks down at that one spot and
1:36:56 it was like the ants got on your backpack and I said, “Oh shit, this is that tree.”
1:37:00 Did you actually get bitten by one of those because they’re incredibly painful, the Tangerana
1:37:04 one.
1:37:05 Yeah, surprisingly painful because they’re small and it’s nothing like, luckily I have
1:37:10 not been bitten by a bullet ant yet.
1:37:12 But it’s amazing because they live inside the tree.
1:37:16 The tree comes standard with holes in it that allow the ants to move and to exist safe and
1:37:23 it protects their eggs and they protect the tree.
1:37:26 So we saw that spot where there’s a perfect circle around the trees, because the ants
1:37:30 had excavated the other vegetation so that those trees could have no competition to grow.
1:37:37 The incredible calculation of how ants come programmed to garden that tree and the tree
1:37:45 somehow has been genetically informed to have ant habitat within itself.
1:37:53 It’s mind-blowing and it actually is the foundation of a lot of existential confusion for me because
1:37:58 how the hell is this possible?
1:38:00 Yeah, well one of the things you mentioned that’s also a source of a lot of existential
1:38:06 confusion for me is ants and the intelligence of different creatures in the forest.
1:38:11 There’s these giant colonies, there’s just giant systems, but even just looking at a
1:38:16 single colony of ants, then collaborating leaf cutter ants is an incredible system.
1:38:22 So individually the ants seem kind of dumb and simplistic, but taken together there is
1:38:28 a vast intelligence operating that’s able to be robust and resilient in any kind of
1:38:34 conditions, is able to figure out a new environment, is able to be resilient to any kinds of attacks
1:38:40 and all that kind of stuff.
1:38:41 What do you find beautiful about them?
1:38:43 Like as you said, just leaf cutter ants in this jungle.
1:38:46 That’s forgetting all the other hundreds of species of ants that are in this jungle, but
1:38:50 just the leaf cutters apparently digest roughly 17% of the total biomass of the forest.
1:38:59 Everything, all these giant trees, all that leaf litter, 17% of that, almost a fifth of
1:39:04 this forest cycles through leaf cutter colonies.
1:39:07 So they’re constantly regenerating the forest.
1:39:10 They’re a huge source of the driver of this ecosystem.
1:39:14 And so to me, when you see them working, it’s, again, like I said, you see your friends
1:39:18 as you go through the jungle, you see all the kpop trees, the kinea tree, there’s leaf
1:39:22 cutter ants doing what they’re supposed to do, and it’s just so beautiful.
1:39:25 I find them very beautiful, army ants, they’re so tough, they’re so ready to fight, they
1:39:30 have these huge mandibles, they’re transporting their eggs, they’re moving from here to there.
1:39:35 Anything that’s in the way is getting eaten, they’re just savage, and they’re kind of cute
1:39:38 for that.
1:39:39 Unless you’re tied to a tree.
1:39:40 The savagery is cute.
1:39:42 I find that, yeah, it’s kind of reassuring, you know.
1:39:44 You want certain things to be tough.
1:39:46 That’s their part.
1:39:47 Oh, that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the nature mechanism.
1:39:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:39:54 The powerful play.
1:39:57 But the army ants are so savage, you know, like if you step on army ants, they all kamikaze,
1:40:05 just attack onto your feet, and they’ll just sacrifice their own life for the good of
1:40:09 the thing, and they’ll be trying to kill your shoes, and there’s something funny about that
1:40:14 to me.
1:40:15 There’s something like kind of reassuring, again, unless, unless, imagine if you’re going
1:40:20 through the jungle, and you slip, and you fall, and you twist your knee, and you fall
1:40:24 in just the right way, but you can’t get up, you can’t, you’re stuck there.
1:40:30 And then army ants find you.
1:40:32 They will take you apart.
1:40:33 There are records of horses that have been tied up, and army ants come, and they’ll
1:40:39 take out the whole horse.
1:40:41 Imagine the pain of that.
1:40:44 It might be raining on us very hard, very soon.
1:40:47 You want to pause?
1:40:48 Nope.
1:40:49 I think we’ll stay here until the ship goes down.
1:40:51 We should mention that there’s this one source of light, and we’re shrouded in darkness.
1:40:56 And now the night shift is going to take over soon, and we are in the Amazon rainforest.
1:41:00 What does the rainforest represent to you?
1:41:02 Can you zoom out and look at the entirety of it?
1:41:07 Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot resonated with a lot of people, that everything you’ve ever
1:41:15 heard of, all the heroes, all the villains, all of your ancestors, every achievement,
1:41:20 tragedy, triumph, everything has happened on that one spot.
1:41:25 This one tiny, tiny little rock that has life on it.
1:41:28 And to me, the rainforests represent the crown jewel of that.
1:41:33 As far as we know, and to the best of our knowledge, and with our shrewd, scientific
1:41:38 brains at their fullest capacity, this is still the only place that we know that has
1:41:44 life.
1:41:46 And given that, the fact that there are still these tropical, towering, complex ecosystems
1:41:54 that we are barely understand, crawling and full of the most incredible life, it’s just,
1:42:02 to me, it’s so wonderful.
1:42:05 It’s so incredible.
1:42:06 Those are the waterfalls, and the birds, and the macaws, and the jaguars.
1:42:09 It’s barely believable.
1:42:10 Like if you were to theoretically tell a hypothetical alien, “I live on this planet,” and there’s
1:42:15 just these places where everything is interconnected.
1:42:18 Everything means something to something else, and the whole thing is this system that keeps
1:42:22 us alive.
1:42:23 Every tree is pumping air into the river, and there’s an invisible river above the
1:42:26 actual river, and the whole thing goes into stabilizing our global climate.
1:42:30 And each little, tiny leaf cutter ant somehow contributes to this giant, biotic orchestra
1:42:37 that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible.
1:42:40 That is beautiful.
1:42:42 I love that.
1:42:43 And so the rainforest, to me, are the greatest celebration of life, and probably the greatest
1:42:48 challenge for us as a global society.
1:42:51 Because if we can’t protect the crown jewel, the best thing, you know, the most beautiful
1:42:56 part, then we’re really, really missing the point.
1:43:00 Yeah, the diversity of organisms here is the biggest celebration of life.
1:43:08 That is at the core of what makes Earth a really special thing.
1:43:12 That said, you and I have been arguing about aliens for pretty much the day I showed up.
1:43:17 All right, so you brought a machete to this fight.
1:43:21 Luckily, the table is long enough to carry me.
1:43:26 So to you, Earth is truly special.
1:43:29 Yeah.
1:43:30 You don’t think there’s other Earths out there, millions of other Earths in our galaxy.
1:43:34 When you look up, you know, we were sitting in the Amazon River at dark, the storm rolled
1:43:39 over, and you started counting the stars.
1:43:41 Yeah.
1:43:42 One, two, and that was, once you can count the stars, that was a sign that the storm
1:43:46 will actually pass.
1:43:47 Eventually, it will pass, and that’s what you were doing, three, four, five, and it’s
1:43:50 going to pass.
1:43:51 You’re not going to have to sit in that river for like all night.
1:43:55 So just a couple of hours to keep yourself warm.
1:43:57 Okay, each of those stars, there’s Earth-like planets around them.
1:44:03 Why do you think there’s not alien civilizations there?
1:44:08 You can write down a calculation on a napkin.
1:44:11 You can cite different Hollywood movies.
1:44:14 You can point up to the pieces of light and the stars, but if I talk about show me a single
1:44:18 cell that’s not from this planet, it’s still not possible.
1:44:23 So I agree with you that the likelihood is there, all indications point to it.
1:44:27 It would be fascinating, especially if it was done in, especially, you know, imagine
1:44:31 finding a planet of alternative life forms, not necessarily even intelligent.
1:44:35 Imagine just a planet of butterflies, whatever, you know, something else.
1:44:40 That would be amazing, but I’m concerned with the reality that we have in front of us is
1:44:45 that this is the spaceship.
1:44:47 This is life.
1:44:48 And so right now, given that reality, maybe that’s the case.
1:44:52 Maybe there are other planets, or maybe we are the first.
1:45:00 Maybe life originated here.
1:45:02 Maybe God, the universe, whatever.
1:45:06 Maybe this is it.
1:45:07 This is the testing ground for something bigger.
1:45:14 And this complexity and this diversity of life and this life that we have is that important.
1:45:19 And I think that part of what we do when we go, “Oh, yeah, but there’s other planets.”
1:45:23 First of all, we’re taking an assumption into reality without, I mean, you know, aliens
1:45:30 are right now are about as real as Santa Claus.
1:45:32 We think they’re out there, but we’re not sure.
1:45:34 Maybe a little more real because, you know, it could make sense.
1:45:37 No one has an alien.
1:45:38 No one’s seen an alien.
1:45:39 No one’s even seen cellular life.
1:45:41 And so I’m not, again, if they showed up tomorrow, great, let’s study them.
1:45:45 But right now we have this very simple threat going on where we can’t stop killing each
1:45:52 other and our living environment.
1:45:55 And so while some people can specialize in looking to the stars and to other planets
1:45:59 and talk about being an interplanetary species, I’m very much concerned with the fact that
1:46:03 here in our home turf, our living environment where the air is good and the rivers are clean
1:46:09 and the trees are big and there’s Macaws flying through the sky and salmon in the rivers,
1:46:16 not only do we have a responsibility to each other and to our children to protect this
1:46:20 incredible gift that is our entire reality seems kind of weird to, at some point, conservation
1:46:28 seems kind of ridiculous.
1:46:29 Like you’re begging people to not pollute the things that keep them alive.
1:46:33 It’s almost kind of silly at a point.
1:46:38 But we have this incredible thing where there are fish in the ocean and in the rivers.
1:46:42 They come standard with life on Earth and we’re harming the ability of Earth’s ecosystems
1:46:47 to provide for that life.
1:46:49 And we are the generation that’s going to decide if those systems continue to provide
1:46:55 life to all the people on Earth and all the generations.
1:46:58 And by the way, all the other animals that exist for their own reasons, other consciousnesses
1:47:03 that we’re just beginning to understand, elephants, humpback whales, whatever, families of giant
1:47:08 river otters, not everything can be seen from a human perspective.
1:47:13 These are other species that have their own stories.
1:47:17 And so I’m more biocentric than anthropocentric in that I think that nature is important.
1:47:23 But I also believe that we are special.
1:47:30 We are the most intelligent animal.
1:47:32 So one, I agree with you, there’s some degree to which when you imagine aliens, you forget
1:47:39 if by for a moment how special and important life is here on Earth, yes.
1:47:47 But it’s also a way to reach out through curiosity and trying to understand what is intelligence,
1:47:56 what is consciousness, what is exactly the thing that makes life on Earth special.
1:48:01 Another way of doing that, and I see the jungle in that same way is basically treating the
1:48:06 animals all around us, the life forms all around us as kinds of aliens.
1:48:13 That’s a humbling way that’s an intellectual humility with which to approach the study
1:48:18 of like, what the hell is going on here?
1:48:21 This is truly incredible.
1:48:25 Are the animals we’ve met over the last few days conscious?
1:48:30 What is the nature of their intelligence?
1:48:32 What is the nature of their consciousness?
1:48:34 What motivates them?
1:48:35 Are they individual creatures or they’re actually part of the large system?
1:48:39 And how large is the system?
1:48:40 Is Earth one big system?
1:48:42 And humans are just little fingertips of that system?
1:48:45 Or are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything else is in the
1:48:53 emerging complexity of the system?
1:48:55 So I think thinking about aliens is a necessary, I like my Tom with a little drop of poison
1:49:03 from Tom Weiss is a necessary perturbation of the system of our thinking, to sort of
1:49:08 say, hey, we don’t know what the fuck’s going on around here.
1:49:11 And aliens is a nice way to say, okay, the mystery all around us is immense because to
1:49:20 me, likely aliens are living among us.
1:49:25 Not in a trivial sense, little green men, but the force that created life, I think permeates
1:49:35 the entirety of the universe, that there is a force that’s creative.
1:49:41 Now the force that created life is a big one.
1:49:45 And then the other thing is, what do you mean by that?
1:49:47 There’s aliens living among us.
1:49:51 You mean extraterrestrials living among us.
1:49:57 You believe that?
1:49:59 Not like a hundred percent, but there’s a good percentage.
1:50:01 I don’t understand how it’s possible for there not to be a very large number of alien
1:50:08 civilization throughout just our galaxy.
1:50:13 But that’s different than saying that they’re living among us.
1:50:15 If you tell me that there’s aliens living five galaxies over and that they’re just out
1:50:19 there somewhere, I’m kind of more on your side than that they’re here.
1:50:25 Because just like Bigfoot, we have camera traps.
1:50:27 We have DNA sequencing through water now.
1:50:31 You’re telling me no one found one wing nut of a ship in all, like the Egyptians up until
1:50:39 right now.
1:50:40 And Russia saw a crash ship, took a picture, tweeted that shit real quick.
1:50:45 I think there’s no Bigfoot, there’s no trivial manifestations of aliens.
1:50:50 I think if they’re here, they’re here in ways that are not comprehensible by humans because
1:50:55 they’re far more advanced than humans.
1:50:57 They’re far more advanced than any lifeforms on Earth.
1:51:00 So even if it’s just their probes, we cannot just even comprehend it.
1:51:06 I think it’s possible that they operate in the space of ideas, for example, that ideas
1:51:12 could be aliens, feelings could be aliens, consciousness itself could be aliens.
1:51:17 So we can’t restrict our understanding of what is a lifeform to a thing that is a biological
1:51:24 creature that operates via natural selection on this particular planet.
1:51:29 It could be much, much, much more sophisticated.
1:51:32 It could be in the space of computation, for example, as we in the 21st century are developing
1:51:37 increasingly sophisticated computational systems with artificial intelligence.
1:51:41 It could be operating on some other level that we can’t even imagine.
1:51:45 It could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand.
1:51:51 We barely understand quantum mechanics.
1:51:53 We use it, quantum mechanics is a way we used to make very accurate predictions, but to
1:51:58 understand why it’s operating that way, we don’t.
1:52:03 And there’s so many gigantic, powerful cosmic entities out there that we detect, sometimes
1:52:11 can’t detect dark matter, dark energy, but it’s out there.
1:52:15 We know it exists, but we can’t explain why and what the fuck it is.
1:52:21 We give it names, black holes and dark energy and dark matter, but those are all names for
1:52:28 things that mathematical equations predict, but we don’t understand.
1:52:32 And so all of that is just to say that aliens could be here in ways that are for now and
1:52:40 maybe for a long time going to be impossible for humans to understand.
1:52:44 So aliens in the strict biological sense, like horseshoe crabs, we agree that we haven’t
1:52:53 found physical aliens.
1:52:55 The only way I can imagine finding physical aliens is if alien species are trying to communicate
1:53:02 with us humans or with other life forms, and are trying to figure out a way to communicate
1:53:08 with us such that we dumb humans would understand, like let’s create a thing.
1:53:15 Yo, there’s a moth, the size of a small eagle.
1:53:23 Let’s try to get us 15 minutes of attention.
1:53:25 It’s just my…
1:53:26 Big fan of the podcast.
1:53:28 Okay.
1:53:29 Lex, I love you.
1:53:30 All right, so wouldn’t it be interesting, it’d be really fascinating to me if we found out
1:53:36 that there were aliens living among us and we couldn’t see them.
1:53:40 And what some of the people were calling aliens, the scientists, the religious people were
1:53:45 calling angels, and then everybody had this realization that whether you call them aliens
1:53:49 or angels, there are these…
1:53:52 There is way more to the universe than we’re realizing.
1:53:56 Just for me, the fact that there’s…
1:54:02 There’s a skull on the table.
1:54:04 There’s a skull on the table.
1:54:05 There’s not a skull on your hand.
1:54:07 There’s now a skull on my hand of a monkey with a bullet in its head that I found on
1:54:11 the floor of an indigenous community where they eat monkeys.
1:54:14 I didn’t kill the monkey, so save your comments.
1:54:18 But in terms of the animals, I think that when I see space, it…
1:54:25 My feeling, and I’m not requiring anybody else to have this feeling, but because we
1:54:29 know…
1:54:30 Because it’s the only place that we know that there’s life and we have no idea how it started.
1:54:37 I just think it’s so important to protect it.
1:54:41 And for me, it’s just as much about our children as it is about the little spider monkeys and
1:54:45 the little baby caiman that are in the river right now, because life is so beautiful.
1:54:51 And I think that there’s a huge amount of intellectual responsibility that we can transfer
1:54:59 off of ourselves if we go, “Yeah, the rivers are filled with trash and yeah, extinction
1:55:04 is happening.”
1:55:05 But we have to be an interplanetary species anyway because at any moment, this could all
1:55:09 end from an asteroid and everything’s going to shit anyway, and so it’s like, “We’re fucking
1:55:12 up this planet.”
1:55:13 But that’s…
1:55:14 We’re just being angry teenagers who are going goth for a while and it’s like, “What if you
1:55:19 just rolled up your sleeves and said, “Holy shit, wait a second.”
1:55:24 We can pretty much do whatever we want.
1:55:26 We can fly all over the world.
1:55:27 We can do heart transplants.
1:55:29 We can watch Netflix and the Amazon if we wanted to.
1:55:32 We could do all this amazing stuff.
1:55:34 We can capture on video or adventures and go back and watch them again and again and
1:55:38 again, there’s so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to do and we’re
1:55:44 the richest in history.
1:55:45 I mean, we can do everything.
1:55:47 We could cross the whole planet in a second and it’s like, “That’s an amazing time to
1:55:50 be alive.”
1:55:51 And if we just don’t fuck up the ecosystems and kill all the other animals, we got it
1:55:55 made.
1:55:56 Yeah, so it is true that we can destroy ourselves in nuclear weapons, but it also is true that
1:56:02 that snake that I got to handle yesterday is one of the most beautiful things Earth has
1:56:08 ever created.
1:56:10 In that little organism, it’s encapsulated the entire history of Earth and it’s beautiful.
1:56:15 So both things are true.
1:56:18 We should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through the weapons
1:56:22 we create and we should become multi-planetary species as a backup for that purpose, but
1:56:29 also remember that this place is really, really special and probably if not difficult, probably
1:56:36 impossible to recreate elsewhere.
1:56:40 And by the way, there’s something incredibly powerful about a skull.
1:56:44 Yeah.
1:56:45 If you ever hold a human skull, it’ll give you, it’ll weigh on you for a second because
1:56:51 you look into this, the hollow eyes of this face and suddenly you go, you feel your own
1:56:56 teeth.
1:56:57 You feel your own skull and you go, holy shit.
1:57:01 You go, what is going on?
1:57:02 It’s like taking acid.
1:57:03 You just go, oh boy, I forgot that I’m a ghost inhabiting a meat vehicle on a floating rock.
1:57:09 But even a monkey, it’s like looking at an ancestor, you know, not a direct ancestor,
1:57:21 there’s a, it’s like a, you know, like you’re looking at a puddle at a reflection, a little
1:57:27 blurry, but it’s still there, and like the roots of who we are is still there and it’s
1:57:36 all kind of incredible.
1:57:37 Do you ever think of the tree of life just kind of like where we came from?
1:57:41 Yeah.
1:57:42 The jungle is ephemeral, it just keeps, it’s a system that just keeps forgetting because
1:57:48 it’s just churning and churning and churning and churning has, in some ways, no history.
1:57:53 But to create the jungle, to create life on earth, there’s a deep history of lots of
1:57:58 death, sex and death.
1:58:01 A festival of sex and death, life on earth.
1:58:06 That’s what I see in the skull.
1:58:08 Yeah.
1:58:09 There’s something, it’s the something kind of terrifying about that image to me.
1:58:14 Like when I hold that every now and then at night, you hold that skull and you, it just
1:58:18 reminds you that you’re temporary.
1:58:20 Yeah.
1:58:21 Both you and I will one day have one of those, yeah.
1:58:28 Mine will be bigger.
1:58:33 The male competition continues.
1:58:34 The silverback slaps the lesser male once again.
1:58:38 Do you have a lighter?
1:58:40 Yeah, bro.
1:58:41 You want to light this blunt?
1:58:42 Yeah.
1:58:43 What are your favorite animals to interact with?
1:58:49 I mean, my favorite, absolute favorite animal to interact with is 100% elephants, which
1:58:54 there’s no elephants here, but I’ve been incredibly privileged to spend some time with elephants
1:58:58 both in India and in Africa and I think that they’re so smart and so complex that we do
1:59:08 a really bad job of understanding what an elephant really is.
1:59:12 I think that most children probably think of elephants as like something kind of cuddly.
1:59:18 Most adults probably think of, have a similar misconception of them.
1:59:23 When you see an elephant, when you see a 12 foot tall bull elephant with bone coming out
1:59:30 of its face with huge tusks and those giant, it’s an octopus faced butterfly-eared behemoth
1:59:37 that’s a survival machine and it’ll look at you and just go, “Do I have to kill
1:59:42 you to keep safe?”
1:59:45 And it’s just, they’re so tough and they have dirt on their back and they have flower
1:59:49 petals in their little hair, you realize they have hair all over their body and the power
1:59:53 to throw a car over to flip it.
1:59:56 Just one of the most impressive animals on earth and I think that I’ve gotten really
2:00:00 good at interacting with wild elephants in a way that’s respectful to them and I think
2:00:05 that when an elephant allows you to be in its space, it’s because you’re showing submissiveness
2:00:12 and respect for the elephant space and they’re so intelligent that they’re communicating
2:00:18 with seismic vibrations through the earth that they have a matriarchal society that
2:00:23 they can remember the maps of their ancestors and they know how to find water that they
2:00:28 can solve problems.
2:00:29 They’re such beautiful animals and they’re so, talk about aliens, they’re so alien looking.
2:00:35 These big weird heads and the trunks with all those muscles and they’re so different
2:00:40 than us, but yet I actually think that we grew up together.
2:00:46 They raised us sibling species that we’ve inhabited the same epoch in history and we’ve
2:00:54 relied on the ecosystems that they’ve created and I think that they have a deep understanding
2:00:58 of humans, elephants and I think I see them more like aliens, more like non-human beings
2:01:06 that we share the earth with.
2:01:07 I don’t see it as we’re humans and they’re animals.
2:01:10 I actually see elephants as sort of a separate society along with humans as one of the dominant
2:01:15 species on the planet.
2:01:17 Almost every species, especially the intelligent ones, especially the big ones are their own
2:01:21 societies that overlap and sometimes co-develop.
2:01:26 I think whales, I think elephants, I think there’s those higher, no one suggesting that
2:01:32 sardines somehow need human rights or something, but I think the elephants need representation
2:01:37 in governments because they influence their landscape, they engineer their environment,
2:01:44 they have emotions, they have families, they have burial rituals, they’re so like us and
2:01:49 yet we treat them like they’re just oversized cows that we have to be scared of.
2:01:54 They’re not the same as domesticated livestock, they’re one of the treasures of earth.
2:01:59 I mean, look, let’s just say little green men showed up and they said, “What’s earth?”
2:02:03 It’s like, well, there’s mountains, there’s rivers, it’s like, “Well, how do I do this?”
2:02:08 There’s mountains, rivers, there’s elephants, it’s like one of the first things a baby learns
2:02:13 is elephant, even if he’s never seen one, it’s just so iconic on earth.
2:02:19 Like you said, Daron Aronofsky, the elephant walking over the camera.
2:02:25 I haven’t seen it.
2:02:26 You said it’s incredible.
2:02:27 So at the sphere, the postcard from earth, I mean, it’s a celebration of earth in all
2:02:33 forms and one of the critical big creatures in that film is an elephant and steps over
2:02:41 the audience and the whole like, the whole sphere reverberates that power.
2:02:47 I mean, some of it is size, some of it is like, “How did earth create this?”
2:02:54 It is a weird looking creature, but we take it for granted because we’ve accepted that
2:02:59 this earth can’t create this kind of thing, but it is weird, beautifully weird.
2:03:04 Oh, it’s beautifully weird.
2:03:05 I mean, elephants, there’s something really impressive and wise about them.
2:03:11 There’s also beautiful weird that doesn’t come with so much grandeur.
2:03:15 To me, a giraffe is beautifully weird, but they’re just 18 foot tall camel deer things
2:03:22 with giant necks and they’re strange and they’re absolutely serenely beautiful, but
2:03:28 they don’t have that deep intelligence that elephants have.
2:03:33 There’s something that elephants have.
2:03:35 You see in their eyes, how does the intelligence manifest itself?
2:03:39 Well, this is the thing, a lot of people, a lot of the, when I was reading Friends to
2:03:44 Wall’s book, a lot of what he was saying was that people give elephants human problems
2:03:50 to solve in controlled environments and call it a study on elephant intelligence.
2:03:56 Whereas if you’re watching wild elephants and you’re in the wild, you’re going to be
2:04:01 watching them in a way that they’re looking, you’ve pulled up in a safari vehicle or you’ve
2:04:07 pulled over to the side of the road and the elephants are wary of you, so they’re not
2:04:10 acting natural, but as soon as you start watching wild elephants, truly in the wild and comfortable
2:04:16 with your presence, you see how they start caring for their babies or how they can get
2:04:21 annoyed.
2:04:22 I once watched elephants around a water hole and there’s this warthog and I don’t know
2:04:25 why, but this warthog decided he needed to get in and there was this young male elephant
2:04:29 and he kept turning around to this warthog and just being like, “Don’t make me do it.”
2:04:33 Now, this elephant did not need to hurt the warthog and the warthog was just like, “I
2:04:37 need a drink.
2:04:38 I need a drink.
2:04:39 I need a drink.”
2:04:40 Much simpler brain.
2:04:41 The elephant was like, “You could just tell.”
2:04:42 He was like, “Watch this.”
2:04:44 He just went and crushed the warthog like it was a big beetle and crushed his pelvis and
2:04:52 the warthog dragged itself away on its front legs and probably went off to die, but this
2:04:55 young elephant put out his ears and he like paraded around with his tail off and he was
2:05:00 like, “Look what I did, destruction.”
2:05:04 That’s a very relatable type of, he was annoyed with the warthog and so you see them do these
2:05:10 things.
2:05:11 The most magical thing and I’ve spoken about this many times is that I was walking with
2:05:16 a herd of semi-wild elephants that were crossing through a village in India because elephants
2:05:21 have lost a lot of their territory because there’s so much population in India and so
2:05:27 we were crossing through a village which is very delicate because the matriarchs are
2:05:30 leading the babies and there’s villagers who have no idea what an elephant is and they’re
2:05:34 watching the elephants cross and the matriarchs back this girl up against the wall and she
2:05:38 was terrified, standing there with her back against the wall and the elephant just put
2:05:42 her trunk out and touched the girl’s stomach and then the other elephants came and they
2:05:46 all started touching her stomach and the ranger there explained to me, “She’s pregnant.
2:05:53 They know she’s pregnant.
2:05:54 They can smell.
2:05:55 They can tell and they’re curious and all the female elephants came to investigate the
2:06:01 pregnant girl and she had no idea what was going on and so it’s like, “That stuff.
2:06:05 That stuff.”
2:06:06 And it’s cool to hear that with the crushing and the pride of a young elephant that there’s
2:06:13 a complexity of behavior just like with humans.
2:06:16 Yeah, it’s not always pretty.
2:06:19 That’s the thing, man.
2:06:20 Humans are capable of good and evil and sometimes we attach these words.
2:06:28 I love that there’s just, it’s an orchestra of different sounds and that’s that one is
2:06:34 sexy.
2:06:35 It’s a bamboo rat calling out for a mate.
2:06:37 A mate.
2:06:38 All right.
2:06:39 Good luck.
2:06:40 Good luck to you, buddy.
2:06:41 Good hunting.
2:06:42 You know, humans are capable of evil things and beautiful things and I wonder if animals
2:06:50 are the same.
2:06:52 You think there’s just different personalities and different life trajectories for animals
2:06:56 like as they develop in their understanding of social interaction, of survival of maybe
2:07:05 even primitive concepts of right and wrong within the social system, do you think there
2:07:12 is a lot of diversity in personalities and behavior just like different people?
2:07:21 Is there different elephants?
2:07:24 Of course.
2:07:25 And what I really like is, as you said, is there a perception of what’s right and wrong
2:07:29 because elephants have a code of ethics.
2:07:32 And so as the simplest example is that as young males begin to grow, they start developing
2:07:38 these tusks and those tusks are a tool and they use them.
2:07:41 So for Indian elephants, the females don’t have tusks and the males do.
2:07:45 The females kick the males out of the herd.
2:07:48 The females keep all the sisters and the aunts and the cousins together, but the males are
2:07:53 their own thing.
2:07:55 And so here’s the thing.
2:07:56 So what you get is these crews of male elephants and the older males, well, there’s play fighting
2:08:03 that goes on around, two young males can play fight, but the older males, they’ll kick
2:08:08 some ass.
2:08:09 They’ll show them how to behave.
2:08:11 They’ll explain who gets to talk to the females, who gets to interact, who gets to mate, who
2:08:16 gets the best vegetation to eat.
2:08:19 And so there’s an order established and so young male elephants have to be taught how
2:08:23 to act.
2:08:24 Just like a teenage human has to be taught, you can’t just haul off and break another
2:08:30 kid’s nose.
2:08:32 There’s going to be consequence.
2:08:33 Maybe you’ll get suspended or maybe that kid will get his friends and beat the living
2:08:37 shit out of you.
2:08:38 Whatever it is, society regulates your behavior and elephants have a very strict, very predictable
2:08:45 sort of, like the males teach the males how to run things and the females, which really
2:08:50 have the final say, they’re matriarchal.
2:08:53 They’re the ones leading the herd where to go.
2:08:55 The males follow where the wise females tell them where to go.
2:08:59 So that regulation mechanisms from that emerges a kind of moral system under which they operate.
2:09:06 What’s right and wrong?
2:09:08 For an elephant.
2:09:09 Yeah.
2:09:10 For an elephant.
2:09:11 Right and wrong for an elephant is not the same as what’s right and wrong for a grizzly
2:09:12 bear.
2:09:13 Grizzly bear, if you’re a male grizzly bear and you see a female with cubs, you just kill
2:09:17 those cubs and then you can mate with that.
2:09:19 You can mate with her and put your own cubs in there and it’s like that’s a whole different
2:09:22 type of ethics.
2:09:23 Yeah.
2:09:24 The value of a child life is different from species to species.
2:09:29 Some of them hold a sacred, some of them not at all.
2:09:32 And that’s why I think I resonate so much with elephants because they’re, I think that
2:09:36 we’re, we are kind of matriarchal.
2:09:39 At least I grew up matriarchal, like women were the force in my life.
2:09:44 My family and most of my friends’ families, women kind of have the final say.
2:09:48 And I feel like that’s the way it is with elephants.
2:09:52 Like you might be bigger and stronger, but it doesn’t really account for much if you’re
2:09:55 not smarter and more emotionally intelligent and you know how to take care of the group.
2:10:02 Just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions, as we were talking about aliens.
2:10:09 There’s a lot of people trying to understand, trying to study the origin of life.
2:10:13 Oh, I love this.
2:10:15 First of all, what do you think is life versus non-life?
2:10:20 Like when you look at like ants or even like the simplest, simplest of organisms, we saw
2:10:26 a frog in a stream yesterday.
2:10:28 That was like a leaf frog.
2:10:29 It was like as flat as a sheet of paper and it does a lot of weird things and it found
2:10:36 a way to exist in this world.
2:10:39 That’s a single living organisms with a bunch of components to it, but there’s a life form
2:10:46 that exists in this world.
2:10:47 What is the difference between that and a rock?
2:10:50 What is the essence of that life?
2:10:54 This might be an unanswerable question.
2:10:56 There’s probably a chemistry, physics, biology way of answering that.
2:11:00 What to you is that?
2:11:03 I think to me, life is something that grows in response to stimuli.
2:11:07 Like in basic biology 101, I think, and I’m fine with that.
2:11:11 I don’t need it to be more romantic than that, but I think it’s actually comical how do you
2:11:17 get from a rock to an orangutan?
2:11:22 Our answer for that is primordial soup.
2:11:27 Maybe there was just stuff on earth and then the stuff just got up and started walking.
2:11:32 Maybe there just, there was nothing happening and then there was, all of a sudden there
2:11:36 was a cell and the cell had function and then it complexified and then it started reproducing
2:11:41 and found male and female parts and what?
2:11:46 We are so under-equipped to understand how the hell we got here, let alone ants or even
2:11:52 bacteria.
2:11:54 I see this so many in very simple mathematical models, like something called game of life.
2:12:01 Your cell, your automata, you could see from simple rules and simple objects when they
2:12:08 are interacting together as you grow that system, complex objects arise.
2:12:15 Like that emergence of complexity is not understood by science, by mathematics at all and it seems
2:12:21 like from primordial soups, you can get a lot of cool shit and the force of getting from
2:12:29 soup to like two humans on microphones, not understood and it seems to be a thing that
2:12:38 happens on earth.
2:12:40 I tend to think that it’s a thing that happens everywhere in the universe and there’s some
2:12:45 deep force that’s pushing this along in some way.
2:12:51 But there’s something we, I don’t want to sort of simplify it, but there is something
2:12:59 that creates complexity out of simplicity that we don’t quite understand.
2:13:04 And that’s the thing that created the first organism, living organism on earth.
2:13:09 That like leap from no life to life on earth, that’s a weird one.
2:13:14 That’s a weird one.
2:13:15 ‘Cause you can imagine, I think that what the earth is four or 4.5 billion years old
2:13:21 and you can imagine just this rock of a planet with like rain and storms and elements and
2:13:30 iron and granite and like just random stuff, it’s pretty easy to imagine that.
2:13:38 But then I remember that book, we think we all have the same book when we were kids and
2:13:41 like they show this like fish like animal crawling out of the primordial soup.
2:13:46 And it’s like, bro, you just missed the most important part, author of that book, bro.
2:13:55 And I think the first bacteria came in around 3.7 billion years ago, so there’s like at
2:14:01 least like, you know, a bunch of billion years where there’s just nothing or just a planet.
2:14:06 And then we start seeing fossils of the first bacteria.
2:14:09 And the bacteria stuck around for a long time, a billion, 2 billion years, it’s just very,
2:14:14 very long.
2:14:15 Just bacteria.
2:14:16 Just bacteria.
2:14:17 But a lot of them.
2:14:18 A lot of them.
2:14:20 There’s probably a lot of innovation, a lot of murder, a lot of interaction.
2:14:26 And then, I mean, there’s a few big leaps along the history of life on earth.
2:14:31 You know, the predator pre-dynamic, that was a really cool innovation.
2:14:34 It’s almost like innovations, like features on an iPhone, it’s like, it’s nice.
2:14:38 Like predator prey, eukaryotes, so complex, multi-cellular organisms emerging from the
2:14:48 water to land.
2:14:50 That was weird.
2:14:51 That was an interesting innovation.
2:14:55 Whatever led to humans, there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.
2:15:01 I see.
2:15:02 I can’t even get that far.
2:15:03 I can’t get from rock and sand to cells.
2:15:07 Yeah.
2:15:08 That’s a huge, I mean, everything around us that has cells, it’s wild, and I could imagine
2:15:19 being on another planet and how incredibly valuable this thing would be.
2:15:25 It’s impossible to replicate.
2:15:27 I’m looking at it through the candlelight right now, and I can see all of the structures
2:15:30 in this leaf, the incredible structures in this leaf that look exactly like the veins
2:15:35 in my arm, which look exactly like the rivers that are flowing across this landscape, and
2:15:38 it’s like life has this overwhelming pattern that it uses, and it’s so beautiful.
2:15:45 I just think it’s, yeah, when you imagine the days of the lightning and the volcanoes
2:15:51 and the primordial soup, there’s a big gap there, and it’s fascinating to think about,
2:15:58 and it’s fascinating to see how different people’s belief systems lead them to different
2:16:04 answers there.
2:16:05 Not to give any spoilers, but Postcard from Earth, or Darren Aronofsky’s film.
2:16:10 The idea there is there’s probes that are sent out from Earth to all these other planets,
2:16:18 and each probe contains two humans, a man and a woman, and those two humans are in love,
2:16:26 so think of a couple in love.
2:16:28 They’re sent there with all the information, basically a leaf that holds the information
2:16:34 of what it takes to create life on other planets, to recreate on Earth and on other planets,
2:16:41 and the two humans hold all the information for the things that make life on Earth special,
2:16:47 especially in human civilization is love, consciousness, the social connection, so all
2:16:53 that information is sent in the probe, and the Postcard from Earth is those humans waking
2:16:59 up remembering all the information that is Earth, like a celebration of all the things
2:17:07 that make Earth magical throughout its history, all the diversity of organisms, all of that.
2:17:12 You’re loading all that in to create life on that new planet, which is something I think
2:17:16 alien civilizations are doing, they’re sending probes all throughout the galaxy, and they
2:17:20 just haven’t arrived yet, but anyway, that’s another…
2:17:23 That’s so beautiful, and one of the things that I think, I want to see that so much,
2:17:27 and one of the things that I love about Aronofsky’s work is the fountain, and what I find so
2:17:33 beautiful about that is that now here, he’s saying, okay, we’re sending probes out to
2:17:39 other worlds, alien civilizations, and in the fountain, it was sort of what I thought
2:17:43 he did so beautifully was braid together those three stories where in one, I don’t remember
2:17:48 if he’s in a spaceship or if that’s supposed to be like his soul.
2:17:51 The other one, he’s a scientist in comparable times to ours, and then he’s the Spanish explorer,
2:17:56 but either way, there’s the tree of life, and it’s sort of braids together all of the
2:18:02 major religions, and it made me think of that quote that you hear where it says, “Oh, God,
2:18:06 what was it?
2:18:08 Christ wasn’t a Christian, and Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist, and Muhammad wasn’t a Muslim.
2:18:12 They were all just teachers who were teaching love,” and it’s like the fountain sort of
2:18:17 says nature is that driving force, and it’s our job to understand that the game is love,
2:18:24 and that’s what the main character in the fountain needs to learn is that it’s nature
2:18:28 that’s going to carry your soul through this thing, and that there’s so much you don’t
2:18:33 understand in the epiphany at the end.
2:18:36 God, I love that movie.
2:18:37 God, I love that movie.
2:18:38 Among many things, you’re also an artist who’s trying to convert the thing that is nature
2:18:43 into the thing that we humans can understand, the complexity, the beauty of it.
2:18:47 That’s what Darren Anoski tried to do with those couple of films.
2:18:51 That’s something that I hope you do actually in the medium of film, too, that would be
2:18:55 very interesting, and you do that in the medium of books currently.
2:18:58 How much do you think we understand about the history of life on earth?
2:19:03 I think we got it all wrong.
2:19:05 No, I don’t know.
2:19:07 It seems like they change it all the time.
2:19:11 They say that Easter Island, when I was in college, they were big on telling you that
2:19:14 Easter Island, they ruined their environment, and they had environmental collapse, and that’s
2:19:20 why there was nobody on Easter Island.
2:19:22 It was a cautionary tale.
2:19:23 We could ruin our environment, and now it seems like they’ve changed their mind on that.
2:19:28 When humans entered North America, seems to be hugely up to speculation, and the Africa
2:19:34 spreading, that we all spread out of Africa, and then the Pleistocene overkill extinction
2:19:38 theory, and it seems like every few years they update it, and they change it, and they
2:19:43 say, “Oh, the guys, no, no, no, no, no, the guys from 10 years ago, actually my new theory
2:19:47 is the best theory.
2:19:48 Write some books and get me on Letterman.”
2:19:50 It seems like there’s a new prevailing theory that’s really always exciting and edgy about
2:19:56 how we got here, and where we came from, and how we dispersed, and maybe even has some
2:20:00 political implications, like how we should use the Amazon moving forward, like the Amazon
2:20:05 was engineered by people, so fuck it, let’s just cut it down.
2:20:08 Yeah, I tend to believe that we mostly don’t understand anything, but there is an optimism
2:20:14 in continuously figuring out the puzzle of that.
2:20:18 We offline talked about the Graham Hancock Flynn-Dibble debate on Rogan.
2:20:23 I like debates, personally, so Flynn-Dibble represents mainstream archaeology, and I actually
2:20:28 like the whole science, the whole field of archaeology.
2:20:33 You’re trying to figure out history with so little information.
2:20:37 You’re trying to put together this puzzle when you have so little, and you’re desperately
2:20:42 clinging onto little clues, and from those clues, using the simple possible explanation
2:20:47 to understand.
2:20:48 Now, with modern technology, as Flynn was trying to express, that you can use large amounts
2:20:54 of data that’s imperfect, but just the scale, and using that to reconstruct civilizations.
2:21:02 There are different practices from the little details of what kind of things they eat, how
2:21:06 they interact with each other, what kind of art they create, to when they exist, to what
2:21:10 are the time frames, all that kind of stuff.
2:21:12 That starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding, but still, the air bars are large in terms
2:21:19 of what really happened.
2:21:23 That leaves room for things like Graham Hancock talks about like lost civilizations, which
2:21:28 I like also because it gives you have a kind of humility about maybe there’s giant things
2:21:36 we don’t know about, or we got completely wrong.
2:21:39 It’s always good to remember.
2:21:42 It’s confusing to me to imagine, I don’t even know, where did the Egyptians go?
2:21:48 What happened to them?
2:21:49 Yeah.
2:21:50 It seemed like they were doing so good.
2:21:51 They had so much cool shit.
2:21:53 I was reading anthropological stuff in the Amazon about tribes that just through their
2:21:59 societal structures and through their hunting practices that didn’t really develop practices
2:22:08 that worked and kinds of bands of people that went extinct before they could turn into larger
2:22:14 societies.
2:22:15 There’s a lot of people that got it wrong.
2:22:18 For every explorer that leaves Borneo and arrives in South America, there’s probably
2:22:25 hundreds more that just die at sea, get eaten by sharks, avalanche.
2:22:31 It’s so fascinating to me that all of us really, past our grandparents, don’t really
2:22:36 even know where we came from.
2:22:38 Do you know who your great-great-great grandparents are?
2:22:42 No.
2:22:43 There’s methods of trying to figure that out, but really, again, the airbars are so large
2:22:46 that it’s almost like we’re trying to create a narrative that makes sense for us.
2:22:51 I’m 10% Neanderthal, therefore, I can bench press this much, and therefore, my aggressive
2:22:58 tendencies have an explanation when in reality, there’s so much diversity of personalities
2:23:02 that they far overshadow any possible histories we might have.
2:23:10 Your aggressive tendencies don’t have any explanation.
2:23:13 No, you need to– you listen to me right now.
2:23:16 I’m sorry.
2:23:17 Don’t hit me again.
2:23:18 Don’t shut me out again.
2:23:19 Yeah, man.
2:23:21 One of the things you and I talk a lot about is different explorers.
2:23:26 Who do you think is– I’m just throwing a ridiculous question one after the other.
2:23:31 Who do you think is the greatest explorer of all time?
2:23:33 Oh, God.
2:23:34 I love Shackleton, but I hate the cold, so I can’t even read about it.
2:23:38 I hate the cold so much.
2:23:39 I can’t even go there for fun.
2:23:43 I think Percy Fawcett in the Amazon was the goat in terms of just sheer, the last of the
2:23:51 Victorian era, march forward, go deeper, just stop at nothing, and then eventually take
2:23:58 such big risks that you never come back.
2:24:01 It’s hard for me to relate to that kind of exploration, because to me, I’m such a softy.
2:24:07 I wouldn’t want to leave my family behind.
2:24:09 I wouldn’t want to– even if you told me that I could leave Earth and go exploring and I
2:24:13 could go touch the moon, I’d be like, nope, absolutely not.
2:24:16 The highway is dangerous enough.
2:24:18 I would never risk dying in space.
2:24:21 This guy left his home, went out into the jungle out there with horrendous gear compared
2:24:28 to the camping gear we have today.
2:24:30 Go headlamp and just explore it for years on end.
2:24:35 Well, let me actually push back.
2:24:37 You have that explore– there is definitely a thing in you, just me having observed you
2:24:42 behave in the jungle and in the world.
2:24:45 You’re pulled towards exploration, towards adventure, towards the possibility of discovering
2:24:51 something beautiful, including a small little creature or a whole new part of the rainforest,
2:24:56 a part of the world that is like, holy shit, this is beautiful.
2:24:59 I think that’s the same kind of imperative.
2:25:01 So maybe not going out to the stars, but I could see you doing exactly the same thing.
2:25:05 So he disappeared in 1925 during an expedition to find an ancient lost city, which he and
2:25:13 other people believed existed in the Amazon rainforest.
2:25:16 So there’s that pull.
2:25:17 Like, I’m going to go into there with shitty equipment with the possibility of finding
2:25:23 something.
2:25:24 Like I said, he ran into uncontacted tribes and started goofing off.
2:25:29 I think he started dancing and singing.
2:25:32 The tribes were ready to kill him and he started goofing and doing a song and a dance and just
2:25:37 being ridiculous.
2:25:38 And the tribes were like, what now?
2:25:40 And they’re like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, don’t shoot him yet.
2:25:43 That’s a funny one.
2:25:44 Yeah.
2:25:45 And they actually, he kind of like on a human level used humor to save his own life on multiple
2:25:50 occasions to the point where he deescalated the situation was like, look, we’re not here
2:25:54 to fight.
2:25:55 We’re here to, we have a pile of maps, you know, all my guys have Barry, Barry, Dengue,
2:26:00 Malaria, like we’re dying out here.
2:26:01 If you guys just go on your merry way, we’ll go on our merry way and like, incredible.
2:26:06 He was so tough.
2:26:07 And then that guy from Shackleton’s expedition ended up on one of Fawcett’s expeditions
2:26:11 and you go, oh yeah, he’s a proven explorer.
2:26:14 He’s been through the Antarctic and the guy was like, fuck the jungle.
2:26:18 Absolutely fucked the jungle.
2:26:19 He was like, and there’s a great quote where he says, without a machete and something, you
2:26:23 know, I don’t remember exactly the words he used, but he said, without a machete in this
2:26:27 environment, you don’t last.
2:26:30 And you know that now.
2:26:31 Like you, you, in that tangle to just take three steps that way would, I would immediately
2:26:36 be taking on, I mean, I’m not wearing shoes right now, bullet ants, venomous snakes, spikes
2:26:41 through my feet, tripping over myself.
2:26:43 I don’t have a headlamp.
2:26:45 Unbelievable risk right there.
2:26:48 We’re sitting on the edge of tragedy.
2:26:51 Can you explain what the purpose of the machete in this situation is?
2:26:54 Like, what is a machete?
2:26:55 How does it work?
2:26:56 How does it allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense environment?
2:27:01 So this is the tool that I spend most of my life carrying.
2:27:05 This is in my hand for 90% of my time.
2:27:10 And in the jungle, you really need a machete.
2:27:12 There’s so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through.
2:27:17 And like a jaguar, an ocelot, a lot of these other animals that are more horizontally based
2:27:23 and low to the ground, they can make it like when we got stuck in those bamboo patches and
2:27:26 we were just hacking through them and it’s dangerous.
2:27:29 And there’s, as you hit the bamboo, it ricochets and there’s spikes and then one piece falls
2:27:34 and it pulls a, a train, a vine that has spikes on it and that hits you in the neck and it
2:27:38 just, the jungle is savage to humans.
2:27:41 But if you are an agouti, a little rodent or a jaguar or a deer, you can kind of slip
2:27:47 through this stuff.
2:27:48 And the deer have developed really small antlers.
2:27:50 They can just kind of weep through, low to the ground.
2:27:53 And so, and so for us being these vertical beings walking through the jungle, it really
2:27:59 helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonally opposing your movement at all times.
2:28:03 So a machete is just a very, very useful tool.
2:28:05 It could help you pull thorns out of your body.
2:28:08 As you saw last night, we can use it to find food.
2:28:12 You want machete fishing.
2:28:14 You cut a fish head off with a machete by like, it was swimming.
2:28:20 And then you basically, you know, machete the water.
2:28:27 And the other fascinating thing about that fish without its head, it kept moving.
2:28:31 So it was just using, I guess it’s nervous system to swim beautifully.
2:28:35 I mean, there’s so many questions there about how nature works.
2:28:39 Well, let’s explain it.
2:28:40 Because the way the machete hit this fish, it kind of took his eyes off and his lower
2:28:46 jaw was still there.
2:28:47 So it was really just like the brain and the top jaw that came off.
2:28:51 And this fish, as the dust cleared in the stream, this fish was, I found it very haunting
2:28:56 in a very like interstellar way.
2:28:58 Like it was just the programming was still there, but the brain was gone and the fish
2:29:01 was just still moving and it was going to die, but it was still swimming and it looked
2:29:05 like a, like a live fish.
2:29:07 It was.
2:29:08 And you’re still trying to catch it, which is interesting to watch.
2:29:10 And I still had to work to catch it because every time I caught it, it would freak out
2:29:13 and then it would jump back in the water.
2:29:14 And I’m programmed here from years and years of living in the Amazon that everything can
2:29:18 hurt you.
2:29:19 So you actually become quite, you know, if a moth lands on you, you flick it because
2:29:23 it could be a bullet ant.
2:29:24 And so even the fish here, a lot of the fish here have spikes coming out of them.
2:29:27 And so even though I know that fish, I know its name, I’ve eaten them many times.
2:29:32 As I was holding it when it would twitch with that explosive power just like the came and
2:29:36 I would, I would, I would get that fear response and release it.
2:29:39 And so that happened three or four times before I finally said, this is stupid.
2:29:43 Even though he’s slippery, he hasn’t got ahead.
2:29:45 I can hold onto him.
2:29:46 I put him in my pocket.
2:29:47 Yeah.
2:29:48 And put him in my pocket.
2:29:49 And then we fried him up.
2:29:50 And he was delicious.
2:29:52 So and I’m grateful for his existence and for his role and for my existence on this planet,
2:29:57 this brief existence that I was able to enjoy that delicious, delicious fish.
2:30:02 So the machete is used to cut through this extremely dense jungle.
2:30:05 This is vines, by the way.
2:30:06 This is rope-like things that are extremely strong.
2:30:10 And they go all kinds of directions to go horizontal and all of this.
2:30:13 I don’t even, how tree, we have a tree right above us that makes no sense.
2:30:20 There’s like a tree that kind of failed and then a new tree was created on top of it.
2:30:26 That makes, it just makes no sense.
2:30:28 It feels like sometimes trees come from the sky, sometimes they come from the ground.
2:30:34 I don’t really quite understand how that works because there’s new trees that grow on old
2:30:41 trees and the old trees right away and then new trees come up.
2:30:44 Yeah.
2:30:45 That whole mechanism.
2:30:46 Strangler figs.
2:30:47 And so strangler figs, as you go across the world’s ecosystems, that whole belt of, you
2:30:50 know, whether you’re in rainforests in the Amazon, the Congo, Indonesia, all across the
2:30:56 tropics, you have strangler figs and the amazing thing that this, that this species does, it’s
2:31:01 become a keystone species across the planet with a hyper-influence on its ecosystem wherever
2:31:07 it is because they produce fruit in the dry season when the rest of the forest is making
2:31:12 it hard for animals to find fruit, to find food.
2:31:15 And so the bats, the birds, the monkeys, they all go to the strangler fig, they eat the
2:31:19 fruit and the fruit, of course, is just tricking the animals, the plants are tricking the animals
2:31:23 into carrying their seeds to another tree.
2:31:26 And so they’re getting free transportation.
2:31:29 Monkey takes a poop on another tree after eating strangler figs, and then that strangler
2:31:32 fig sends out its vines, gets to the ground, and then as soon as it begins sucking up nutrients,
2:31:39 outcompetes that tree for light, grows hyper-drive around the trunk of that tree, and then eventually
2:31:48 that tree will die and the strangler fig will win because it got a, it got a boost up to
2:31:52 the top.
2:31:53 Whereas these little trees down here, they’re going to have to wait their turn.
2:31:55 They have to wait until a tree falls, until there’s a light gap, and then they have enough
2:31:58 food to grow quick.
2:32:01 And so this whole thing is an energy economy.
2:32:03 Everything is just trying to get sunlight.
2:32:04 And so strangler figs, yeah, top-down trees growing, parasitic top-down octopus trees growing
2:32:11 over other giant trees, and you’ve seen the size of some of the trees here.
2:32:15 So you know, back to Percy Fawcett in exploration, what do you think it was like for him back
2:32:20 then?
2:32:21 A hundred years ago, huh, damn, going to the jungle.
2:32:24 Well, see, the thing is, those guys didn’t go with the locals.
2:32:28 They came down here with mules, and they tried to do it their way.
2:32:32 And so he’s one of the people that wrote about the green hell, the jungle as the oppressive
2:32:40 war zone, where there’s nothing to eat and everything is killing you, and it’s, I think
2:32:47 that that image is so wrong, because as you saw last night, we could go, if we went out
2:32:52 with JJ right now, we would machete fish some fish, we could start a little fire, we do
2:32:59 it all in shorts, like to JJ, it’s green paradise.
2:33:03 And it’s intense, but if you know what you’re doing, which the local people surely do, well,
2:33:08 then just beneath the sand, there’s turtle eggs that you can eat, and inside the nuts
2:33:13 on the ground, there’s grubs that you can eat.
2:33:15 And if you really needed to, you could just jump on a caiman and eat that, because their
2:33:19 tails are pretty full of meat.
2:33:21 And it’s like, there’s actually unending amounts of food here.
2:33:27 And so they were pretty, you know, they were strange.
2:33:29 If you’re able to tune into that frequency, I feel like you and JJ are able to tune to
2:33:39 the frequency of the jungle that is a provider, not a destroyer of human life.
2:33:44 Right?
2:33:45 And I think to be collaborated with not fought against.
2:33:51 Yes.
2:33:52 But we’re coming at that with our modern lens, because we’re coming down here with, I’ve
2:33:56 survived how many infections in the jungle where those probably would have killed me
2:33:59 before.
2:34:00 So my dead ass opinion of the jungle would have been overwhelming and collective murder,
2:34:06 as Herzog says.
2:34:09 And so Percy Fawcett was coming down here with this view of it’s trying to kill us at
2:34:12 all times.
2:34:13 And we are flying down here and coming out here with our superior medicines and our ability
2:34:18 to survive infections.
2:34:20 And so it is different for us.
2:34:22 It is different.
2:34:23 We’re coming at this very, very different.
2:34:25 But Fawcett, to me, was like the last of like the real swashbucklers, like the really batshit
2:34:32 crazy explorers that just went out into the dark spaces on the map.
2:34:38 And it’s very hard for me to identify with him, but with, for instance, Richard Evans
2:34:43 Schultes from Harvard, that’s someone where you go, okay, now we’re getting to the point
2:34:50 where I can start to understand.
2:34:52 To me, just like the conquistadors, and they tell you the conquistadors showed up, you
2:34:55 know, they killed, the Spanish killed 2000 Inca on the first day, and then they marched
2:35:01 to this city.
2:35:02 And they’re like, when I hear about that, can you imagine yourself just like slaughtering
2:35:06 a bunch of women and children and soldiers, and then just like drinking some wine and doing
2:35:10 it again tomorrow?
2:35:11 I just actually wrapped my head around that.
2:35:13 Yeah, it just seems like an entire different world.
2:35:17 No.
2:35:18 Like different worlds.
2:35:19 Different value system.
2:35:20 Different value system.
2:35:21 A different relationship with violence and life and death, I think.
2:35:25 We value life more.
2:35:26 We value, we resist violence more.
2:35:30 Yeah.
2:35:31 Like, I just, I can’t, like if we saw a car accident, I feel like if I saw a car accident,
2:35:35 like, you know, or if you see a little bit of war, some violence, like it affects you.
2:35:40 These people were so comfortable with those things.
2:35:43 It was so normal part of their, the Spartans, the Comanches, like they became so comfortable
2:35:50 with war to the point that it became what they did as a culture.
2:35:55 And they celebrated it too.
2:35:56 They celebrated it.
2:35:57 And direct violence too, like taking that machete and murdering me.
2:36:01 Or if I got to the machete first, me murdering you.
2:36:04 Not a chance, bitch.
2:36:06 And then I would put it on Instagram and show off.
2:36:11 And the number of DMs I would get from murdering you with a machete.
2:36:14 Meanwhile, half the world right now is messaging me saying, “My DMs are filled with take care
2:36:19 of Lex.
2:36:20 Don’t lose Lex.
2:36:21 Make sure Lex comes back safe.
2:36:22 Lex is a national treasure.
2:36:23 We love Lex.
2:36:24 Make sure he holds a snake.”
2:36:26 The amount of love that is out there.
2:36:28 Meanwhile, I emerged from the jungle of blood around me with a machete and I take over your
2:36:32 Instagram account.
2:36:33 He’s very humble.
2:36:34 Very humble about the love.
2:36:38 So what do you think makes a great explorer?
2:36:40 Whether it’s Percy Fawcett, Richard Evans-Schultes.
2:36:43 By the way, say who Richard Evans-Schultes is.
2:36:46 He’s a biologist.
2:36:47 So that’s another lens to wish to be an explorer is to study the biology, the immense diversity
2:36:56 of biological life all around us.
2:36:58 Richard Evans-Schultes, I know about him from reading Wade Davis’ book One River, which
2:37:02 is this big, hefty, five or 600 page tome about the Amazon and it covers two stories.
2:37:09 It’s Richard Evans-Schultes and I think it’s in the 40s.
2:37:12 I think it’s like pre-World War II era where he’s in the Amazon looking for the blue orchid
2:37:18 and the cure for this and that and he’s pressing plants and he’s going to these indigenous
2:37:22 communities where they still live completely with the forest and they drink ayahuasca and
2:37:27 they talk to the gods and he learns about how they believed that the anaconda came down
2:37:32 from the Milky Way and swam across the land and created the rivers and sort of he came
2:37:37 down and even though he was a western scientist from Harvard, he embraced the indigenous perspective
2:37:45 on the world, on creation, on spirituality and he sort of resigned himself and gave himself
2:37:53 fully to that and spent years and years traveling around parts of the Amazon that had hardly
2:37:57 been explored and certainly never been explored in the way he was doing it, in the ethnobotanical
2:38:04 spiritual way of what medicinal compounds are contained in these plants and how do the
2:38:10 local indigenous people use and understand them?
2:38:13 For example, if 80,000 species of plants in the Amazon rainforest and 400 billion trees
2:38:20 in the Amazon rainforest, the statistics of likelihood that through trial and error that
2:38:27 humans could discover ayahuasca, it’s astronomical that one of these trees and a root when put
2:38:35 together allow you to go access the spirit realm and see hallucinogenic shapes and talk
2:38:42 to the gods, that’s almost enough to inspire spiritual thought itself.
2:38:49 The fact that trial and error, it would take like millions of years or something.
2:38:53 I forget what the figure is, it’s incredible, but Richard Evan Schultes was one of the first
2:38:56 people that came down and saw that and then one river is where Wade Davis comes back,
2:39:01 I believe in the 70s and the heartbreak of the book is that all of these incredibly wild
2:39:08 places with naked native tribes and these intact belief systems, Wade Davis comes back
2:39:16 in a lot of the same places that Schultes went.
2:39:19 Now there’s missionary schools and they’re wearing discarded Nikes and whatever.
2:39:26 I don’t know if there’s Nikes in the 70s, but Western stuff has made it in.
2:39:31 They’ve been contacted, domesticated, forced into Western society and a lot of them then
2:39:39 forget the thousands and thousands of years that have gone into creating the medicinal
2:39:45 botanical knowledge that the indigenous possess about how to cure ear infections and how to
2:39:51 treat illnesses from the medicinal compounds flowing through these trees is lost in a single
2:39:56 generation with the modernization.
2:40:00 Yeah, he wrote the plants of the gods, their sacred healing and the hallucinogenic powers.
2:40:07 That is interesting.
2:40:08 You mentioned how to discover that.
2:40:10 How do you find those incredible plants, those incredible things that can warp your mind
2:40:17 in all kinds of ways, of course, physically heal, but also take you on a mental journey.
2:40:24 That’s interesting.
2:40:25 You don’t think trial and error is possible.
2:40:27 I was reading about ayahuasca and they were saying statistically, if you put 1,000 humans
2:40:35 in the Amazon and gave them villages to live in because humans are communal species, it
2:40:41 would take tens and tens of thousands of years or perhaps even centuries before even the
2:40:46 possibility, it’s like that thing, a bunch of chips on a keyboard, they write Hamlet.
2:40:50 It’s like astronomical odds to get to, oh, wait, this and this dosed together.
2:40:58 What the local people believe is that the gods revealed this secret through the jungle
2:41:04 to us as a link to the spirit world and that that’s how we know this.
2:41:11 Because if they didn’t remember it from their ancestors, we would have no idea how to get
2:41:15 this information from the wild.
2:41:17 So I will likely do ayahuasca.
2:41:23 What do you think exists in the spirit world that could be found by taking that journey?
2:41:32 I think that ayahuasca is, I can only speak from personal experience.
2:41:39 And for me, it was as if your brain is a house you’ve lived in your entire life and it’s
2:41:46 a big house.
2:41:47 It’s a mansion and there’s many, many rooms that you didn’t even know exist, hidden rooms
2:41:51 behind the bookshelves, under the floorboards, rooms that you had no idea were there.
2:41:57 And some of them are fantastic and some of them are terrifying basements.
2:42:02 And ayahuasca takes you on a journey through that at its most effective.
2:42:09 You sit in front of the shaman with the candlelight, with the sounds of the jungle and you drink
2:42:16 the substance and after that what happens is the journey is all inside and the shaman
2:42:24 is supposed to be able to guide you through that.
2:42:26 But in my experience, you’re so deep inside, like falling through nebulas out in space,
2:42:34 no physical form, or crawling through the jungle.
2:42:37 It’s really, really powerful.
2:42:40 It’s not like the recreational drugs that everyone does, like where you go, “Oh, I did
2:42:45 mushrooms and I could see music.”
2:42:49 And I was talking to my friends, but no, no, no, you’re face down on the floor, usually
2:42:52 vomiting, sometimes shitting, having dialogues with the creator.
2:42:59 And that can be traumatizing as well as amazing.
2:43:03 It’s a really good way of looking at it.
2:43:06 It’s a big house and you get to open doors that you’ve never had before and discover
2:43:10 what rooms are there inside you.
2:43:12 You ever think about that, like that there’s parts of yourself you haven’t discovered yet,
2:43:16 or maybe you’ve been suppressing.
2:43:18 How much are you exploring the shadow?
2:43:21 Oh boy.
2:43:22 So say you, me, Carl Jung and Jordan Peterson are in a deserted island together.
2:43:27 Fuck, I didn’t even make my bed today.
2:43:30 There’s no bed in an island.
2:43:32 Great.
2:43:33 That’s what Kim said.
2:43:36 I want to see you and Jordan Peterson do ayahuasca together.
2:43:41 I think that’s the thing.
2:43:44 Ayahuasca to me, I’ve kind of told you about, like I’ve experienced some things that really
2:43:49 made me believe that there’s a benevolent force around us.
2:43:53 But to me, ayahuasca was like a ride through the scariest parts of the universe to sort
2:44:03 of be like, here’s what it could be like.
2:44:07 That’s where I came up with my idea that deep space or just outer space is just the outside
2:44:12 of the video game.
2:44:13 And this is it because when I was on ayahuasca, I was one of the jungle creatures and I wasn’t
2:44:18 Paul and I didn’t have a name.
2:44:21 And for a long time, I saw many things and I arrived at this spot in the jungle where
2:44:25 there was a big tree and all the animals were there and they were all not in words, not
2:44:29 in any language that we can understand, but they were all discussing what to do about the
2:44:34 threat and it was all leaving, it was all flying up and it was fire and the jungle was
2:44:39 being destroyed and it was like, and then after that it was just space and stars and
2:44:44 silence like crushing vacuum silence for years.
2:44:50 And that was terrifying.
2:44:51 That was fucking terrifying.
2:44:52 When I came back and I had hands, man, I can remember my own name.
2:44:59 You grounded things are simpler.
2:45:02 You’re back inside the video game.
2:45:04 What are the chances you think we’re actually living in a video game?
2:45:08 When you say a video game, it implies that there’s a player.
2:45:10 Who’s the player?
2:45:11 Is God?
2:45:12 No, there’s a main player.
2:45:13 It’s not going to be God.
2:45:14 God is the thing that creates the video game.
2:45:16 Oh, so then we’re just…
2:45:17 And there’s somebody who’s our NPCs, like I’m an NPC and you’re…
2:45:20 You’re an NPC.
2:45:21 Jesus Christ.
2:45:22 Yeah.
2:45:23 You created me.
2:45:24 Is this like Halo where you can kind of kill the NPCs because…
2:45:28 I see how you put the machete behind you.
2:45:31 Okay.
2:45:32 I think I’m just going to take a stand here.
2:45:34 I think that because people…
2:45:35 I’m just sick of fucking playing it halfway.
2:45:37 I think that because people live indoors in climate controlled boxes in cities far away
2:45:43 from nature, they’ve completely lost track of everything that’s real and they’ve started
2:45:46 to think that we’re living inside of a simulation.
2:45:49 Notice that nobody carrying an alpaca up a mountain thinks that we’re living inside
2:45:52 of a video game.
2:45:53 They all know that it’s real because they’ve had babies on the floor of a cold hut.
2:45:57 They understand the consequences of life.
2:45:59 They understand the fish and how hard it is to get them and the basic rules of the wind
2:46:03 and the rain and the river and that we all have to play by those and that it’s…
2:46:08 And you talk to a grieving mother and ask her if she’s living inside a video game and
2:46:13 it’s like, the people, to me, this whole thing of, “Are we living in a simulation?”
2:46:18 To me, that’s the infirmary of society starting to parody itself.
2:46:29 It’s people going, “I have no meaning in my life anymore.
2:46:31 So is this even real?”
2:46:34 And again, go ask the Sherpa, go ask the Eskimo.
2:46:37 They’re not working.
2:46:38 You forget what fundamentally matters in life.
2:46:40 What is the source of meaning in a human life?
2:46:45 If you talk about such subjects, nevertheless, you could for a time stroll in the big philosophical
2:46:51 questions.
2:46:53 And if you do it for short enough of time, you won’t forget about the things that matter,
2:46:58 that there is human suffering, that there is real human joy, that is real, that our time
2:47:07 in the jungle was very hard.
2:47:12 Did you suffer enough to know that it’s real?
2:47:14 Yeah.
2:47:15 Man, I was hoping we were in a video game that whole time.
2:47:18 So that’s actually a really good way to…
2:47:21 There was this moment that I watched where you were washing a shirt in this pathetic puddle
2:47:27 because we had no water and because we had walked all day and tripped all day and gotten
2:47:31 thorns in our hands and our feet and our legs and we were lost in the jungle and it was nighttime
2:47:37 and we didn’t know if a big tree was going to just fall on us and mousetrap kill us and
2:47:42 there’s a lot of uncertainty.
2:47:44 But I watched something very special happen to you and that was, I saw you crouching by
2:47:49 the side of this puddle, it wasn’t even a flowing stream so we couldn’t drink it and
2:47:54 you were just trying to wash the sweat off of your shirt and you looked at me and you
2:48:00 just said, “The only thing that I care about right now is water.”
2:48:05 And I feel like in that moment we were united in the simple reality of the fact that we
2:48:11 were so thirsty that it hurt and that it was a little scary.
2:48:16 Yeah, it was scary.
2:48:20 But also there’s like a joy in the interaction with the water because it cools your body
2:48:31 temperature down and there’s like a faith in that interaction that eventually will find
2:48:37 clean water because water is plentiful on earth.
2:48:41 It’s kind of like a delusional faith that eventually we’ll find and it was just like
2:48:46 a little celebration.
2:48:50 I think the cooling aspect of the water because the body temperature is really high from traversing
2:48:58 the really dense jungle and just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing
2:49:04 else really is.
2:49:06 Yeah, it was a little celebration of life, of life on earth, of earth, of the jungle,
2:49:11 of everything.
2:49:12 It was a nice, it was a nice moment.
2:49:14 I think about that.
2:49:15 I had a couple of those, there’s one in the puddle and one in the river.
2:49:21 One was full of delusion and fear and the other one was full of relief and celebration.
2:49:28 Yeah, there’s this thing that they say where all the pleasure in life is derived from the
2:49:36 transitions.
2:49:37 When you’re cold, warm feels good.
2:49:40 When you’re hot, cold feels good.
2:49:41 When you’re hungry, food feels good.
2:49:44 And when you’re that thirsty, water becomes God and it’s all you want.
2:49:50 And also, the other thing is that when we’re out there, it felt so good to be so lost and
2:49:55 so tired and so, we were doing levels, how would you describe the physicality of what
2:50:02 we were doing, the level of physical exertion?
2:50:05 Well, it’s something that I haven’t trained, I don’t even know how you would train for
2:50:11 that kind of thing, but it’s extremely dense jungle.
2:50:14 So every single step is completely unpredictable in terms of the terrain your foot interacts
2:50:21 with.
2:50:22 So, the different variety of slippery that is on the jungle floor is fascinating because
2:50:28 some things, I mean, the slope matters, but some roots of trees are slippery, some are
2:50:34 not.
2:50:35 Some trees in the ground already rotted through, so if you step through, you’re going to potentially
2:50:40 fall through.
2:50:41 So it could be a shallow hole or it could be a very deep hole with some leaves and vegetation
2:50:48 covering up a hole where if you fall through, you could break a leg and completely lose
2:50:52 your footing or fall rolling down hill.
2:50:55 And if you roll down hill, I’m pretty sure there’s a 99% probability that you’ll hit
2:51:01 a thing with spikes on it.
2:51:04 So there’s so many layers of avoiding dangers, of small dangers and big dangers all around
2:51:10 you with every single step.
2:51:12 So there’s like a mental exhaustion that sets in, like just the perception and you’re just
2:51:17 observing you, you’re extremely good at perceiving, having situational awareness of taking the
2:51:24 information in that’s really important and filtering out the stuff that’s not important.
2:51:28 But even for you that’s exhausting and for me it was completely exhausting, just paying
2:51:32 attention, paying attention to everything around you.
2:51:35 So that exhaustion was surprising because there’s moments when you’re like, “I don’t
2:51:40 give a damn anymore, I’m just going to step, I’m just going to…”
2:51:43 And so that’s it.
2:51:44 You go, “I don’t care anymore” and you reach out and you’re just going to lean against
2:51:47 this tree and then what happened?
2:51:49 Every time.
2:51:50 You get spikes in it.
2:51:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:51:52 And then you have to care.
2:51:53 Yeah.
2:51:54 And then there’s just bad luck because there is wasp nest, there’s just like a million things
2:51:58 and that is physically, it’s mentally, psychologically exhausting because there’s the uncertainty.
2:52:03 When is this going to end?
2:52:06 In our particular situation, up and down hills, up and down hills, very steep downward, very
2:52:10 steep upward, no water, all this kind of stuff.
2:52:14 It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but it’s very difficult to describe what are
2:52:19 the parameters that make it difficult because I run long distances very regularly, I do
2:52:23 extremely difficult physical things regularly that on some surface level could seem much
2:52:29 more challenging than what we did, but no, this was another beast.
2:52:34 This is something else, but it was also raw and real and beautiful because it’s like,
2:52:41 it’s what the explorers did.
2:52:43 It’s what Earth is without humans and also just like the massive scale of the trees around
2:52:50 us was the humbling size difference between human and tree.
2:53:00 It’s both humbling in that like, that tree is really old.
2:53:04 It’s the time difference, lifetime difference and just the scale, it’s like, holy shit.
2:53:13 We live on an earth that can create those things, makes me feel small in every way that
2:53:19 life is short, that my physical presence on this earth is tiny, how vulnerable I am.
2:53:25 All of those feelings are there and in that, the physical endurance of traversing the jungle
2:53:34 was the hardest journey that I remember ever taking.
2:53:42 Every step and then that made making it out of the jungle and then made it the swim in
2:53:54 the water that we could drink.
2:53:57 I was just pure joy, it was probably one of the happiest moments in my life, just sitting
2:54:07 there with you, Paul and with JJ in the water, full darkness, the rain coming down and us
2:54:19 all just laughing, having made it through that, having eaten a bit of food before and
2:54:27 the absurdity of the timing of all of it that somehow worked out and how we’re just three
2:54:38 little humans sitting in a river, just our heads emerged barely above water with jungle
2:54:49 all around us, what a life.
2:54:52 That was a real adventure.
2:54:53 That was a real adventure.
2:54:54 That was a real one.
2:54:55 Yeah.
2:54:56 I’ll never forget that, so it’s a real honor to have shared that.
2:55:02 Of course, we had very different experiences.
2:55:06 When you saw a caiman in that situation, you’re like, “I have to go meet that guy.”
2:55:11 It’s a friend of mine.
2:55:12 Well, I mean, we were in the river in a thunderstorm just next above, we’re all laughing our asses
2:55:17 off and I mean, we’re in the river with the stingrays and the black caiman and the ferrana
2:55:21 and all the electric eels and everything and it’s pitch black out and then what were
2:55:26 we doing?
2:55:27 We were holding our headlamps off and there was those swirling moths, the infinity moths
2:55:30 all making those geometric patterns and it’s like, we’re just three ridiculous primates,
2:55:37 three friends in a river just laughing because we were safer in that river than we had been
2:55:42 in there and we were rejoicing that the thunderstorm was compared to the war zone that we’d been
2:55:50 living in, the thunderstorm was safe and it really was a beautiful moment.
2:55:54 Also that very different life trajectories have taken these three humans into this one
2:55:59 place.
2:56:00 Yeah.
2:56:01 It’s like, what is this universe that would like, because we’re kind of like those moths.
2:56:08 You know what I mean, we would come from some weird place on this earth and we’d have
2:56:13 all kinds of shit happen to us and we’re all pursuing some shit and some light and we ended
2:56:18 up here together enjoying this moment.
2:56:20 Yeah.
2:56:21 That’s something else.
2:56:22 I felt absurd and in that absurdity was this like real human joy and damn water tasted
2:56:28 good.
2:56:29 Yeah.
2:56:30 Water’s good.
2:56:31 Man, water and those little oranges, those things and then I would just say like, do
2:56:36 you feel like, I feel like running like, no matter how much I run, I feel like you run,
2:56:42 you do a workout and then you stop.
2:56:44 Maybe people who do ultras feel this, but like, I felt like the, we woke up, it was
2:56:49 like, wake up at dawn, 6 a.m., let’s start walking, break camp, go and it’s like, pretty
2:56:56 much you just don’t stop all day and it’s level 10 cardio all day long and you’re sweating
2:57:02 buckets and there’s no water.
2:57:04 It’s like, you would never put yourself through that voluntarily.
2:57:07 You couldn’t.
2:57:08 You would never have the resolve to continue torturing yourself, except for that we were
2:57:13 trying to make it to freedom, to get out and it’s like the obsession of that with the
2:57:19 compass and the machete and the navigating, fuck.
2:57:22 I think there’s something to be said about like the fact that we didn’t think through
2:57:26 much of that and we just dived into it.
2:57:28 I think there was like, we’re like laughing and enjoying ourselves moments before and
2:57:33 once you go in, you’re like, oh shit and you just come face-to-face with it.
2:57:39 I think that’s what, whatever that is in humans that goes to that, that’s what the explorers
2:57:44 do and the best of them do it to the extreme levels.
2:57:50 Well I think that what we did was to a pretty extreme level because we left the safety of
2:57:55 a river of knowing where we were and voluntarily got lost in the Amazon with very little provisions
2:58:03 on a very, now that we’re back, now that we experienced what we experienced, I really
2:58:08 can’t stop thinking about how fucking stupid it was that we did that because if we had
2:58:12 gotten lost, Pico was saying to me, if one of you had broken your leg, it’s days in
2:58:22 either direction.
2:58:24 Even if they had sent help for us, help would take how long to scour all that jungle?
2:58:30 Sound doesn’t travel.
2:58:32 Even a helicopter, even if they looked for us, they wouldn’t be able to see us.
2:58:35 How would we signal for help?
2:58:37 You can’t really build a fire and so it’s like, if anything had gone wrong, if we’d
2:58:41 gone a few degrees different to the west, it would have taken us two more days.
2:58:46 If we’d gotten injured, it’d be carried through that.
2:58:52 And so it somehow only afterwards am I really going, wow, thank God we got out of this.
2:58:57 Thank God.
2:58:58 After I see so many people going, make sure nothing happens to Lex Friedman, I’d be
2:59:02 the deadest motherfucker on earth.
2:59:06 It somehow works out.
2:59:08 It does seem to somehow work out.
2:59:09 Let me ask you about Jane Goodall, another explorer of a different kind.
2:59:13 What do you think about her?
2:59:16 About her role in understanding this natural world of ours?
2:59:21 I think that Jane is like a living historical treasure.
2:59:26 Like I think somehow she’s alive, but she’s already reached that level where it’s like
2:59:32 Einstein, Jane Goodall.
2:59:33 Like there’s these incredible minds and growing up as a child, my parents would read to me
2:59:40 because I was so dyslexic, I hadn’t learned to read until I was quite old and my mom was
2:59:45 a big Jane Goodall fan and all I wanted to hear about was animals and so I would get
2:59:50 read to about this lady named Jane Goodall, this girl who went to Africa and studied chimps
2:59:54 and who broke all the rules and named her study subjects even though that wasn’t what
2:59:59 she was supposed to do and she became this incredible advocate for earth and for ecosystems
3:00:06 and she seemed to realize as her career went on that teaching children to appreciate nature
3:00:13 was the key because they’re going with that thing where she says we don’t so much inherit
3:00:21 the earth from our ancestors, but borrow it from our children.
3:00:24 We’re just here, we’re just passing through and so if we destroy it, we’re dimming the
3:00:29 lights on the lives of future generations and so she’s been really, really cognizant
3:00:34 of that and she’s been a light in the darkness.
3:00:36 She’s sort of in terms of saying that animals have personalities and culture and their own
3:00:43 inalienable rights and reasons for existing and that human life is valuable.
3:00:48 She’s very big on that every day.
3:00:50 We influence the people around us and the events of the earth.
3:00:54 Even if you feel like your life is small and insignificant, that you do have an impact
3:00:59 and I think that’s a really powerful little candle out there in the darkness that Jane
3:01:03 carries.
3:01:04 What do you think about her field work with the chimps?
3:01:10 Bad ass.
3:01:11 The fact that she did what she did at the age that she did at the time that she did is incredible.
3:01:18 It’s actually incredible.
3:01:19 She has that explorer gene and she also has that relentless, relentlessness is like this
3:01:25 incredible quality.
3:01:27 She travels 300 days a year, educating people, talking around the world, trying to help bolster
3:01:32 conservation now before it’s too late and traveling 300 days a year is not fun.
3:01:39 Traveling at all can be not fun.
3:01:42 I started reading the River of Doubt book, you recommended it to me, Antony Westwell.
3:01:47 That guy is bad ass on many levels, but I didn’t realize how much of a naturalist he
3:01:52 was, how much of a scholar of the natural world he was.
3:01:57 That book details his journey into the Amazon jungle.
3:02:03 What do you find inspiring about Teddy Roosevelt and that whole journey of just saying, “Fuck
3:02:08 it,” of going to the Amazon jungle, of taking on that expedition?
3:02:13 Teddy Roosevelt, you could write volumes on what’s inspiring about him.
3:02:16 I think that he was a weak, asthmatic, little rich kid that wasn’t physically able, that
3:02:22 had no self-confidence and he had pretty severe depression, he had tragedy in his life.
3:02:31 He was very, at least for me, he’s been one of the people, one of the first historical
3:02:37 figures where he wrote about the struggle to overcome those things and to make himself
3:02:46 from being a weak, asthmatic, little teenager, to sort of strengthening himself and building
3:02:51 muscle and becoming this barrel-chested lion of a guy who could be the president, who could
3:02:56 be an explorer and one of the rough riders.
3:03:01 Everything he does is so hyperbolically incredible to come out of war and have the other people
3:03:09 you fought with go, “This guy has no fear.”
3:03:12 He must have just been a psychopath and had no fear.
3:03:15 And then proving it further was that thing where he was going to give a speech to a bunch
3:03:19 of people and he got shot in the chest and went through his spectacle case and through
3:03:25 his speech.
3:03:26 And even though the bullet was lodged in his chest, this man said, “Don’t hurt the
3:03:32 guy that shot me.”
3:03:33 I believe he asked him, “Why’d you do it?”
3:03:36 And then as he’s bleeding and in the rain, said, “No, no, no, I’m not going to the hospital.
3:03:40 I’m going to keep going with the speech.”
3:03:43 What a badass.
3:03:44 That’s incredible.
3:03:45 But going to the jungle on many levels is really difficult for him at that time.
3:03:52 There’s so many things, so many more things even than now that can kill you, all the different
3:03:57 infections, everything.
3:03:58 Yeah.
3:03:59 And the lack of knowledge, just the sheer lack of knowledge.
3:04:01 So that truly is an expedition, a really, really challenging expedition.
3:04:08 So there’s lessons about what it takes to be a great explorer from that, the perseverance,
3:04:14 how important you think is perseverance and exploration, especially through the jungle.
3:04:18 I think it’s all there is.
3:04:19 If you hear about the people, and I think that that is a tremendous metaphor for life
3:04:24 because whether you hear about that plane that crashed in the Andes and the people were
3:04:28 alone and freezing and they had to eat each other and some of them made it out.
3:04:34 Some of them kept the fire burning.
3:04:36 And Teddy Roosevelt voluntarily, after being president, threw himself into the Amazon rainforest
3:04:44 and survived, came so close to dying, but survived.
3:04:49 And so perseverance is all of it.
3:04:51 I think that’s our quality as a human.
3:04:55 So they also mapped, so on the biology side is interesting, but they mapped and documented
3:05:00 a lot of the unknown geography and biodiversity.
3:05:02 What does it take to do that?
3:05:04 So when I see you move about the jungle, you’re always like, you capture an creature, take
3:05:08 a picture right down, so you can find new creatures, find new things about the jungle,
3:05:14 document them, sort of a scientific perspective on the jungle.
3:05:18 But back then, there was even less known, much less known about the jungle.
3:05:23 So what do you think it takes to document, to map that world, that new unexplored wilderness?
3:05:30 I mean, they’re clearly pressing botanical specimens, they’re probably shooting birds.
3:05:36 And Roosevelt knew how to preserve those specimens.
3:05:41 I mean, he really was a naturalist, so he knew exactly, so if he’s seeing these animals,
3:05:45 to them, whereas we’ll take a picture and identify it, they were harvesting specimens,
3:05:49 taking them with them, drying them out.
3:05:53 For them, it was totally different, and it could be the first, there’s, I don’t know,
3:05:57 I forget what JJ said, there’s something like 70 species of ant birds here.
3:06:01 And it’s like, so how likely are you to be the first person to ever see this one species
3:06:06 of bird?
3:06:07 And so for them, you have this bird, and so perfectly preserving that specimen.
3:06:13 And I think a lot of non-scientific people don’t realize that every species from blue
3:06:17 whale to elephant to blue jay to sparrow, whatever it is, whatever species we have on record,
3:06:24 they’re scientific specimens.
3:06:25 And the first people to see them, shot them.
3:06:29 And museums are filled with these catalogs, preserved birds that these explorers brought
3:06:35 back from New Guinea and South America and Africa, and then put into these drawers.
3:06:41 And now we labeled them, and we said, this is red and green macaw, this is scarlet macaw,
3:06:47 this is brown crested ant bird, and they’re just categorized.
3:06:53 That book of birds you have, like encyclopedia of birds, what?
3:06:58 The human achievement in these pages.
3:07:01 So people listening, Paul’s just flipping through a huge number of pages.
3:07:06 These are just, is this in the Amazon or is this in Peru?
3:07:09 This is just here, the birds of Peru.
3:07:12 Dude, pages on pages of toucans and aurasaris and hummingbirds and ant birds and smoky brown
3:07:20 woodpecker and tropical screech owl, which we just heard by the way.
3:07:26 It’s endless.
3:07:27 Who knew there were so many birds?
3:07:28 I had no idea there were so many birds.
3:07:29 Documenting all of that, and a lot, I mean, there’s also, which we got to experience,
3:07:35 and you’re pretty good at also is actually making, understanding and making the sounds
3:07:40 of the different birds.
3:07:41 Yeah.
3:07:42 What’s your favorite birds on to make?
3:07:44 Undulated tinnimoo, because in the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk, they’re usually the
3:07:49 ones that make up what is considered by many to be the anthem of the Amazon.
3:07:56 Can you do a little bird for us?
3:08:02 That’s what a undulated tinnimoo sounds like, and it’s usually like, oh, it is getting to
3:08:06 be afternoon.
3:08:08 It’s almost like hearing church bells on a Sunday.
3:08:10 It’s like, there’s something about it, you go, ah, there he is.
3:08:15 And like you were saying, it’s a reminder, oh, that’s a friend of mine, surrounded by
3:08:20 friends.
3:08:21 I have so many friends here.
3:08:22 What does it take to survive out here?
3:08:25 What are some basic principles of survival in a jungle?
3:08:30 Cleanliness.
3:08:31 I mean, really, but we talked about this, but like, you know, keeping, I have so many holes
3:08:37 in my skin right now, look, I have a mosquito, here we go, I have so many spots that I’ve
3:08:44 scratched off of my skin because a mosquito bites me and then I scratch it, or the other
3:08:48 big one is that I worry that I have a tick, not deliberately, not with my thinking brain,
3:08:56 but my simian brain just wants to find and remove ticks.
3:09:00 And so I scratch and then if my fingernails get too long, I remove my skin and then those
3:09:06 get infected in the jungle.
3:09:07 And so staying hyper clean, using soap, like basic stuff, keeping order to your bags, order
3:09:16 to your gear, things in dry bags, make sure, you know, we explained that we got in the
3:09:22 river during a thunderstorm.
3:09:24 We didn’t explain why we did that because the thunderstorm came when we had eaten dinner,
3:09:28 but we hadn’t set up our tents.
3:09:30 And so we decided to cover our bags with our boats that we had been carrying, our pack
3:09:34 graphs that we’d been carrying in our backpacks.
3:09:37 So all of our gear would stay dry.
3:09:39 So the only thing we could do is either sit in the rain and be cold, or sit in the river
3:09:43 and be warm.
3:09:44 And so keeping our gear dry, momentary discomfort for future, you know, that to me was an incredibly
3:09:53 smart calculation to make is you really just, you got to be smart out here.
3:09:58 You can’t, you know, not running out of a headlamp while you’re out on the trail and
3:10:02 being stuck in that darkness.
3:10:05 It really takes just being a little bit on your toes.
3:10:08 And I find that that, that necessity of being on your toes is a place that I like to live
3:10:13 in.
3:10:14 It’s just the right amount of challenge here.
3:10:15 So keeping the gear organized and all that, but also being willing to sort of improvise.
3:10:20 I’ve seen you improvise very well because there’s so much unknowns, there’s so many,
3:10:24 so much chaos and dynamic aspects that like planning is not going to prevent you from
3:10:30 having to face that in the end of the day.
3:10:32 No, it’s been really funny watching you sort of shed your planning brain, like day, like
3:10:41 day one, it was very much like, so are we going to, and then I could tell, I could see
3:10:46 your, I could see your brow sort of furrow when you, I would go, I don’t know what time
3:10:49 we’re going to get there.
3:10:50 And you’d go, well, we’ll just tell me.
3:10:51 And I’d be like, I don’t know what the jungle is going to let us do.
3:10:54 You know, let’s do, let’s record the podcast tomorrow.
3:10:57 Okay, but we, if it, if it, you know, if it rains, if it gets windy, if a Friahe comes,
3:11:01 if there’s a Jaguar with rabies, like anything could happen, landslides, like anything, literally.
3:11:09 I mean, the thing you mentioned, trees falling, that’s a thing in the jungle.
3:11:14 That’s a major thing in the jungle.
3:11:15 Holy shit.
3:11:16 First of all, a lot of trees fall and they fall quickly and they could just kill you.
3:11:20 They fall quickly, they’re huge.
3:11:22 We’re talking about trees that are like the size of school buses stacked and connected
3:11:29 to other trees with vines so that when they fall, this millennium tree, this thousand-year-old
3:11:35 tree, boom, it shakes the ground, pulls down other trees with it.
3:11:39 So if you’re anywhere near that for a few acres, you’re getting smashed.
3:11:44 That’s the end of you.
3:11:45 And so the jungle at any moment that you’re out there could just decide to delete you.
3:11:49 And then the leaf cutter ants and the army ants and the flies and everything, you’ll
3:11:52 be digested in three days.
3:11:53 You’ll be gone.
3:11:54 Gone.
3:11:55 No bones, nothing.
3:11:56 Who do you think would eat most of you?
3:11:59 I would hope that a king vulture with a colorful face would just get in there, like right
3:12:05 in the arc, just like nature’s metal, just like when they walk in through the elephant’s
3:12:09 ass.
3:12:10 I’d want that on camera trap.
3:12:11 I think that would be a great way to go.
3:12:12 And we’ll slowly look up and just kind of smile.
3:12:14 Yeah.
3:12:15 Just rip out your intestines and just shake it.
3:12:18 Victorious over your dead body.
3:12:20 Well, but also honor a friend.
3:12:22 That’s another one.
3:12:23 Yeah, sure.
3:12:24 But you just, you look so, you know, your white naked ass lay in there in the jungle.
3:12:27 You’d be like face down the shit.
3:12:29 That’s why you always have to look good.
3:12:32 Any moment of tree falling you in a vulture just swoops in and eats your heart.
3:12:35 That’s right.
3:12:38 We talked about it alone, this show a bit.
3:12:40 Yo.
3:12:41 Rockhouse.
3:12:42 Yeah.
3:12:43 Who is, well, what do you think about that guy?
3:12:44 Rockhouse, Roland Welker from season seven.
3:12:46 He built the Rockhouse.
3:12:47 He killed the Muscox with bow and arrow and then finished it with a knife.
3:12:54 And you had the GoPro to mount to, you know, to document it.
3:13:00 That’s a really mind blowing.
3:13:01 I mean, so for people who don’t know that show is you’re supposed to survive as long
3:13:05 as possible.
3:13:06 On season seven of the show, they literally said you can only win it if you survive a
3:13:13 hundred days.
3:13:15 And that’s, there’s a lot of aspects of that show that’s difficult.
3:13:19 One of which is it’s in the cold.
3:13:22 The others, they get just a handful of supplies, no food, nothing, none of that.
3:13:26 So you have to figure all of that out.
3:13:29 And this is probably one of the greatest performers on the show, Roland Welker.
3:13:35 He built a Rockhouse shelter.
3:13:37 So what, I mean, what does survival entail?
3:13:39 Just building a shelter, fire, catching food, so staying warm, getting enough energy to
3:13:47 sort of keep doing the work.
3:13:48 It takes a lot of work.
3:13:49 Like building the Rockhouse, I read that it took 500 calories an hour from him.
3:13:55 So he had to feed himself, right?
3:13:57 Quite a lot.
3:13:58 You’re lifting 200 pound boulders.
3:14:03 And still the guy lost, I read 44 pounds, which is 20% of his body weight.
3:14:09 So that’s survival.
3:14:11 What lessons, what inspiration do you draw from him?
3:14:16 I think he was fun to watch because he had this indomitable spirit.
3:14:22 He was just, he wasn’t there to commune with nature.
3:14:26 He was there to win.
3:14:27 And he was like, to me, that’s the pioneer mentality.
3:14:30 He just, he was just, he goes, I’m a hunting guide.
3:14:33 I’m out here.
3:14:34 I’m going to win that money.
3:14:35 I’m going to survive through the winter.
3:14:36 He wasn’t worried.
3:14:37 I feel like so many people are like, they worry second guessing themselves, am I in
3:14:41 a video game?
3:14:42 I don’t know.
3:14:43 What’s my, you know, just questioning their entire existential identity.
3:14:46 And this guy was like, you know what, there’s a musk ox over there.
3:14:49 I’m going to shoot it.
3:14:50 I’m going to stab it.
3:14:51 And then I’m going to make a pouch out of its ball sack and I’m going to live off that
3:14:55 for the next few months and win a half a million dollars.
3:14:58 And that’s an amazing amount of pragmatic optimism that I just enjoyed.
3:15:01 And every time he would go, we got to get back to Rockhouse and it became, even though
3:15:06 he’s all alone, it was, he had a big smile on his face and what made that season so great
3:15:11 was that it was him and then it was Callie and, and Roland had, you know, the muscle
3:15:18 and could make Rockhouse and then Callie was, was the opposite.
3:15:22 She was this girl who, yeah, she could hunt with her bow and she knew how to fish and,
3:15:27 and she wasn’t using raw power.
3:15:29 But what was so endearing about her was that how much she loved being out there as hard
3:15:33 as it was and as isolation, isolationist as it was.
3:15:38 She was smiling every time, every time the show cut to her.
3:15:42 She was like, Hey, everybody, it’s morning.
3:15:45 Can you believe the frost?
3:15:46 Like you’ve been out there for a hundred days.
3:15:50 Amazing Opto.
3:15:51 I think it was really an amazing show of that, that the game is all here.
3:15:55 The game of life.
3:15:56 The game of alone and the game of life.
3:15:58 Cause it’s the same thing.
3:15:59 Yeah.
3:16:00 She maintained that sort of silliness, the goofiness off through it when the condition
3:16:04 got really tough.
3:16:05 And she had a very different perspective as, you know, Roland didn’t want any of the spirituality.
3:16:11 It’s very pragmatic and from Callie is very spiritual connection to the land.
3:16:17 She said something like she wanted not only to take from the land, but to give back.
3:16:23 I mean, there’s this kind of poetic spiritual connection to the land as such a dire contrast
3:16:29 and Roland and, but she’s still a badass.
3:16:32 I mean, to survive no matter what, no matter the kind of personality you have, you have
3:16:36 to be a badass.
3:16:37 I think she took up a porcupine quill from her shoulder.
3:16:43 That was crazy.
3:16:44 Cause I think it went in somewhere completely different and it migrated to her shoulder.
3:16:50 And the way they understood that is because they have, I said, that’s impossible.
3:16:53 Cause I remember that she’s like pulling up her shirt and she, she’s like, there’s something
3:16:56 and then she like pushes it out.
3:16:58 And I remember like, I was like, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up how.
3:17:03 And it was because the barbs, once it goes in, as you move and flex your body, it moves
3:17:08 on a little bit each time and it gets to migrate.
3:17:10 Like, I didn’t even think of that shit.
3:17:13 Plus, if I remember correctly, I think she caught two porcupines.
3:17:17 The second one was like rotting or something or infected.
3:17:20 It had an affected body, whatever had the spots on it.
3:17:23 Yeah.
3:17:24 She chose not to eat it.
3:17:25 No.
3:17:26 And then she chose not to eat it at first and then she decided to eat it eventually.
3:17:29 Yeah.
3:17:30 I forgot that.
3:17:31 Yeah.
3:17:32 And she, that was, that was an insane sort of really thoughtful, focused, collected decision
3:17:39 waiting a day and then saying, fuck it, I need, I need this fat.
3:17:43 And those, the other thing is like fat is important.
3:17:45 Oh yeah.
3:17:46 It’s like meat is not enough.
3:17:49 You learn about like what are the different food sources there.
3:17:52 Apparently there’s like a rabbit starvation is a thing because we have too much lean meat
3:17:59 and it doesn’t nourish the body.
3:18:00 Fat is the thing that nourishes the body, especially in cold conditions.
3:18:07 So that’s the thing.
3:18:08 Yeah.
3:18:09 She was, she was incredible.
3:18:11 And I thought as, as, as, as brash and sort of fun as Roland was, she represented a much
3:18:20 more beautiful take on, on it.
3:18:22 And it was really heartbreaking when she lost because I mean, and like you said, still a
3:18:26 bad ass.
3:18:27 Yeah.
3:18:28 It’s kind of like Forest Griffin versus Stefan, Stefan Bonner, like it was like, it doesn’t
3:18:31 matter who won.
3:18:32 Yeah.
3:18:33 You guys beat the shit out of each other.
3:18:34 Like.
3:18:35 And she didn’t really lose, right?
3:18:36 No.
3:18:37 So she got, she got evacked because her toe was going frostbite, frostbite a hundred days.
3:18:45 You think you can do a hundred days?
3:18:48 Honestly.
3:18:50 I’ve done, I’m 18 years in the Amazon man.
3:18:54 I just, at this point, it’s, I could, I wouldn’t sign up for another hundred days, you know?
3:19:03 At this point, I don’t, I don’t have that to prove.
3:19:05 I’ve survived in the wild and I wouldn’t want to voluntarily take a hundred days away from
3:19:11 everyone I know.
3:19:12 Yeah.
3:19:13 The loneliness aspect is, is tough.
3:19:16 We’re not meant for that.
3:19:17 I really love the people I have in my life and I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, and you see it
3:19:21 on the show.
3:19:22 A lot of the people.
3:19:23 Yeah.
3:19:24 Big, tough ex-Navy SEALs who are survival experts who know what they’re doing.
3:19:27 They get out there and they go, you know what?
3:19:29 I miss my family.
3:19:31 Yeah.
3:19:32 And they go, it’s not worth it.
3:19:33 They have this existential realization and they go, we’re only got, I only got so many
3:19:37 years here.
3:19:38 Like, let’s, let’s, this is crazy.
3:19:40 It’s just some money.
3:19:41 Fuck it.
3:19:42 And they go home.
3:19:43 You know, it’s funny cause you sometimes film yourself in the jungle and you’re alone.
3:19:46 And there’s another guy, Jordan Jonas, Hobo Joro.
3:19:53 He’s the season six winner.
3:19:56 And he said that the camera made him feel less lonely.
3:19:59 I’ve heard of him from multiple channels.
3:20:02 One of the things is he spent all of his twenties in living in Siberia with the, with the tribes
3:20:11 out there.
3:20:12 Herzog, happy people.
3:20:16 And so he actually talked about that it’s one of the loneliest time of his life because
3:20:24 when he went up there, he didn’t speak Russian and he needed to learn the language.
3:20:28 And even though you have people around you, when you don’t speak their language, it feels
3:20:31 really, really lonely.
3:20:32 And he felt less lonely on the show because he had the camera and he felt like he could
3:20:37 talk to the camera.
3:20:39 There is an element when you have in these harsh conditions, if you like record something,
3:20:44 you feel like you’re talking to another human through it, even if it’s just recording.
3:20:49 I sometimes feel that like, maybe cause I imagine a specific person that will watch
3:20:54 it and it feel like I’m talking to that person.
3:20:58 I noticed that when things got especially hard and they did get especially hard when
3:21:04 we were out in the wilderness, that you would begin filming to share that struggle.
3:21:15 But I also think that I’ve used that at times where, yeah, you go, well, maybe if I, cause
3:21:21 if you can tell someone else about it, then you’re on the hero’s journey.
3:21:25 And then it sort of has to make you braver and it changes how you, cause you, I’m, I’m
3:21:30 cold and I’m tired and I’m, I’m hungry and this hurts and that hurts.
3:21:33 And I don’t know when we’re going to make it.
3:21:35 And how is this going to go?
3:21:36 And almost, you know, well, guys, we’re, we’re here and we’re going that way.
3:21:41 And, and, and then you’re like, well, I got to keep going cause you’re like, they’re still
3:21:45 out there.
3:21:46 If you forget.
3:21:47 You have to step out.
3:21:48 That’s one of the reasons I, I want a family.
3:21:49 I think when you have kids, you have to be like, you have to be the best version of yourself,
3:21:54 like for them.
3:21:55 All my friends with kids that I’ve seen them go through where until you have a family,
3:22:00 you’re just, you’re just playing around man.
3:22:03 I mean, you could do important work.
3:22:05 You can, you can have skin in the, in other games, but it’s once you have a little tribe
3:22:10 of humans that depends on you.
3:22:12 Yeah.
3:22:13 If you take that seriously, if you want to do that right, it’s one of the hardest things
3:22:17 you could do and it, it just, it just changes everything.
3:22:24 How has your life changed since we last met?
3:22:27 Speak about changing everything.
3:22:30 Have you been, for people that don’t know, pushing jungle keepers forward into uncharted
3:22:37 territories, saving more and more and more and more rainforests?
3:22:41 There’s a lot, I could ask you about that.
3:22:43 There’s a lot of stories to be told there.
3:22:45 It’s a fight.
3:22:46 It’s a battle.
3:22:47 It’s a battle to protect this, this beautiful area of rainforest of nature.
3:22:55 Since we last met, you’ve made, you’ve continued to make a lot of progress.
3:23:00 So what’s, what’s the story of jungle keepers leading up to the moment we met and after
3:23:06 and everything you’re going doing right now?
3:23:08 18 years ago when I first came to the jungle, I was a kid from New York who always dreamed
3:23:17 since I was six years old, maybe even younger of going to a place where animals were everywhere
3:23:23 and there was big trees and skyscrapers of life and so being dyslexic and not fitting
3:23:28 in in school and reading about Jane Goodall and having Lord of the Rings be one of the
3:23:33 things I grew up on, I just chose to come to the Amazon and the first person I met was
3:23:38 this local indigenous conservationist named Juan Julio Durán who was trying to protect
3:23:45 this remote river, the Las Piedras River, which in history apparently faucet referenced
3:23:51 either the Las Piedras but he called it Tahuamanu and said, “Don’t go there, you’ll surely
3:23:57 die from tribes.”
3:23:59 And so there’s very few references to this river in history.
3:24:02 It stayed very wild because it’s been a place that the law hasn’t made it, that the government
3:24:07 hasn’t really extended to like, you know, we’re sort of past the police limit.
3:24:12 And so JJ was out here ages ago trying to protect this river before it was too late
3:24:16 and when I met him, I was just a barely out of high school kid with a dream of just seeing
3:24:22 the rainforest, let alone seeing a giant anaconda or having any sort of meaningful experience
3:24:29 or contribution to the narrative and somehow over all the years that we began working together
3:24:36 and sparked a friendship and began exploring and going on expeditions and bringing people
3:24:41 to the rainforest and asking them for help and manifesting the hell out of this insane
3:24:47 dream that we had.
3:24:48 I mean, we didn’t even have a boat, we would take logs down the river, we would have to
3:24:53 cut a tree down every time we wanted to return to civilization, we’d have to cut down a balsa
3:24:57 tree and float down the river.
3:24:58 To float down the river on it, yeah.
3:25:00 It was, it’s madness, like it’s madness, it’s pure madness and I don’t know what made us
3:25:05 keep going but along the way people showed up who cared and who wanted to help.
3:25:10 And if it was a movie, it wouldn’t even necessarily be a good movie because you’d go, “Oh, please,
3:25:15 you’re just telling me that you just kept doing the thing and just magically people
3:25:19 showed up?”
3:25:20 But yeah, that’s what happened.
3:25:21 That’s exactly the way it went.
3:25:22 We kept doing the thing that we loved.
3:25:25 We said, “It doesn’t matter if we don’t have funding or a boat or gasoline or friends
3:25:29 or anything, we just kept going.”
3:25:33 And along the way we found someone who could help us start a ranger program and then we
3:25:38 found Daxa Silva who helped us fund the beginning of Jungle Keepers.
3:25:44 And then people like Mosin and Stefan who were there making sure that this thing actually
3:25:49 took flight off the ground.
3:25:50 And then right around the time that we were wondering what was going to happen and if
3:25:54 we’re all going to have to quit and get real jobs and if we could actually save the rainforest
3:25:58 from the destruction that was coming, Lex Friedman sends me a DM and honestly changed
3:26:06 the entire narrative.
3:26:08 Because up until then we had been playing in the minor leagues, pretending, trying real,
3:26:14 real hard and the listeners of your show in the moments after you published your episode
3:26:23 with our conversation began showing up in droves and supporting Jungle Keepers, putting
3:26:29 in five, 10, 100, a thousand.
3:26:31 We started getting these donations and the incredible team that I work with, we all went
3:26:36 into hyperdrive, everybody, everybody started going nuts.
3:26:39 We all started spending 16-hour days working to try and deal with the tidal wave that Lex
3:26:45 sent towards us.
3:26:47 Just because so many people knew that we were doing this, that was an indigenous led fight
3:26:51 to protect this incredibly ancient virgin rainforest before it was cut and people resonated
3:26:58 with that.
3:26:59 And so we got this huge swell of support.
3:27:03 And this year we’ve protected thousands and thousands of more acres of rainforest because
3:27:07 of that swell of support.
3:27:09 So current 50,000 acres, what’s the goal, what’s the approach to saving this rainforest?
3:27:15 Since we printed this, it’s gone up to 66,000 acres and as you know in each of those little
3:27:25 acres are millions and millions of animal heartbeats and societies of animals.
3:27:29 And the goal here is that we’re between Manu National Park, Alto Pudos National Park, the
3:27:37 Tambopada Reserve, we’re in a region that’s known as the Biodiversity Capital of Peru,
3:27:42 one of the most biodiverse parts of the Western Amazon.
3:27:46 And we’re fighting along the edge of the Trans-Amazon Highway.
3:27:51 And so it’s just a small group of local people and some international experts who have come
3:27:56 together and used these incredibly out of sight of the box strategies to sort of crowdfund
3:28:02 conservation to go, “Look, we know that this incredible life is here.
3:28:06 We have the scientific evidence.
3:28:08 We have the national park system.
3:28:10 If we can protect this before they cut it down, we could do something of global significance,
3:28:16 all these jaguars, all these monkeys, all these undescribed medicines, the uncontacted
3:28:20 tribes that we share this forest with could all be protected.
3:28:25 And people have stepped up and begun to make that happen.
3:28:27 And it’s people from all over the world, and it’s incredible.
3:28:31 But what’s the approach?
3:28:33 So trying to, with donations, to buy out more and more of the land and then protect it.
3:28:40 So the approach is that currently the government favors extractors.
3:28:43 So if you’re a gold miner or an illegal logger, or you just want to cut down and burn a bunch
3:28:50 of rainforests and set up a cacao farm, the government’s fine with that.
3:28:55 It doesn’t matter.
3:28:56 You’re not really breaking the law if you destroy nature.
3:28:58 So as long as you’re producing something from the land, they don’t see it as a loss that
3:29:03 the nature was destroyed permanently.
3:29:05 Yeah, it’s just wilderness.
3:29:06 It’s sort of just beyond the scope of it.
3:29:08 It’s not, it doesn’t, or the local people that technically own the land out here, the local
3:29:13 indigenous people.
3:29:14 For instance, we fought this year to help the community of Puerto Nuevo, who’s been
3:29:18 fighting for 20 years to have government recognized land.
3:29:22 These are indigenous people in the Amazon fighting to protect their own land.
3:29:27 And you know what it was that was holding back?
3:29:29 They didn’t understand how the system of legal documents worked to certify that titled land.
3:29:37 They didn’t really have the funding to go from their very, very remote community into
3:29:41 the offices.
3:29:42 And so Jungle Keepers helped them with that.
3:29:45 And so really all we’re doing is helping local people protect the forest that is their world.
3:29:51 That’s it.
3:29:52 If people donate, how will that help?
3:29:57 If people donate to Jungle Keepers, what you’re doing is you’re helping someone like
3:30:03 JJ, who’s an indigenous naturalist who has the vision, who has seen forest be destroyed.
3:30:09 He’s trying to protect it before it’s too late.
3:30:10 You’re saving mahogany trees, ironwood trees, Cape Poc trees, skyscrapers of life, just
3:30:18 monkeys, birds, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, this entire avatar on earth world
3:30:23 of rainforest that produces a fifth of the oxygen we breathe and the water we drink.
3:30:29 This incredible thing.
3:30:31 As far as I know, it’s the most direct way to protect that.
3:30:34 And so the fact that we have large funders who give us $100,000 to protect this huge
3:30:40 swath of land, and that goes through things like this and through Instagram, it goes directly
3:30:46 to the local conservationists who work with the loggers to protect that land before it’s
3:30:52 cut.
3:30:53 But one of the most impactful things that has happened this year in the wake of our last
3:30:57 conversation was that I got an email from a mother and she said, “I’m a single mom and
3:31:03 I work a few jobs and I can’t afford to give you a ton of money, but me and my kids look
3:31:08 at your Instagram often after dinner and they really want to protect the heartbeats.
3:31:14 They really want to protect the animals and the rainforest.”
3:31:16 And so we give $5 a month to Jungle Keepers and it was, to me, that was so impactful because
3:31:22 I used to be that little kid worried about the animals.
3:31:25 And I saw how a few million raindrops can create a flood.
3:31:29 Yeah.
3:31:30 I ask that people donate to Jungle Keepers.
3:31:35 You guys are legit.
3:31:38 That money is going to go a long way, junglekeepers.org.
3:31:42 If you somehow were able to raise very large, so the raindrops would make a waterfall, a
3:31:50 very large amount of money.
3:31:52 I don’t know what that number is, maybe $10 million, $20 million, $30 million.
3:31:59 What are the different milestones along the way that could really help you on the journey
3:32:06 of saving the rainforest?
3:32:10 If we did, let’s just say some company organization or if enough people donated it, let’s just
3:32:15 say we got that $30 million, that money would go directly into stopping logging roads, into
3:32:22 creating a corridor, a biological corridor that connects the uncontacted indigenous
3:32:28 reserves with other tribal lands, with Manu National Park, with the Tambopada, which establishes
3:32:33 essentially the largest protected area in the Amazon rainforest.
3:32:38 And what makes this groundbreaking is that we’re not doing this in the traditional way,
3:32:41 we’re doing this, take it to the people.
3:32:44 And that’s what’s been so exciting is that when JJ started this 30 years ago, he had
3:32:49 no idea.
3:32:50 His father wanted him to be a logger.
3:32:52 He didn’t have shoes until he was 13 years old.
3:32:54 He grew up bathing in the river.
3:32:57 He had no idea that a bunch of crazy, foreigner scientists were going to show up and some
3:33:04 guy in a James Bond suit was going to come down here with microphones and that all of
3:33:09 a sudden the world would know that he was on this quest to protect this incredible ecosystem
3:33:13 and all those little aliens.
3:33:14 Well, that’s all the important thing to remember, that the people that are cutting down the
3:33:18 forest, the loggers are also human beings, they’re families, they’re basically trying
3:33:23 to survive and they’re desperate and they’re doing the thing that will bring them money.
3:33:28 So they’re just human beings.
3:33:29 At the core of it, if they have other options, they will probably choose to give their life
3:33:38 to saving the community to first and foremost, providing for their family.
3:33:46 And after that, saving the community, helping the community flourish.
3:33:51 And I think probably a lot of them love the rainforest, they grew up in the rainforest.
3:33:56 Yeah.
3:33:57 I mean, look at Pico.
3:33:58 Yeah.
3:33:59 Pico used to be a logger, full-time logger, long-time logger.
3:34:02 Now he loves conservation.
3:34:03 He goes, “Yo soy muy conservacionista,” he’s like, “Yeah,” you know.
3:34:09 It’s all about just providing people options.
3:34:12 There’s some dark stuff on the gold mine stuff you’ve talked about.
3:34:17 He showed me parts of the rainforest where the gold mine czar and they’re just kind
3:34:22 of erasing the rainforest.
3:34:25 So at the edges, this one, the mining happens.
3:34:27 And it’s this ugly process of they’re just destroying the jungle just for the surface
3:34:36 layer of the sand or whatever that they processed is to collect just little bits of gold.
3:34:44 And there’s also very dark things that happen along the way as the communities around the
3:34:50 gold mines are created.
3:34:52 So the entirety of the moral system that emerges from that has things like prostitution where
3:34:57 one third of the women that are drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution are miners
3:35:06 under, you know, under 17 years old, 13 to 17 year old.
3:35:11 There’s just a lot of really, really dark stuff.
3:35:14 I think that we have a rare chance to do something against that darkness.
3:35:24 I think that this is an example of local people who have taken action, done good work, been
3:35:32 good to the people that have visited, harnessed a certain amount of international momentum.
3:35:39 And now we’re on the cusp of doing something historic.
3:35:43 And so for the children in the communities along this river, it won’t be being a prostitute
3:35:52 in a gold mine.
3:35:53 It’ll be becoming a trained ranger.
3:35:57 Like last month, our ranger coordinator and one of our, one of our female rangers went
3:36:03 to Africa for a ranger conference.
3:36:05 And it’s like, we’re beginning to, this is someone from a little tiny village with thatched
3:36:09 huts up river.
3:36:10 She went to Africa to talk about being a professional conservation ranger.
3:36:14 And it’s like, that’s, that’s changing lives.
3:36:17 And her, her daughters, then she’s married to Ignacio, the guy.
3:36:22 She like, her, her, their kids are going to grow up seeing their parents walking around
3:36:26 with the emblem on and go, oh, I want to, and then, and then people like Pico and Pedro
3:36:30 and all these guys that work here are going to go, well, we have to, we have to protect
3:36:34 this forest.
3:36:35 And then they start getting fascinated about the snakes.
3:36:37 And then they start caring about the turtle eggs.
3:36:40 And then all of a sudden they have a way of life.
3:36:42 And nobody needs to go be, nobody can, nobody needs to go steal anybody’s kids to be a prostitute
3:36:46 in a gold mine.
3:36:47 That’s horrible.
3:36:48 And so it’s really a, it’s a win-win for the, for the animals, for the river, for the rainforest,
3:36:53 for people who improve its biocentric conservation.
3:36:56 It’s just making everything better.
3:36:57 Yeah.
3:36:58 I’ve read an article that said an estimated 1200 girls between ages of 12 and 17 are forcibly
3:37:07 drafted into child prostitution around the communities in the gold mines.
3:37:12 At least one third of the prostitutes in the camp are underage.
3:37:16 The girls had ended up in the camp after receiving a tip that there were restaurants looking for
3:37:21 waitresses and willing to pay top dollar.
3:37:24 They jumped on a bus together and came down to the rainforest.
3:37:27 What they found was not what they were expecting.
3:37:30 The mining camp restaurants served food for only a few hours a day.
3:37:34 The rest of the time, it was the girls themselves who were on the menu, literally at the end
3:37:39 of the road and without the money to return home, the girls would soon become trapped
3:37:43 in prostitution.
3:37:46 It’s interesting to me that the most devastating destruction of nature, the complete erasure
3:37:55 of the rainforest burned to the ground, sucked through a hose, spit out into a disgusting
3:38:04 mercury puddle like the complete annihilation of life on earth goes hand in hand with the
3:38:09 complete annihilation of a young life.
3:38:13 It’s like it’s all based around the same thing.
3:38:16 It’s the light versus the dark.
3:38:18 It’s the destruction and the chaos versus a move towards order and hope and it is incredibly
3:38:27 dark and this region is heavy with it.
3:38:31 Well, I’m glad you’re fighting for the light.
3:38:37 Is there like a milestone in the near future that you’re working towards like financially
3:38:41 in terms of donations?
3:38:44 There is in the next year and a half, as you saw in your time here, there’s roads working
3:38:52 around the General Hupers concessions.
3:38:55 All the work that the local people are doing to protect this land is trying to be dismantled
3:38:59 by international corporations that are subcontracting logging companies here and really what we
3:39:06 need is $30 million in the next two years to protect the whole thing.
3:39:12 You’ve seen the ancient Mahogany trees.
3:39:15 You’ve seen the families of monkeys.
3:39:16 You’ve seen the Cayman in the river.
3:39:18 All of this is standing in the pathway of destruction.
3:39:22 That road, they’re going to come down that road and men with chainsaws are going to dismantle
3:39:26 a forest that has been growing since the beginning.
3:39:29 This is so magical.
3:39:30 Do you see the snake over there?
3:39:32 Yeah.
3:39:33 Do you?
3:39:34 There’s a snake.
3:39:35 I’m just going to, don’t move.
3:39:36 I don’t want you to move.
3:39:37 I’m going to just, this is one of the most beautiful snakes in the Amazon rainforest.
3:39:41 This is the Blunt-Headed Tree Snake, one of my favorite snakes.
3:39:45 I’ve been hoping that you would get to see this snake.
3:39:49 I have been praying.
3:39:50 Oh boy.
3:39:51 Okay.
3:39:52 Okay.
3:39:53 Let’s just, let’s just, let’s just go right back into this.
3:39:57 Okay.
3:39:58 Look at this little beauty creation.
3:40:01 Let’s keep you away from the fire.
3:40:04 Look at this little Blunt-Headed Tree Snake.
3:40:09 Such an incredible, harmless little snake.
3:40:17 If you put your hand out, it’ll probably just crawl onto your hand.
3:40:19 Just be real careful with the fire.
3:40:21 So look, I’m just going to put them like this.
3:40:23 We’re going to, yeah, let’s just snake safety.
3:40:29 So he’s a tree snake.
3:40:31 Yep.
3:40:32 Nice and slow.
3:40:33 Nice and slow.
3:40:34 Nice and slow.
3:40:35 So you nice and slow just, really so just be the tree.
3:40:37 Be the tree that he climbs on.
3:40:40 And this is like, again, this is a snake that’s so thin and so small.
3:40:45 There you go.
3:40:47 There you go.
3:40:48 Nice and slow.
3:40:49 Just, just be the tree.
3:40:50 Let him crawl around.
3:40:51 So he’s going to try and do all this stuff.
3:40:56 Let me see if I can just calm him down for a second.
3:40:58 Let me just see.
3:40:59 He’s a very active little snake.
3:41:00 So see like the snake the other night.
3:41:02 Okay.
3:41:03 Just gosh.
3:41:04 Look at this.
3:41:05 So I can see the light through his body.
3:41:07 To me, this is an alien.
3:41:11 This is this strange little life form.
3:41:15 His eyes are two thirds of his head.
3:41:20 I’m not joking.
3:41:21 You look at their skull.
3:41:22 He’s so tiny.
3:41:23 He’s so tiny.
3:41:24 The people listening, there’s a snake in Paul’s hands right now and it’s very, it’s long,
3:41:31 of course, but very skinny, very, very light.
3:41:35 And also for everyone listening, the odds of that as we’re sitting here doing this podcast
3:41:42 that a snake would just be crawling by in the jungle might sound like something that
3:41:47 would happen, but the density of snakes in the Amazon rainforest makes this a very unique
3:41:54 experience.
3:41:55 Can you tell me a little bit about the coloration scheme?
3:41:58 Yeah.
3:41:59 A little bit brown.
3:42:00 Yeah.
3:42:01 I’m going to describe this as we were talking here.
3:42:04 It’s just a sort of banded white and brown snake with this tiny little head about the
3:42:10 size of my pinky nail.
3:42:13 Two thirds of this snake’s head is made up of its gigantic eyes.
3:42:19 It’s got a small mouth and it’s about a third as thick as a pencil.
3:42:25 It’s basically a moving shoestring.
3:42:27 It’s incredibly, incredibly thin.
3:42:31 The only thing I am thinking like so is that if we have Dan come and just do some shots
3:42:37 of.
3:42:38 Yeah.
3:42:39 That’s true.
3:42:41 Dan!
3:42:44 So what are we looking at?
3:42:47 The snake that was crawling behind us in the jungle that we were talking about, jungle
3:42:52 keepers and what we could do.
3:42:54 And the snake just showed up at that moment and this is a very active little snake who’s
3:43:00 out for a hunt tonight and wants to find something to eat.
3:43:05 This is a blunt headed tree snake, totally harmless little, literally a moving shoestring.
3:43:12 Super beautiful little animal.
3:43:13 When you talk about aliens to me, this is an alien, like what are you thinking?
3:43:19 What are you doing right now?
3:43:20 What do you think about the fact that we were handled, being handled by these giant humans?
3:43:27 And as you were saying, it reaches up to the leaves.
3:43:29 Yeah.
3:43:30 This snake just naturally knows to go, look, you just put them anywhere near leaves and
3:43:33 he’s like, I got this.
3:43:34 He just wants to go right up into that tree.
3:43:38 I just want you to try holding him and real gentle, just be the tree.
3:43:43 Yeah.
3:43:44 And just kind of do the same thing you learned last night, just nice and gentle.
3:43:48 Yup.
3:43:49 And see, he’s holding onto my finger right now.
3:43:51 He’s just going up.
3:43:52 There you go.
3:43:53 Perfect.
3:43:54 Nice and easy.
3:43:55 He’s a little erratic.
3:43:56 He’s a little goofy.
3:44:03 Maybe he’s camera shy.
3:44:07 Maybe a fan of the podcast and gigantic eyes relative to his body size.
3:44:17 And then for everyone listening, as we’re handling the snake that we found that was
3:44:29 crawling by us, like literally by our shoulders, as we’re talking, a bat flies through, no
3:44:36 joke, eight inches from Lex’s ear, like just zips past his head as he’s holding a snake
3:44:42 while we’re sitting here in the jungle is just, we’re just in it now.
3:44:45 Now, he’s going to try and back up.
3:44:48 And how do you?
3:44:49 Yeah.
3:44:50 Why don’t you, why don’t you?
3:44:51 Let’s encourage him to come back.
3:44:53 He’s weaved this way.
3:44:54 He’s okay.
3:44:55 He’s just trying to back up.
3:44:56 Yeah.
3:44:57 Release.
3:44:58 Release.
3:44:59 Okay.
3:45:00 This is what I’m going to do.
3:45:02 We’re going to say, thank you, Mr. Snake.
3:45:04 Thank you, Mr. Snake.
3:45:05 Thank you, Mr. Snake.
3:45:06 Go back up into the tree.
3:45:09 Here we go.
3:45:10 There you go.
3:45:11 There you go.
3:45:12 There you go.
3:45:13 And then we can resume normal podcasting now because we really are in the jungle right
3:45:19 now.
3:45:20 We really are in the jungle.
3:45:22 That’s one of my favorite snakes.
3:45:23 That’s one of my favorite little aliens on this planet.
3:45:26 Look at that.
3:45:29 And it’s going on some long journey.
3:45:35 It’s going to carry the rest of the night.
3:45:40 So that little snake is one of the millions of life forms, heartbeats, that you’re trying
3:45:47 to protect.
3:45:49 Exactly.
3:45:52 To me, after almost 20 years down here, the people here have become my friends, the caiman
3:46:00 on the river, the monkeys.
3:46:02 When I fall asleep at night, I think about all the different heartbeats, all the different
3:46:06 little creatures here that, when they bulldoze this forest, when they chop down these trees
3:46:12 that they vanish, that we take away their world.
3:46:16 And in that very evolutionary, historical sense of remembering the primordial soup,
3:46:24 it’s like this little creature is surviving out here somehow and we have the chance to
3:46:29 save it.
3:46:30 And even if you don’t care about the little creature on the pale blue dot, each of these
3:46:34 little creatures contributes to this massive orchestral hole that creates climactic stability
3:46:41 on this planet.
3:46:42 And the Amazon is one of the most important parts of that.
3:46:45 And each of these little guys is playing a role in there.
3:46:48 So one of the other fascinating life forms is other humans, but living a very different
3:46:53 kind of life.
3:46:54 So uncontacted tribes, what do you find most fascinating about them?
3:47:00 What I find most fascinating about the uncontacted tribes is that while me and you are sitting
3:47:05 here with microphones in a light, somewhere out there in that darkness, in that direction,
3:47:11 not so far away as the crow flies.
3:47:15 There are people sitting around a fire in the dark, probably with little more than a
3:47:20 few leaves over their heads, who don’t even have the use of stone tools, who only have
3:47:30 metal objects that they’ve stolen from nearby communities.
3:47:38 They’re living such primitive, isolated, nomadic lives in the modern world and they’re still
3:47:43 living naked out in the jungle.
3:47:45 It’s truly incredible, it’s truly remarkable and I think that it’s because they can’t advocate
3:47:53 for themselves, they can’t protect themselves, it’s sort of like, well, we can let them get
3:47:58 shot up by loggers and let their land get bulldozed while they hide, they have no idea
3:48:04 that their world is being destroyed, but they’re sort of the scariest and most fascinating thing
3:48:10 out there right now in the jungle.
3:48:12 Because you’re spoken about them being dangerous, what do you think their relationship with
3:48:17 violence is?
3:48:18 Why is violence part of their approach to the external world?
3:48:24 So from the best I understand it, that at the turn of the century, Industrial Revolution,
3:48:31 we had sudden immense need for rubber, for hoses and gaskets and wires and tires and
3:48:39 the war machine and the only way to get rubber was to come down to the Amazon rainforest
3:48:45 and get the local people who knew the jungle to go out into the jungle and cut rubber trees
3:48:50 and collect the latex.
3:48:52 And Henry Ford tried doing Fordlandia, tried having rubber plantations but leaf blight
3:48:57 killed it and so you had this period of horrendous extraction in the Amazon where the rubber
3:49:03 barons were coming down and just raping and pillaging the tribes and making them go out
3:49:08 to tap these trees and the uncontacted tribes said no.
3:49:13 They had their six foot long longbows, seven foot long arrows with giant bamboo tips and
3:49:19 they moved further back into the forest and they said we will not be conquered.
3:49:25 And since that time, they’ve been out there and it’s confusing because in a way they’re
3:49:30 still running scared a century later and their grandparents would have told them, you know,
3:49:34 the outside world, everyone you see in the outside world is trying to kill you, so kill
3:49:38 them first.
3:49:40 So can you blame them for being violent?
3:49:42 No.
3:49:43 Is this river still wild because loggers were scared to go here for a long time for almost
3:49:49 a century late?
3:49:51 That’s why this forest is still here?
3:49:53 Yes.
3:49:54 And so is it a human rights issue that we protect the last people on earth that have
3:49:59 no government, no affiliation, no language that we can explain, we don’t know what their
3:50:05 medicinal plant knowledge is, we don’t know their creation myths, we know nothing about
3:50:09 them.
3:50:10 And they’re just out there right now with bows and arrows living in the dark, surviving
3:50:14 in the jungle naked without even spoons, forget about the wheel, forget about iPhones, they
3:50:20 got nothing and they’re making it work.
3:50:23 We don’t know their creation myths.
3:50:26 So they have a very primitive existence, but do you think their values, or do you think
3:50:36 their nature is similar to ours and how do their values differ from ours?
3:50:43 This is complicated because the anthropologist in me wants to say that they have a historical
3:50:53 reason for the violent life that they have.
3:50:57 They experienced incredible generational trauma some time ago, and because they’ve been living
3:51:03 isolated in the jungle, that has permeated to become their culture, they’ve become a
3:51:07 culture of violence, but yet the contacted modern indigenous communities that we work
3:51:15 with that are my friends that work here, just the other day, we were speaking to one of
3:51:20 them who was pulling spikes out of your hand while he was explaining that he tried to help
3:51:26 them, the brothers, los hermanos.
3:51:30 He tried to help them, he tried to give them a gift, and what did they do?
3:51:33 They shot them in the head.
3:51:35 Yeah.
3:51:36 He said there are brothers, and he tried to give them bananas, plantains, boat full of
3:51:44 plantains, and they shot at him.
3:51:46 They shot three arrows at him, and one of them actually hit him in the skull and put
3:51:49 him in the hospital, and he got helicopter evacuated from his community.
3:51:55 And so he’s brave for surviving, but he’s a lucky survivor.
3:52:00 They are incredibly accurate with those bamboo-tipped arrows, and those arrows are seven feet long,
3:52:05 so when you get hit by one, they come at a velocity that can rip through you, and the
3:52:11 range on a shotgun is way shorter than the range on a longbow.
3:52:19 You’re talking about a couple hundred meters on a longbow, and they’re deadly accurate.
3:52:25 They can take spider monkeys out of a tree, and so there’s stories of loggers, and I’ve
3:52:31 seen the photos of the bodies of loggers who attacked one of the tribes, and the tribes
3:52:36 hadn’t done anything, but these loggers came around a bend, they started shooting shotguns
3:52:39 at the tribe, and the tribe scattered into the forest, and as the loggers’ boat went
3:52:44 around a bend, they just started flying arrows, took out the boat driver, boats skidded to
3:52:48 the side, and then everybody was standing in the river and you can’t run, and the tribe
3:52:52 just descended on them and just porcupine them full of arrows.
3:52:57 Shotgun versus bow.
3:52:58 There’s a shotgun shell here, by the way, from the loggers.
3:53:03 Yeah, we picked that up yesterday.
3:53:06 Was that yesterday?
3:53:08 I don’t know.
3:53:09 I don’t know.
3:53:10 One of the things that happens here is time loses meaning in some kind of deep way that
3:53:20 it does when you’re in a big city in the United States, for example, and there’s schedules
3:53:24 and meetings and all this kind of stuff, it transforms the meaning, your experience of
3:53:29 time, your interaction with time, the role of time, all of this.
3:53:35 I’ve forgotten time, and I’ve forgotten the existence of the outside world.
3:53:42 And how does that feel?
3:53:47 It feels more honest.
3:53:49 It also puts in perspective, like all the busyness, all the … it kind of takes the
3:53:56 ant out of the ant colony and says, “Hey, you’re just an ant.
3:54:02 This is just an ant colony, and there’s a big world out there.”
3:54:05 Yeah, it’s a chance to be grateful, to celebrate this earth of ours, and the things that make
3:54:14 it worth living on, including the simple things that make the individual life worth living,
3:54:20 which is water and then food, and the rest is just details.
3:54:25 Of course, the friendships and social interaction, that’s a really big one actually.
3:54:31 That one I’m taking for granted because I didn’t get a chance yet to really spend time
3:54:34 alone.
3:54:35 And when I came here, I’ve gotten a chance to hang out with you, and there’s a kind of
3:54:42 camaraderie.
3:54:43 There’s a friendship there, that if that’s broken, that’s a tough one too.
3:54:49 I mean, you spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle.
3:54:53 Did you ever get alone out here?
3:54:55 Yeah.
3:54:56 Yeah.
3:54:57 I mean, the first 15 years we were doing this, there would be times that JJ would be busy
3:55:04 in town with his family, and for sheer love of the rainforest, I would have to come alone
3:55:09 out here.
3:55:10 I mean, we didn’t have running water, I didn’t have running water, I didn’t have lights.
3:55:14 All I had was a couple of candles in the darkness and a tent, and I was 20-something years old
3:55:19 living in the Amazon by myself.
3:55:21 Your boat sunk, and yeah, it’s incredibly lonely.
3:55:26 I had to learn through experience because I thought there was a period, I think when
3:55:30 you’re young, as a young man, I had this thing like I wanted to prove that I could be like
3:55:36 the explorers.
3:55:37 I wanted to prove that I could handle the elements, that I could go out alone, that
3:55:41 I could have these deep, connective moments with the jungle, and it’s like I did that,
3:55:47 and that’s great.
3:55:49 You know what the kid from Into the Wild learned right before he died in that bus, that if
3:55:54 you don’t have somebody to share it with, it doesn’t matter.
3:56:02 I don’t know, some kind of like even just deep human level, like even if you have somebody
3:56:12 to share it with, you ever just get alone out here, just like this sense of like existential
3:56:23 dread of like what, you know, the jungle has a way of not caring about any individual organism,
3:56:30 because it just kind of churns.
3:56:33 It’s like, it makes you realize that life is finite quite intensely.
3:56:45 For me, it’s comforting being out here, because I find the rat race, the national narrative,
3:56:53 the need to make money, to worry about war, to be outraged about the newest thing that
3:56:58 that politician said and what that actor did, and it just, there’s always just this unending
3:57:05 sort of media storm, and everyone’s worried, and everyone’s trying to optimize their sunlight
3:57:11 exposure and find the solution and buy the right new thing.
3:57:16 To me coming out here, first of all, I mean something out here, because I can help someone,
3:57:22 I can help people, I can help these animals, and so I find my meaning out here.
3:57:28 But also, you know there’s the losing the madness over the mountains, it’s nature has
3:57:34 always and for many people been where things make sense.
3:57:38 And to me, I think I’m a simple analog type of person that it makes sense that when it
3:57:43 rains, you get in the river to stay warm, and you wait for the dawn, and you see a little
3:57:50 tree snake, and you say, it just, it makes more sense, and I think that the overwhelming
3:57:57 teeming complexity that is inside the ant mound of society can be dizzying for some people.
3:58:03 And I think that maybe it’s the dyslexia, maybe it’s just that I love nature, but now
3:58:10 if I, when I land in JFK, I feel like a frightened animal.
3:58:17 Like it’s as if you release like a some animal that had never seen it until like into Times
3:58:26 Square, and you can just imagine this dog with its ears back running away from taxis
3:58:30 and just cowering from the noise, and it’s just hustle and bustle, and people are brutal,
3:58:35 and how much you want it for, getting the car, you know, screaming over the intercom,
3:58:39 and just everything, everything, sensory changes, and let’s get home, okay, let’s go,
3:58:44 you got a meeting, you got to get to the next place, you got to give a talk, you got to
3:58:48 say, out here, when we finish up here, what are we going to do?
3:58:51 We’re going to eat some food, maybe go catch a crocodile, go walk around the jungle, and
3:58:56 I like, it’s slower, it makes sense, and there’s that, again, there’s that deep meaning of
3:59:02 that here where we can be the guardians for good, we can be, we can hold that candle up,
3:59:08 and know for sure that we’re protecting the trees from being destroyed, and it’s that
3:59:12 simple thing of just, this is good, there you go.
3:59:18 It’s simple.
3:59:19 In society, I feel like everyone’s always losing their minds and forgetting the most
3:59:22 basic of fundamental truths, and out here, you can’t really argue with them, you know,
3:59:28 when we needed water, it was like, shit, if we don’t get water, we’re fucked, and that’s
3:59:34 to me, that’s where the camaraderie comes from, because no matter what, we’ll be, we
3:59:38 could go to the most fancy ass restaurant, through the biggest, most famous people in
3:59:43 the world, it doesn’t matter.
3:59:45 We still remember what it was like standing around in the jungle going, fuck, we’re scared,
3:59:49 and we don’t have water.
3:59:51 We got reduced to the simplest form of humans, and that’s something, and we survived, and
3:59:56 that’s cool.
3:59:57 And you take all the, all those people in their nice dresses, in their fancy restaurants,
4:00:03 you put them in those conditions, they’re all gonna want the same thing, this water,
4:00:06 and it’s all the same thing.
4:00:09 All the beautiful people.
4:00:11 How has your view of your own mortality evolved over your interaction with the jungle?
4:00:16 How often do you think about your death?
4:00:18 Well, I don’t anymore, because the, I’ve come to believe that there is a benevolent
4:00:26 God, spirit, creator, taking care of us, and I don’t, I don’t think about my own death.
4:00:36 We have a little bit of time here, and we clearly know nothing about what we’re doing
4:00:39 here, and it seems like we just have to do the best we can.
4:00:46 And so I just, it doesn’t scare me, I’ve come close to dying a lot of times, and I just
4:00:54 don’t think, you don’t want to have a bad death, first of all.
4:00:57 You don’t want to, you don’t want to, you don’t want to be a statistic.
4:01:00 You don’t want to find out, you don’t want to like try out a, be the first to try out
4:01:04 a new product, and oops, it crushed you.
4:01:07 You know, that’s a terrible way to go, or the people that used to, you know, in the
4:01:10 gold rush, they were using mercury, and they were all getting, or lead, it was lead poisoning,
4:01:14 and it’s like, oh, you know, a few million people died that way, and it’s like you want
4:01:18 to, you want a good death, you know, you want to staring down the eyes of a tiger, or hanging
4:01:23 off the edge of a cliff, saving somebody’s, something, something worthy, warrior’s death.
4:01:29 But if- Riding a 16 foot black caiman, just- Boots on, screaming, yeah, that’d be fun,
4:01:38 that’d be a good one.
4:01:39 A lot of people say that you carry the spirit of Steve Irwin, in your heart, in the way
4:01:47 you carry yourself in this world, I mean, that guy was full of joy.
4:01:53 If I have a percentage of Steve Irwin, I would be honored, but that guy, I think there’s
4:01:58 only one Steve, I think that he was, he occupied his own strata of just shining light, everything
4:02:06 was positive, enthusiasm, love, and happiness, and save the animals, and do better, and let’s
4:02:12 make it fun, and that was so infectious that it sort of transcended his TV show, it transcended
4:02:21 his conservation work, it transcended business and entrepreneurship, it just threw sheer
4:02:27 magnetism and enthusiasm, he just, I mean, everyone knew who Steve was.
4:02:32 Everyone loved Steve.
4:02:34 We still all love Steve, and so it’s just amazing what one spirit can do.
4:02:40 So if anybody, you know, makes that comparison, I get really uncomfortable, because to me,
4:02:46 Steve Irwin is like, just the goat, and so I’m okay with that.
4:02:52 Well, I at least agree with that comparison.
4:02:56 Having spent time with you, there’s just an eternal flame of joy, and adventure too, just
4:03:04 pulling you, a dark question, but do you think you might meet the same end, giving your life
4:03:11 in some way to something you love?
4:03:15 That is a dark question, but I think most likely I’ll get whacked by loggers.
4:03:20 I think that loggers or gold miners will take me out, I don’t picture myself going from
4:03:24 animals, but that would be heartbreaking too.
4:03:29 Yeah, it would, but yeah, at the same time though, like the Kurt Cobain value of that,
4:03:34 if I died doing what I love to protect the river, I’d be so worth so much more, like
4:03:37 we’d get the 30 million if I died tomorrow for sure.
4:03:40 So we’ve already talked about this with my friends, I’m like, if I get whacked, do the
4:03:44 foundation, make the documentary, protect the river, protect the heartbeats, call it
4:03:48 the heartbeats, jungle keepers the heartbeats, you know, be ready for it, because these things
4:03:54 do happen.
4:03:55 People get pissed if you get in their way, and as many happy people as, whose lives
4:03:59 were changing, there’s also going to be some jealous, shitty, upset people who are mad
4:04:04 that they can’t make prostitutes out of young girls and keep destroying the planet.
4:04:07 And so they might just erase you, me.
4:04:13 Well I hope you, like a Clint Eastwood character, just impossible to kill, I like how you squinted
4:04:21 your eyes.
4:04:27 On cue.
4:04:28 Who do you think will play you in a movie?
4:04:31 God, somebody with the right nose.
4:04:35 Somebody who can live up to this schnozzle.
4:04:37 Yeah, Italian.
4:04:40 It’s funny.
4:04:41 Do you think of yourself as Italian, or human, American?
4:04:45 That’s the thing.
4:04:48 My life has been the United Nations of whatever.
4:04:53 To me, that’s the other thing, you go back to society, and everyone’s obsessed with race.
4:04:58 To me, I’m like, look, leopards have black babies and yellow babies.
4:05:03 One mother.
4:05:04 They’re all leopards.
4:05:06 And I’m so colorblind and raceblind and everything else I’ve lived in India.
4:05:11 My friends are Peruvian.
4:05:13 My family, we got Italian, Filipino, just everything.
4:05:17 And so I’m so immersed in it that when I find it very jarring and disconcerting how much
4:05:24 time we spend talking about different religions, and just the differences in humans, I’m like,
4:05:31 dude, we’re talking about whether or not our ecosystems are going to be able to provide
4:05:35 for us.
4:05:36 We’re talking about nuclear, we’re talking about this pretty serious shit on the table.
4:05:41 And we’re over here arguing over shades of gray.
4:05:44 It’s so trivial, and that drives me crazy.
4:05:47 And as does the outrage, where it’s like, no, you have to care more.
4:05:51 I’ve been criticized for not caring enough about that.
4:05:53 And I’m like, I’m going to, who cares what the hell I am?
4:05:59 Who gives a shit what the hell?
4:06:00 I’m a human.
4:06:01 We’re all human.
4:06:02 It’s not that easy, but it’s kind of fun sometimes.
4:06:06 And we’re at a better time.
4:06:09 When you think about the Middle Ages, even if you were a king, you still didn’t have
4:06:12 that good.
4:06:13 You didn’t have pineapples in the winter.
4:06:14 You didn’t even know what the fuck a pineapple was.
4:06:17 We have pineapples whenever we want them.
4:06:22 We can fly on planes to other countries.
4:06:24 Let’s clarify.
4:06:25 We, you mean a large fraction of the world, I mentioned to you one of the biggest things
4:06:33 I’ve noticed when I immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States is how plentiful
4:06:40 bananas and pineapples were.
4:06:42 The fruit section, the produce section of the, they didn’t have to wait in line at the
4:06:47 grocery store.
4:06:48 You could just eat as many bananas and pineapples and cherries and watermelon as you want.
4:06:53 That’s not everybody has that.
4:06:55 No, that’s true.
4:06:57 Not everybody has that, but, but, but everybody could be that king.
4:07:01 No.
4:07:02 But, but, but a growing number of people today can feast on pineapple, can feast on pineapple
4:07:08 and have toasters and new distracting apps all the way until the grave.
4:07:13 That’s the thing that I also noticed is I don’t think so much about politics when I’m
4:07:18 here or-
4:07:19 We haven’t even talked about it.
4:07:21 Don’t talk about the stupid differences between humans.
4:07:26 No.
4:07:27 Except to just kind of laugh at the absurdity of it on occasion.
4:07:30 We’re too busy trying to survive glaciers and jungles and avalanches and all kinds of
4:07:34 shit.
4:07:35 Do you think nature is brutal, as Warner Herzog showed it, or is it beautiful?
4:07:43 I think the brutality of nature is the chaos.
4:07:48 And I think that we are the only ones in it that are capable of organizing in the direction
4:07:55 of order and light.
4:07:58 So yes, there are going to be hyenas tearing each other apart.
4:08:01 Yes, there’s going to be war-torn nations and poor starving children, but we as humans
4:08:08 have the power to work towards something more organized than that.
4:08:16 So there is a force of the nature that’s always searching for order, for good.
4:08:23 It’s kind of a unifying theory if you think about it.
4:08:25 I mean, all of the chaos of history and the wars and the chaos of nature, we, through
4:08:31 technology and organization, there’s so many people, more people today than ever before,
4:08:36 I think, who are so concerned, who realize that the incredible power like what Jane Goodall
4:08:41 says about how you can affect the people around you, how you can do good in the world, how
4:08:46 you can change the narrative of conservation from one of loss and darkness to one of innovation
4:08:52 and light.
4:08:53 Like, we can do incredible things.
4:08:54 We are the masters as humans.
4:08:58 And I think that we’re on the cusp of sort of understanding the true potential of that.
4:09:03 Like, I just think that more than ever, people have harnessed this ability to do good in
4:09:10 the world and be proud of it and just change the darkness into something else.
4:09:19 When you have lived here and taken in the ways of the Amazon juggle, how have your views
4:09:26 of God, you mentioned, how have your views of God change?
4:09:32 Who is God?
4:09:33 I’ve come to believe that, again, back to that, that Christ wasn’t a Christian, Muhammad
4:09:38 wasn’t a Muslim and Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist, that like the game, the game is love and compassion.
4:09:48 And the universe is chaotic and dangerous, and nature is chaotic and dangerous.
4:09:54 But we, if this is some sort of a biological video game, that our reality, that the test
4:10:01 is can we be good?
4:10:04 And we go through it every day.
4:10:06 Can you be good to your parent?
4:10:07 Can you be good to your partner?
4:10:09 Can you be good to your coworkers?
4:10:10 It’s so difficult.
4:10:12 And we see how people can cheat and steal and hurt and destroy and the incredible impact
4:10:20 that it has on the world, the returning exponential impact that one act of kindness, one act of
4:10:30 good can do.
4:10:32 And so I see nature as God.
4:10:37 I see the religions as different cultural manifestations of the same truth, the same
4:10:46 creative force.
4:10:50 You mean you have the same beliefs and your aliens are my angels.
4:10:55 Well, thank you for being one of the humans trying to do good in this world.
4:11:03 And thank you for bringing me along for some adventure.
4:11:08 And I believe more adventure awaits.
4:11:12 Thank you for being enough of a psychopath to actually just sign on to come into the
4:11:18 Amazon rainforest in a suit.
4:11:22 And a year ago, when you told me that you were going to do this, I truly didn’t believe
4:11:26 you.
4:11:27 So for being a man of your word and for the incredible work you do to connect humans
4:11:30 and to create dialogue and to do good in the world.
4:11:34 And for all the adventures that we’ve had, thank you so much.
4:11:37 Thank you, brother.
4:11:38 Lex, thanks, man.
4:11:40 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosalie.
4:11:42 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
4:11:47 And now, let me leave you with some words from Joseph Campbell.
4:11:51 The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
4:12:00 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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