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

00:00:00.000 | Where are we right now, Paul?

00:00:01.660 | Lex, we are in the middle of nowhere.

00:00:04.720 | It's the Amazon jungle.

00:00:07.160 | There's vegetation, there's insects, there's all kinds of creatures.

00:00:10.400 | A million heartbeats, a million eyes.

00:00:12.860 | So, uh, really, where are we right now?

00:00:15.400 | We are in Peru in a very remote part of the Western Amazon basin.

00:00:21.200 | And because of the proximity of the Andean cloud forest to the

00:00:24.760 | lowland tropical rainforest, we are in the most biodiverse part of planet earth.

00:00:28.980 | There is more life per square acre per square mile out here than

00:00:32.840 | there is anywhere else on earth.

00:00:33.840 | Not just now, but in the entire fossil record.

00:00:35.880 | The following is a conversation with Paul Rosalie, his second time on the podcast.

00:00:45.600 | But this time we did the conversation deep in the Amazon jungle.

00:00:50.520 | I traveled there to hang out with Paul and it turned out to

00:00:54.480 | be an adventure of a lifetime.

00:00:57.600 | I will post a video capturing some aspects of that adventure in a week or so.

00:01:02.560 | It included everything from getting lost in dense unexplored wilderness with no

00:01:08.040 | contact to the outside world to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more.

00:01:15.920 | Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist,

00:01:22.880 | explorer, author, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the rainforest.

00:01:28.760 | For this mission, he founded Jungle Keepers.

00:01:32.880 | You can help him if you go to junglekeepers.org.

00:01:36.560 | This trip for me was life-changing.

00:01:41.040 | It expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world I'm

00:01:46.280 | fortunate to exist in with all of you.

00:01:50.280 | So, I'm glad I went and I'm glad I made it out alive.

00:01:56.240 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:59.280 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:02:02.280 | And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosalie.

00:02:06.320 | I can't believe we're actually here.

00:02:09.040 | I can't believe you actually came.

00:02:10.400 | And I can't believe you forced me to wear a suit.

00:02:12.440 | That was the people's choice.

00:02:14.840 | Trust me.

00:02:15.240 | All right.

00:02:15.600 | We've been through quite a lot over the last few days.

00:02:19.800 | We've been through a bit.

00:02:21.120 | Let me ask you a ridiculous question.

00:02:23.360 | What are all the creatures right now, if they wanted to, could cause us harm?

00:02:29.400 | The thing is, the Amazon rainforest has been described as the greatest natural

00:02:34.000 | battlefield on earth because there's more life here than anywhere else.

00:02:38.280 | Which means that everything here is fighting for survival.

00:02:41.120 | The trees are fighting for sunlight.

00:02:43.280 | The animals are fighting for prey.

00:02:45.000 | Everybody's fighting for survival.

00:02:46.640 | And so everything that you see here, everything around us will be killed,

00:02:49.920 | eaten, digested, recycled at some point.

00:02:52.560 | The jungle is really just a giant churning machine of death.

00:02:56.560 | And life is kind of this moment of stasis where you, you maintain this

00:03:00.880 | collection of cells in a particular DNA sequence, and then, and then it gets

00:03:04.720 | digested again and recycled back and renamed into everything.

00:03:07.880 | And, uh, so, so the things, the things in this forest, while they don't want to

00:03:13.360 | hurt us, there are things that are heavily defended because for instance, a giant

00:03:18.160 | anteater needs claws to fight off a Jaguar.

00:03:20.280 | A stingray needs a stinger on its tail, which is basically a serrated knife with

00:03:25.440 | venom on it to deter anything that would hunt that stingray.

00:03:28.480 | Even the catfish have pectoral fins that have razor long steak

00:03:33.760 | knife sized defense systems.

00:03:35.720 | Then you, of course, the Jaguars, the Harpy Eagles, the Piranha, the

00:03:39.520 | Candiru fish that can swim up a penis, lodge themselves inside.

00:03:42.800 | It's the Amazon rainforest.

00:03:44.440 | The thing is, as you've learned this week, nothing here wants to get us with the,

00:03:49.400 | except for an exception of maybe mosquitoes, every other animal just, just

00:03:53.720 | wants to eat and exist in peace.

00:03:56.160 | That's it.

00:03:57.320 | But there is each of those animals that could describe have a

00:04:00.720 | kind of radius of defense.

00:04:03.280 | So if you accidentally step into its home into that radius, it can cause

00:04:10.560 | harm or make them feel threatened.

00:04:12.280 | Make them feel threatened.

00:04:13.160 | There is a defense mechanism that is activated.

00:04:15.560 | Some incredible defense mechanisms.

00:04:17.280 | I mean, you're talking about 17 foot black caiman crocodiles that with

00:04:21.480 | significant size that could rip you in half.

00:04:24.080 | Anaconda is the largest snake on earth.

00:04:25.920 | Bushmasters that can grow up to be nine to, I think even 11 feet long.

00:04:30.800 | And I've caught bushmasters that are thicker than my arms.

00:04:33.040 | So for people who don't know, Bushmasters, snakes, what are these things?

00:04:36.840 | These are vipers.

00:04:37.560 | It's a large, I believe it's the largest viper on earth.

00:04:39.800 | Venomous.

00:04:40.560 | Extremely venomous.

00:04:42.200 | With hinged teeth, tissue, destroying venom.

00:04:44.920 | Like if you get bitten by a Bushmaster, they say, you don't, you don't rush

00:04:49.440 | and try and save your own life.

00:04:50.640 | You try to savor what's around you.

00:04:52.320 | Look at, look around at the world, smoke your last cigarette, call your mom.

00:04:55.600 | That's it.

00:04:56.720 | So that moment of stasis that is life is going to end abruptly

00:05:01.320 | when you interact with one of those.

00:05:02.560 | Yeah.

00:05:03.000 | I even have even this, this seemingly.

00:05:07.240 | Can I just pause at how incredibly beautiful it is that you could

00:05:11.080 | just reach to your right and grab a piece of the jungle.

00:05:13.680 | It's like, it's like even this seemingly beautiful little fern.

00:05:16.920 | If you, if you go this way on the fern, you're fine.

00:05:19.160 | As soon as, as soon as you go this way, there's invisible

00:05:21.320 | little spikes on there.

00:05:22.360 | If you want to.

00:05:22.920 | Oh, I see.

00:05:25.560 | I feel that.

00:05:26.240 | So like everything is defended.

00:05:27.640 | If you're driving on the road and you have your arm out the side, or if you're

00:05:30.120 | on a motorcycle going through the jungle and you get one of these, it'll just

00:05:33.280 | tear all the skin right off your body.

00:05:35.520 | It's kind of doing that to me now.

00:05:37.000 | So what would you do?

00:05:38.320 | Like we're going through the dense jungle yesterday and you slide down the hill,

00:05:45.360 | your foot slips, you slide down, and then you find yourself staring a couple

00:05:49.720 | of feet away from a Bushmaster snake.

00:05:51.280 | What are you doing?

00:05:51.800 | You're for people who somehow don't know, are somebody who loves, admires snakes,

00:05:57.400 | who has met thousands of snakes, has worked with them, respects them, celebrates them.

00:06:04.040 | What would you do with a Bushmaster snake?

00:06:06.240 | Face to face.

00:06:07.880 | Face to face.

00:06:08.720 | This has happened.

00:06:09.440 | Um, I've been there.

00:06:11.280 | It's nice.

00:06:11.840 | Um, I've come face to face with the Bushmaster and there's two things.

00:06:16.280 | There's two reactions that you might get.

00:06:17.560 | One is if the Bushmaster decides that it's vacation time, if it's sleeping,

00:06:21.160 | if you just had a meal, they'll come to the edges of trails or beneath the tree.

00:06:24.840 | And they'll just circle up little spiral, big spiral, big pile of snake on the

00:06:29.320 | trail, and they'll just sit there.

00:06:30.400 | And one time there was a snake sitting on the side of a trail beneath the tree for

00:06:34.560 | two weeks, this snake was just sitting there, resting, digesting his food out in

00:06:38.880 | the open, in the rain, in the sun, in the night, didn't matter.

00:06:41.800 | You go near it, barely even crack a tongue.

00:06:44.080 | Now, the other option is that you get a Bushmaster that's alert and hunting

00:06:49.840 | and out looking for something to eat.

00:06:51.440 | And they're ready to defend themselves.

00:06:53.560 | And so I once came across a Bushmaster in the jungle at night and this

00:06:57.320 | Bushmaster turned its head towards me, looked at me and made it very clear.

00:07:02.960 | I'm going to go this way.

00:07:04.000 | And so I did the natural thing that any snake enthusiast

00:07:06.280 | would do, and I grabbed its tail.

00:07:07.600 | Now, 11 feet later by the head, the snake turned around and just said, if

00:07:11.000 | you want to meet God, I can arrange the meeting, I will oblige.

00:07:14.640 | And I decided to let the Bushmaster go.

00:07:18.080 | And so it's like that with most animals, you know, a Jaguar will turn and look

00:07:21.920 | at you and just remind you of how small you are.

00:07:24.000 | Like, what did you see in a snake's eyes?

00:07:26.200 | What, how did you sense that this is not the right, this is not, this is

00:07:29.880 | going to be your end if you proceed.

00:07:31.760 | His readiness.

00:07:32.760 | I, I, I wanted to get him by the tail and show him to the people that were there

00:07:36.480 | and maybe work with the snake a little bit as an 11 foot snake, he, the snake

00:07:40.960 | turned around and made it very clear.

00:07:42.520 | Like not today, pal.

00:07:43.480 | It's not going to happen.

00:07:44.560 | Is it in the eyes and the movement and the tension of the body?

00:07:47.040 | It was the movement and the S of the neck.

00:07:49.120 | It was, it was, it was as if you pushed me and I went, let's go make my day.

00:07:52.520 | Like he just looked a little bit too, too ready.

00:07:56.000 | He's like, I love this.

00:07:57.640 | Okay.

00:07:58.200 | All right.

00:07:58.680 | So, you know, you just know, you just know.

00:08:00.640 | Whereas like the snake you met last night.

00:08:02.960 | Yeah.

00:08:03.360 | Beautiful snake.

00:08:04.120 | Such a calm little thing.

00:08:05.640 | He just focuses on eating baby lizards and little snails and things.

00:08:09.320 | And that snake has no concept of defending itself.

00:08:11.600 | It has no way to defend itself.

00:08:12.840 | So even a, even something the size of a blue jay could just come and

00:08:15.960 | just peck that thing in the head and swallow it.

00:08:18.120 | And it's a helpless little snake.

00:08:19.320 | So it's, it's really, it kind of depends on the animal.

00:08:22.240 | It depends on the mood you catch them in.

00:08:23.720 | Each one has a different temperament.

00:08:25.240 | The grace of its movement was mesmerizing.

00:08:27.520 | Curious almost, maybe I'm anthropomorphizing.

00:08:30.520 | Projecting onto it.

00:08:31.440 | But it was.

00:08:32.360 | The tongue flicking was a sign of curiosity.

00:08:34.240 | He's trying to figure out what was going on.

00:08:35.680 | It's like, why am I on this treadmill of human skin?

00:08:37.880 | You know, they're just trying to get to the next thing, trying to get

00:08:40.400 | hidden, trying to get away from the light.

00:08:41.800 | Also the texture of the scales is really fascinating.

00:08:44.600 | I mean, it's my first, first snake I've ever touched.

00:08:46.560 | It's so interesting.

00:08:47.400 | It was just such an incredible system of muscles that are all

00:08:52.360 | interacting together to make that kind of movement work and all the

00:08:56.240 | texture of its skin, of its scales.

00:08:58.160 | What do you love about snakes?

00:09:00.280 | From my first experience with a snake to all the thousands of

00:09:03.640 | experiences you had with snakes, what do you love about these creatures?

00:09:06.920 | I think it's when you just spoke about it, it was, that's the first

00:09:11.680 | snake you've met and it was a tiny little snake in the jungle and you

00:09:15.000 | spoke about it with so much light in your eyes and I think that because

00:09:18.520 | we've been programmed to be scared of snakes, there's something, there's

00:09:22.280 | something wondrous that happens in our brain.

00:09:24.440 | Maybe, maybe it's just this, this, this joy of discovery that

00:09:27.400 | there's nothing to be scared of.

00:09:29.440 | And whether it's a rattlesnake that is dangerous and that you need to

00:09:31.880 | give distance to, but you look at it from a distance and you go, whoa, or

00:09:35.760 | it's a harmless little grass snake that you can pick up and enjoy and give to a

00:09:39.320 | child, it's, they're just these strange legless animals that just exist.

00:09:44.800 | You know, they don't even have eyelids.

00:09:46.400 | They're so different than us.

00:09:47.440 | They have a tongue that senses the air and they, to me are so beautiful.

00:09:52.720 | And I've, I've my whole life been defending snakes from humans and

00:09:56.240 | it's, it's, they seem misunderstood.

00:09:58.640 | I think they're incredibly beautiful.

00:10:00.280 | There's every color and variety of snakes.

00:10:03.280 | There's venomous snakes, there's tree snakes, there's huge crushing anacondas.

00:10:06.600 | It's just of the 2,600 species of snakes that exist on earth.

00:10:11.760 | There's just such beauty, such complexity and such simplicity.

00:10:16.760 | They're just, they're just to me, to me, um, I feel like, I feel like I'm, I'm

00:10:21.480 | friend with snake and, and they rely on me to protect them from my people.

00:10:25.880 | Friend with snake.

00:10:28.400 | Me friend snake.

00:10:29.320 | Me friend snake.

00:10:30.680 | You said some of them are sometimes aggressive.

00:10:33.440 | Some of them are peaceful.

00:10:34.880 | Is this a mood thing, a personality thing, a species thing?

00:10:38.000 | Is it, what is it?

00:10:39.000 | So as far as I know, there's only really two snakes on earth that could be

00:10:42.640 | aggressive because aggression indicates, uh, offense.

00:10:46.600 | And so a reticulated python has been documented as eating humans.

00:10:50.680 | Anacondas, although, while it hasn't been publicized, they have eaten humans.

00:10:54.720 | Um, every single other snake from boa constrictor to Bushmasters, to spitting

00:11:01.040 | Cobra, to grass snake, to garter snake, to everything else, every single other

00:11:04.800 | snake does not want to interact with you.

00:11:07.120 | They have no interest.

00:11:08.720 | So there's no such thing as an aggressive snake.

00:11:11.280 | Once you get outside of an anaconda and reticulated python, aggression

00:11:14.080 | could be trying to eat you.

00:11:14.960 | That's predation.

00:11:15.640 | But for every other snake, a rattlesnake, if it was there, would either go escape

00:11:21.600 | and hide itself, or it would rattle its tail and tell us don't come closer.

00:11:24.920 | A Cobra will hood up and begin to hiss and say, don't approach me.

00:11:28.680 | I'm asking you nicely not to mess with me.

00:11:31.800 | And most other snakes are fast or they stay in the trees

00:11:34.520 | or they're extremely camouflaged.

00:11:35.760 | But their whole MO is just don't bother me.

00:11:37.840 | I don't want to be seen.

00:11:38.840 | I don't want to be messed with.

00:11:39.760 | In fact, all I want to be do is be left alone.

00:11:42.200 | And once in a while, I just want to eat.

00:11:43.920 | And by the way, when you see a snake drink, your heart will break.

00:11:49.080 | It's like seeing it's the only thing that's cuter than a puppy, like watching

00:11:53.120 | a snake touch its mouth to water.

00:11:54.920 | And just, you just see that, that little mouth going as they suck water in.

00:11:58.800 | And it's like, it's just so adorable.

00:12:00.360 | Watching the scaled animal just be like, I need water.

00:12:03.400 | In a state of vulnerability.

00:12:05.680 | Yeah.

00:12:06.220 | But bro, there's nothing cuter than a little puppy with a tongue.

00:12:09.160 | Like a baby ball python, baby king Cobra, baby elephant.

00:12:14.000 | So what are their, they're like at a puddle and they just take it in.

00:12:17.240 | They can be at a puddle and they just take it in.

00:12:19.040 | Or one time in India, I was with a snake rescuer and we found

00:12:22.440 | this nine foot king Cobra, this, this God of a snake there.

00:12:25.800 | Ophiophagus Hanna is their Latin name.

00:12:27.720 | And they're, they're snake eaters.

00:12:28.920 | They're the king of the snakes, the largest venomous snake.

00:12:31.320 | And the people that call called the snake rescuer, because

00:12:37.040 | that's a profession in India.

00:12:38.240 | Um, you know, it had gotten into their kitchen or their backyard.

00:12:42.600 | And so we showed up and we got the snake and the snake rescuer.

00:12:45.560 | He knew he looked at the snake and he went to me.

00:12:47.800 | He said, you know, why do you think the snake would go in a house?

00:12:50.040 | And he was quizzing me.

00:12:50.720 | And I actually went, you know, I don't know.

00:12:52.680 | Is it warm?

00:12:53.680 | Is it cold?

00:12:54.240 | You know, like sometimes cats like to go into, into the warm,

00:12:56.440 | warm cars in the winter.

00:12:57.440 | And he was like, he's thirsty.

00:12:59.600 | He goes, watch this.

00:13:01.120 | He took a water bottle, poured it over the, now the snake is standing up.

00:13:04.760 | Snake stands up three feet tall.

00:13:06.320 | This is a huge king Cobra with a hood, terrifying snake to be around.

00:13:09.640 | He leans over to the snake and the snake is standing there trusting him.

00:13:13.840 | And he takes a water bottle and pours it onto the snake's nose.

00:13:16.840 | And the snake turns up its nose and just starts drinking from the water bottle.

00:13:20.440 | Human giving water to snake, big, scary snake.

00:13:24.440 | But this human understood snake gets water.

00:13:27.320 | Snake gets released in jungle.

00:13:28.680 | Everybody's okay.

00:13:29.600 | So sometimes the needs are simple.

00:13:33.440 | They just don't have the words to communicate them to us humans.

00:13:36.280 | Yeah.

00:13:36.720 | And is it this interest or is it fear almost like they don't notice us?

00:13:41.560 | Or is it where source the unknown aspect of it?

00:13:45.360 | The uncertainty is a, is a source of danger.

00:13:48.280 | Well, animals live in a constant state of danger.

00:13:50.960 | Like if you look at that deer that we saw last night, it's stalking through the

00:13:54.400 | jungle, wondering what's going to eat it.

00:13:56.560 | Wondering if this is the last moment it's going to be alive.

00:13:58.680 | It's like the animals are constantly terrified of that.

00:14:01.440 | This is their last moment.

00:14:02.560 | Yeah.

00:14:02.800 | Just for the listener, we'll walk into the jungle late at night.

00:14:06.120 | So it's darkness, except our headlamps on.

00:14:09.600 | And then all of a sudden Paul stops, he looks in the distance and he sees two eyes.

00:14:16.400 | He's, I think you thought, is that a jaguar or is it a deer?

00:14:20.360 | And it was moving its head like this.

00:14:22.280 | Like, uh, scared or maybe trying to figure it, trying to localize itself,

00:14:27.520 | trying to figure out, you're doing the same to it, the two of you like moving your

00:14:32.440 | head and like deep into the jungle.

00:14:35.160 | Like, I don't know, uh, it's pretty far away through the trees.

00:14:38.280 | You can still see it.

00:14:39.000 | 30, 30 feet or so.

00:14:40.640 | Yeah.

00:14:40.920 | That's the thing to actually mention.

00:14:42.280 | I mean, the, with the headlamp, you see the reflection in their eyes.

00:14:45.480 | It's kind of incredible just to see a creature to try to identify a creature by

00:14:50.240 | just the reflection from its eyes.

00:14:52.120 | Yeah.

00:14:52.640 | And so the cats, sometimes you'll get like a greenish or a bluish glow from the cats.

00:14:57.320 | The deer are usually white to orange, caiman, orange, night jars, orange.

00:15:02.920 | Snakes can usually be like orange moths, um, spiders sparkle.

00:15:07.080 | And so you have all these different, as you walk through the jungle, you

00:15:10.040 | can see all these different eyes.

00:15:11.600 | And when something large looks at you like that deer did, your first thing is.

00:15:15.880 | What animal is this that I am staring back at?

00:15:19.320 | Cause through the light, you kind of get, you see the reflection off

00:15:23.480 | the bright light off the leaves.

00:15:25.160 | And I couldn't tell at first, cause actually that those big bright eyes, it

00:15:28.880 | could have been an ocelot, could have been a jaguar, could have been a deer.

00:15:31.600 | And then when it did this movement, that's what the cats do.

00:15:33.920 | They try to see around your light.

00:15:36.040 | I thought maybe Lex Freedman's here.

00:15:38.600 | We're going to get lucky.

00:15:39.400 | It's going to be a jag right off trail.

00:15:40.880 | Your definition of lucky is a complicated one.

00:15:43.600 | That's a fascinating process.

00:15:46.240 | When you see those two eyes, try to figure out what it is and it is trying

00:15:49.520 | to figure out what you are, that process.

00:15:51.440 | Uh, let's talk about caiman.

00:15:53.280 | We've seen a lot of different kinds of sizes.

00:15:55.320 | We've seen a baby one, a bigger one.

00:15:57.320 | Tell me about these, uh, 16 foot plus apex predators of the Amazon rainforest.

00:16:02.760 | The big, bad black caiman, which is the largest reptilian predator in the

00:16:09.760 | Amazon, except for the Anaconda, they kind of both share that, that,

00:16:12.960 | that notch of apex predator.

00:16:14.600 | They were actually hunted to endangered species level in the seventies.

00:16:19.840 | Cause they're, they're leather, black scale leather, but they're coming back.

00:16:25.360 | They're coming back and they're huge and they're beautiful.

00:16:28.600 | And I was, I was walking near a Lake and I never understood how big they could

00:16:32.040 | get, except for, I was walking near a Lake last year and I was following the stream.

00:16:36.200 | You know what it's like when you're following a little stream and there's

00:16:38.000 | just a little trickle of water.

00:16:39.040 | And all of a sudden this river otter had been running the other

00:16:40.960 | direction on the tree, on the stream.

00:16:42.400 | River otter comes up to me.

00:16:43.600 | And I swear to God, this animal looked at me and went, Hey.

00:16:45.440 | And I went, Hey, he was like, didn't expect to see me there.

00:16:48.360 | And he turned around.

00:16:49.560 | He like did a little spin, started running down the stream.

00:16:52.000 | Then he turned around and he, you could tell he was like, let's go.

00:16:54.760 | And I, you know, I'm not anthropomorphizing here.

00:16:56.920 | The animal was asking me to come with him.

00:16:58.520 | So I followed the river otter down the stream.

00:17:00.520 | We started running down the stream and the river otter looks at me one more

00:17:03.040 | time is like, yo, jumps into the Lake.

00:17:05.360 | And I'm like, what does he want me to see?

00:17:07.000 | Now in the Lake, this river otter is doing dives and freaking out and

00:17:11.040 | going up and down and up and down.

00:17:12.440 | And they're very excited.

00:17:13.520 | They're screaming, they're screeching.

00:17:14.720 | All of a sudden, and I've never seen anything like this, except

00:17:19.600 | for in like Game of Thrones.

00:17:20.760 | This croc head comes flying out of the water.

00:17:23.920 | All of the river otters were attacking this huge black caiman, 16 feet,

00:17:29.120 | head half the size of this table.

00:17:31.200 | And she was thrashing her tail around, creating these huge waves in the

00:17:35.200 | water, trying to catch an otter.

00:17:37.000 | And they're so fast that they were zipping around or biting her

00:17:40.080 | and then going around.

00:17:41.280 | And this otter, swear to God, interspecies looked at me and went, watch this.

00:17:45.000 | We're fucking with this caiman.

00:17:46.960 | It was amazing.

00:17:48.080 | And I, for the first time I got to stand there watching this

00:17:50.160 | incredible interspecies fight happening.

00:17:53.400 | They weren't trying to kill the caiman.

00:17:54.600 | They were just trying to mess with it.

00:17:55.920 | And the caiman was doing his best to try and kill these otters.

00:18:00.000 | And they were just having a good time.

00:18:01.760 | And that sick sort of hyper-intelligent animal, like wolf sort of way where

00:18:06.160 | they were just going, you can't catch us.

00:18:07.720 | Yeah.

00:18:07.960 | Like intelligence and agility versus like raw power and dominance.

00:18:12.320 | I mean, I got to handle some smaller caiman and just the power they had, you

00:18:19.400 | know, you scale that up to imagine what a 16 foot, even a 10 foot, any, any kind

00:18:24.600 | of black caiman, the kind of power they deliver, maybe, can you talk to that?

00:18:28.280 | Like the power they can generate with their tail, with their neck, with their jaw.

00:18:33.840 | Alligators and caiman and crocodiles have some of the

00:18:36.760 | strongest bite forces on earth.

00:18:38.160 | Think a saltwater crocodile wins as the strongest bite force on earth.

00:18:41.800 | And you got to hold about a, what was it?

00:18:46.280 | A four foot spectacle caiman.

00:18:48.920 | And you got to feel, I mean, you're a black belt in jujitsu.

00:18:52.320 | How do you, how do you compare the, the explosive force you felt from that

00:18:56.760 | animal compared to what a human can generate?

00:18:58.880 | It's, uh, it's difficult to describe in words.

00:19:03.720 | There's a lot of power.

00:19:04.560 | And we're talking about the power of the neck, like the, what is it?

00:19:07.960 | I mean, there's a lot, it could generate power all up and down the body.

00:19:10.720 | So probably the tail is a monster, but just, just the neck and, you know, not

00:19:16.680 | to mention the power of the bite that, and the speed too, because, uh, the

00:19:22.080 | thing I saw and got to experience is how still and calm, at least from

00:19:26.480 | my amateur perspective, it seems calm.

00:19:29.600 | Uh, still.

00:19:32.360 | And then from that sort of zero to 60, you could just, just go wild thrash.

00:19:37.480 | And then there's also a decision it makes in that split second, whether, uh, as

00:19:43.640 | it thrashes, is it going to kind of bite you on the way or not?

00:19:47.960 | And that's where, that's where of the four species of caiman that we have here,

00:19:53.640 | you see differences in their personalities as a species.

00:19:56.240 | And so you can like, just like, you know, like generally golden

00:19:59.520 | retrievers are viewed as a, as a friendly dog, generally, not every

00:20:02.880 | single one of them, but as a rule, spectacle caiman, puppies, you released

00:20:09.800 | one in the river and it did nothing.

00:20:11.120 | Didn't bite one of your fingers.

00:20:12.280 | It just swam away.

00:20:13.320 | Hmm.

00:20:13.520 | We dropped one in the river and what did it do?

00:20:16.800 | It chose peace.

00:20:17.920 | Now I had a smooth fronted caiman a few weeks ago, and this is probably

00:20:21.480 | about a three and a half foot or not big enough to kill you, but very much

00:20:24.840 | big enough to grab one of your fingers and just shake it off your body.

00:20:27.800 | Just death roll it right off.

00:20:29.160 | And as I was being careful, totally different caiman than

00:20:32.680 | the one that you got to see.

00:20:33.520 | This one has spikes coming off it.

00:20:34.920 | They're like, like, like leftover dinosaurs.

00:20:37.640 | It's like they evolved during the dinosaur times and never changed.

00:20:41.800 | They have spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growths that you

00:20:46.040 | don't see on the other smoother caiman.

00:20:47.640 | And I tried to release this one without getting bitten and I threw it into

00:20:51.720 | the stream, gently into the water, just went, wha, and tried to pull my hands

00:20:55.280 | back and as I pulled my hand back, this caiman in the air turned around and

00:20:59.440 | just tried to give me one parting blow and just got one tooth whack

00:21:02.520 | right to the bone of my finger.

00:21:03.680 | And, uh, uh, bone injury feels different than a skin injury.

00:21:07.960 | So you instantly, instantly, and it just reminds you of that's a

00:21:12.360 | caiman with a head this big and it hurt.

00:21:14.800 | And I know that it could have taken off my finger.

00:21:17.000 | Now, if you scale that up to a black caiman, it's, it's rib crushing.

00:21:22.000 | It's, it's zebra head removing size, you know, just, just meat destroying.

00:21:27.000 | It's, it's incredible.

00:21:28.280 | It's nature's metal sort of, you know, just raw power.

00:21:31.560 | So what's the, the, the biggest croc you've been able to handle?

00:21:36.200 | We were doing caiman surveys for years and we would go out at night and you

00:21:39.880 | want to figure out what are the populations of black caiman, spectacle

00:21:42.840 | caiman, smooth-fronted caiman, dwarf caiman.

00:21:44.680 | And the only way to see which caiman you're dealing with is to catch it.

00:21:49.120 | Cause a lot of times you get up close with the light and you can see the eyes

00:21:51.480 | at night, but you can't quite see what species it is.

00:21:53.760 | For instance, this past few months, we found two baby black caiman on the

00:21:58.960 | river, which is unprecedented here.

00:22:00.520 | We haven't seen that in decades.

00:22:02.040 | So it's important that we monitor our croc population.

00:22:05.360 | So I started catching small ones, um, in mother of God.

00:22:08.640 | I write about the first one that me and JJ caught together, which was probably

00:22:11.640 | a little bigger than this table and, uh, probably mid twenties bravado and

00:22:17.760 | competition with other young males of my species led to me trying to go as big as

00:22:24.880 | I could, and I jumped on a spectacle caiman that was slightly longer than I am.

00:22:31.600 | And I'm five nine, so I jumped on this probably six foot croc and quickly

00:22:38.040 | realized that my hands couldn't get around its neck and my legs were

00:22:43.280 | wrapped around the base of its tail.

00:22:44.920 | And the thrash was so intense that as it took me one side, I barely had enough

00:22:49.640 | time to realize what was happening before it beat me against the ground.

00:22:52.920 | My headlamp came off.

00:22:54.240 | So now I'm blind in the dark, laying in a river, in the Amazon rainforest,

00:22:57.600 | hugging a six foot crocodile, and I went JJ as I always do.

00:23:04.240 | But I, in that moment before I even let go, I knew I couldn't let go of the

00:23:07.440 | croc because if I let go of the croc, I thought she was going to destroy my face.

00:23:10.160 | So I said, okay, now I'm stuck here.

00:23:11.800 | If I just stay here, I can't release her.

00:23:14.040 | I need help.

00:23:14.720 | But I was like, I'm never, ever, ever, ever going to try and solo

00:23:18.680 | catch a croc this big again.

00:23:20.000 | I was like, this is, this is, I knew in that moment, I was like, this is good enough.

00:23:22.720 | So anything longer than you, you don't control the tail.

00:23:25.320 | You don't have, you have barely control of anything.

00:23:27.080 | Yeah.

00:23:27.320 | And that's a spectacle caiman.

00:23:28.400 | A black caiman is a, is a whole other order of magnitude there.

00:23:31.360 | It's like saying like, oh, you know, I, I was play fighting with my golden

00:23:35.120 | retriever versus I was play fighting with like, you know, what, what's the

00:23:39.440 | biggest, scariest dog you could think of the, the dog from Sandlot, a giant

00:23:43.160 | gorilla dog thing, like a, like a Malamute, something, something huge.

00:23:47.280 | What are they called?

00:23:47.800 | Mastiffs.

00:23:48.400 | Yeah.

00:23:48.960 | Mastiffs.

00:23:49.720 | I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs.

00:23:51.280 | What, what do you admire about black caiman?

00:23:53.960 | What they've been here for a very, very long time.

00:23:57.840 | There's something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way of

00:24:01.640 | being, about their presence in this jungle.

00:24:03.560 | With crocodiles, you're looking at this, this mega survivor.

00:24:07.760 | They're in a class with sharks where it's like, they've been here so long.

00:24:11.440 | When you talk about multiple extinctions, you talk about the sixth extinction,

00:24:15.240 | earth's going through all this stuff.

00:24:16.680 | The crocodiles and the cockroaches have seen it all before.

00:24:19.200 | They're like, man, we remember what that comet looked like.

00:24:23.200 | And they're not impressed.

00:24:24.360 | Yeah.

00:24:24.880 | They have this, they carry this wisdom and their power.

00:24:27.800 | Yeah.

00:24:28.200 | In the simplicity of their power, they carry the wisdom.

00:24:30.560 | Yeah.

00:24:30.840 | And they're just sitting there in the streams and they don't care.

00:24:33.560 | And even if there's a nuclear Holocaust, you know, that there would just be some

00:24:37.200 | crocs sitting there dead eyed in that stagnant water, waiting for the life to

00:24:40.840 | regenerate so they could eat again.

00:24:42.400 | It's going to be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches.

00:24:46.840 | And the cockroaches are just background noise.

00:24:49.520 | Yeah.

00:24:49.760 | They'll always be there.

00:24:50.640 | Sons of bitches.

00:24:53.080 | You know, we're talking about individual black caiman and caiman and different

00:24:56.080 | species of caiman, but whenever they're together and you see multiple eyes, which

00:25:00.120 | I've gotten to experience, it's quite a feeling.

00:25:03.480 | There's just multiple eyes looking back at you.

00:25:05.840 | Of course, for you, that's a immediate excitement.

00:25:11.720 | You immediately go towards that.

00:25:14.960 | You want to see it.

00:25:15.800 | You want to explore it.

00:25:16.640 | Maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff.

00:25:19.600 | Yeah.

00:25:20.400 | What's, can you just describe that feeling when they're together and

00:25:24.200 | they're looking at you, so head above water, eyes reflecting the light?

00:25:27.480 | Yeah.

00:25:28.360 | So the other night Lex and I were in the river with JJ surviving a thunderstorm.

00:25:34.880 | We're in the rain and we had covered our, covered our equipment with our boats.

00:25:40.880 | And the only thing that we could do was get in the, in the

00:25:43.680 | river to keep ourselves dry.

00:25:45.120 | And so we were in the river at night, in the dark, no stars, just a little bit

00:25:50.120 | of canopy silhouetted with all this rain coming down, it was such a din.

00:25:53.280 | You could hardly hear anything.

00:25:54.360 | And all the way down river, I just see this Cayman eye in my headlamp light.

00:25:59.200 | And I started walking towards it because I was like, this is even

00:26:04.720 | better, we can catch a Cayman while we're in this thunderstorm in the Amazon river.

00:26:08.440 | And, uh, when JJ went, Paul, it's too far.

00:26:11.880 | JJ very rarely, very rarely, like he'll, he'll make a suggestion.

00:26:17.800 | Like he'll usually go like, maybe it's far, but in that situation, deep in the

00:26:22.360 | wilderness, unknown Cayman size, he went, Paul, it's too far.

00:26:26.400 | Don't leave the three of us right now.

00:26:28.920 | Yeah.

00:26:29.400 | We're too far out to take risks.

00:26:31.200 | We're too far out to be walking along the riverbed at night, because then, you

00:26:34.800 | know, right here at the research station, if you step on a stingray, you get evac'd.

00:26:39.280 | Out where we went, nothing.

00:26:42.400 | So, so for me seeing those eyes, I think I've become so comfortable with so

00:26:46.480 | many of these animals that I may have crossed into the territory where I feel,

00:26:52.280 | I feel so comfortable with many of these animals that they just don't worry me anymore.

00:26:56.440 | I mean, you were, I looked at you in a raft while you had a sizable, probably

00:27:01.800 | about 12 foot black Cayman right next to your raft, I watched its head go under.

00:27:06.040 | Bubbles.

00:27:06.600 | The bubbles, it was all coming up right next to your raft as he was just moving

00:27:09.720 | along the bottom of the river.

00:27:10.880 | Cause he looked at me, went under and then my raft passed and yours came over him.

00:27:14.880 | So now I'm looking back and your raft is going over this black Cayman.

00:27:18.000 | And I'm going, I'm not worried at all.

00:27:20.920 | I was not worried.

00:27:22.320 | I was not worried that the Cayman would freak out.

00:27:24.400 | I was not worried that he would try to attack you.

00:27:27.240 | I knew a hundred percent that Cayman just wanted us to go.

00:27:29.960 | So you could go back to eating fish.

00:27:31.680 | Yeah.

00:27:32.080 | That's it.

00:27:32.600 | Man, it's humbling.

00:27:34.160 | It's humbling these giant creatures.

00:27:36.560 | And especially at night, like you were talking about, I mean, for me, it's both

00:27:42.040 | scary and just beautiful when the head goes under, because like underwater it's

00:27:47.800 | their domain, so anything can happen.

00:27:50.040 | So what is it doing that it's head is going under?

00:27:52.680 | It could be bored.

00:27:53.560 | It could be hungry, looking for some fish.

00:27:57.160 | It could be maybe wanting to come closer to you to investigate.

00:28:00.720 | Maybe you have some food around you.

00:28:03.200 | Maybe it's an old friend of yours and just wants to say hi.

00:28:05.800 | I don't know.

00:28:06.280 | I have a few on the river old friends.

00:28:08.040 | Um, no, when we see their heads go under, it's just.

00:28:12.400 | They're just getting out of the way.

00:28:13.320 | We're, we're shining a light at them and they're going,

00:28:15.400 | why is there a light at night?

00:28:16.440 | I'm uncomfortable.

00:28:17.600 | Head under.

00:28:19.120 | So these Cayman, again, you think of it as this big aggressive animal, but I

00:28:23.400 | don't know anybody that's been eaten by a black Cayman and the smaller species,

00:28:27.000 | smooth fronted Cayman, dwarf Cayman, spectacle Cayman, they're not going to

00:28:29.840 | eat anybody again at the worst.

00:28:31.440 | If you were doing something inappropriate with a Cayman, like you jumped on it and

00:28:36.880 | we're trying to do research and it bit your hand, it could take your hand off.

00:28:41.040 | But that's the only time I've been walking down the river and stepped on a

00:28:44.240 | Cayman and the Cayman just swims away.

00:28:45.840 | And so in my mind, Cayman are just these, they're peaceful dragons that

00:28:50.280 | sit on the side of the river.

00:28:51.320 | And so to me, they are my friends.

00:28:52.880 | And I worry about them because two months ago we were coming up river and on one of

00:28:58.880 | the beaches was a beautiful, about five foot black Cayman with a big machete

00:29:03.920 | cut right through the head.

00:29:05.000 | The whole Cayman was wasted.

00:29:07.240 | Nothing was eaten, but the Cayman was dead.

00:29:11.360 | What do you think that was?

00:29:12.680 | Curious humans.

00:29:14.240 | Just committing violence.

00:29:16.240 | Yeah.

00:29:17.480 | Just loggers, people who aren't from this part of the Amazon because a local person

00:29:21.360 | would either eat the animal or not mess with it.

00:29:24.920 | Like Pico would never kill a Cayman for no reason because it doesn't make any sense.

00:29:29.200 | So these are clearly people who aren't from the region, which usually means

00:29:33.360 | loggers, cause they've come from somewhere else.

00:29:35.160 | They're doing a job here and they, they're just cleaning their pots in the river at

00:29:38.720 | night and they see eyes come near them because the Cayman probably smells fish.

00:29:41.960 | And then they just whack cause they want to see it.

00:29:44.440 | And they're just curious monkeys on a beach.

00:29:46.240 | And again, me friend of Cayman, I protect from my type.

00:29:51.240 | That said, you know, you protect your friends and you analyze and study your

00:29:58.040 | friends, but sometimes friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding.

00:30:02.000 | And if you have a bit of a misunderstanding with the black Cayman, I feel like just a

00:30:06.040 | bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a, uh, bone crushing situation.

00:30:12.520 | But not for a little five foot Cayman.

00:30:14.520 | And I think that's incredibly speciesist of you.

00:30:17.480 | About humans or about Cayman?

00:30:20.240 | No, like all my friends do the same thing.

00:30:23.520 | They go, you swim in the Amazon rainforest, you know, you swim in that

00:30:25.920 | river and I go, yes, every day we, you know, backflips into the river.

00:30:30.080 | We've been swimming in the river.

00:30:31.040 | How many times with the piranha and the stingray and the Kandiru and the Cayman

00:30:35.600 | and the Anacondas, all of it in the river with us and we just do it.

00:30:40.560 | And what's that for you?

00:30:41.760 | So what, what allows you to doing that, to do that, knowing and having

00:30:45.600 | researched all the different things that can kill you, which I feel like

00:30:48.200 | most of them are in the river.

00:30:49.240 | What allows you to just get in there with us?

00:30:53.080 | Well, I think it's something about you where you become like this portal through

00:30:58.720 | which it's possible to see nature is not threatening, but beautiful.

00:31:02.160 | And so in that you kind of naturally by hanging out with you, I

00:31:06.120 | get to see the beauty of it.

00:31:07.760 | Um, there is danger out there, but the dangerous part of it, just like

00:31:12.680 | the, there's a lot of danger in the city.

00:31:14.280 | There's danger in life.

00:31:15.160 | There's a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally, physically.

00:31:18.080 | There's a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of ways.

00:31:20.560 | We went on a expedition to the forest, just twisting your ankle, breaking your

00:31:24.640 | foot, um, getting a bite from a thing that gets infected.

00:31:29.120 | It's just a lot of ways to die and get hurt in the stupidest of ways in a non

00:31:33.920 | dramatic caiman eating you alive kind of way.

00:31:37.360 | Yeah.

00:31:37.720 | It strikes me as unfair because humans are, we're still in our minds.

00:31:42.200 | So, so programmed to worry about that predator, that predator, that predator,

00:31:48.520 | what predator we've killed everything.

00:31:50.080 | Black caimans are coming off the endangered species list.

00:31:52.280 | We exterminated wolves from North America.

00:31:54.360 | I actually heard a suburban lady one time tell her son, watch out.

00:31:58.240 | Foxes will get you.

00:31:59.600 | Foxes.

00:32:00.920 | Yeah.

00:32:01.480 | They eat baby rabbits and mice.

00:32:04.360 | Well, in the case of apex predators, I think when people say dangerous

00:32:08.360 | animals, they really are talking about just the power of the animal and the

00:32:14.600 | black caiman have a lot of power.

00:32:16.440 | And so it's almost just a way to celebrate the power of them.

00:32:21.040 | Sure.

00:32:21.520 | And if it's in celebration, then I'm all for it because my God is that power, like

00:32:25.240 | the waves of, of, of fury that you saw, like when that tail, I mean, you saw, you

00:32:30.000 | saw the tail of the spectacle, that perfect, amazing thing with all those

00:32:33.080 | interlocking scales that works.

00:32:34.640 | So it's like a perfect creation of engineering.

00:32:37.640 | And then, and then when you have one that's this thick and all of a sudden

00:32:41.040 | that thing is moving with all the acceleration of that power, whoa, the

00:32:45.760 | volume of water, the sound that comes out of their throat, there's such, they're

00:32:50.440 | dragons.

00:32:51.200 | We talked about the scales of the snake with like the came in just the way it

00:32:55.240 | felt was, uh, incredible.

00:32:58.680 | Just the armor, the texture of it was so cool.

00:33:01.760 | I don't know, like the, the, the, the bottom one came in and have a certain

00:33:04.480 | kind of texture and it just all feels like power, but also all feels like

00:33:09.360 | designed really well.

00:33:10.560 | It's like, it's like exploring through touch, like a world war two tank or

00:33:16.040 | something like that.

00:33:16.800 | Just the engineering that went into this thing that like the mechanism of

00:33:23.040 | evolution that created a thing that could survive for such a long time.

00:33:26.560 | It's just like, incredible.

00:33:28.480 | This is a work of art.

00:33:29.800 | The pot, you know, the defense mechanisms, the power of it, the damage you can do,

00:33:35.280 | uh, how effective it is as a hunter, all of that, all you can feel that in just by

00:33:41.080 | touching it.

00:33:42.600 | Do you ever see the, the mashup where they put side by side the image of, I

00:33:46.920 | think it's a Falcon in flight next to a stealth bomber and they're almost the

00:33:51.000 | exact same design.

00:33:52.080 | It's incredible.

00:33:53.480 | Like that.

00:33:54.200 | What's the equivalent for, for a croc?

00:33:56.040 | Like I said, maybe a tank, like Armadillo turtle.

00:34:00.840 | Like hippos.

00:34:02.440 | Yeah.

00:34:02.720 | There may not be a machine, a war machine equivalent of a crocodile.

00:34:06.920 | It'd have to have like a big jaw element to it.

00:34:10.880 | Yeah. In the water.

00:34:11.520 | I mean, we, we talked also about hippos.

00:34:14.120 | Those are interesting creatures from all the way across the world.

00:34:16.960 | Just monsters.

00:34:18.200 | Yeah.

00:34:18.480 | Hippos and rhinos.

00:34:20.560 | Hippos are bigger.

00:34:21.600 | Usually our rhinos are bigger.

00:34:23.040 | Rhinos.

00:34:23.680 | Rhinos is after elephants is the largest.

00:34:26.560 | White rhinos.

00:34:27.840 | They can be terrifying too.

00:34:29.280 | Again, when you step into the defense.

00:34:31.520 | Absolutely.

00:34:32.480 | But I have to tell you, after being around so many rhinos, I have rhino friends, black

00:34:38.080 | and white rhinos, and, uh, they're all sweethearts.

00:34:41.440 | And I mean, I mean, sweethearts.

00:34:43.800 | And I mean, when you look at a rhino, it's like a living dinosaur.

00:34:47.480 | I know it's a mammal, but somehow it screams dinosaur.

00:34:49.800 | Cause it seems like Pleistocenic and, and from another age with the giant horn.

00:34:54.200 | And there's so much bigger than you think.

00:34:55.680 | Like they're minivan sized animals.

00:34:57.480 | Like you're, you're, we're not taller than they are at the shoulder and they

00:35:01.520 | have the strange shaped head and the huge horn and they sit there eating grass all

00:35:06.040 | day. So if a rhino is dangerous to a human, it's because the rhino is going, don't

00:35:12.120 | hurt me.

00:35:12.480 | Don't hurt me.

00:35:13.640 | Don't, don't hurt my baby.

00:35:14.840 | And then they're like, you know what?

00:35:15.640 | I'll just kill you.

00:35:16.160 | It'd be easier.

00:35:16.640 | Cause you're scaring me right now.

00:35:17.560 | You're too close to that right now.

00:35:18.800 | Yeah.

00:35:19.320 | And so like there again, I just think it's funny cause humans were so quickly to go,

00:35:24.520 | which snakes are aggressive.

00:35:26.160 | There are no aggressive snakes.

00:35:27.560 | You know, rhinos can be dangerous if provoked.

00:35:30.720 | Otherwise they're peaceful, fat grass unicorns.

00:35:34.800 | You know, like they're, they're really pretty calm that we had these incredible

00:35:38.920 | giant animals and the largest animals on our planet, the black came in the rhinos,

00:35:44.040 | the elephants, all the big, beautiful stuff is becoming less and less.

00:35:48.080 | And it almost reminds me like in game of thrones or like, yeah, they're in the

00:35:51.200 | beginning, they're like, yeah, there used to be dragons.

00:35:53.120 | And it was like this memory and it's like, yeah, we used to have mammoths and we, we

00:35:58.680 | used to have stellar sea cows that were 16 feet long manatees.

00:36:02.880 | And it's, there were things we used to have the Caspian tiger that only went

00:36:07.320 | extinct in the nineties, our lifetimes.

00:36:10.520 | And it's, that's mind blowing to me.

00:36:13.080 | That's that, that has haunted me since I'm a child.

00:36:15.440 | I remember learning about extinction and I went, wait, you're telling me that.

00:36:18.240 | I remember being a kid and going by the time I grew up, you're saying

00:36:21.600 | that gorillas could be gone.

00:36:23.720 | Elephants could be gone.

00:36:25.560 | And because we're doing it.

00:36:27.560 | And then I just, that I remember, I remember looking at the, the nightlight

00:36:32.160 | being blurry because I was crying.

00:36:33.640 | I was so upset and, oh, and it was lonesome George, that turtle, the

00:36:37.280 | Galapagos tortoise where there was one left.

00:36:38.960 | And they said, if we just, if we just had a female, he could live.

00:36:42.680 | And I as a six, seven, eight year old that destroyed me.

00:36:45.640 | We're all just trying to get laid, including that turtle.

00:36:48.400 | Including that turtle for a few hundred years, dude.

00:36:51.600 | So for young people out there, you think you're having trouble.

00:36:55.640 | Think about that turtle.

00:36:56.760 | Think about that turtle.

00:36:57.600 | Yeah.

00:36:58.400 | You know, there's a turtle that Darwin and Steve Irwin both owned.

00:37:01.520 | Yeah.

00:37:01.960 | Yeah.

00:37:02.200 | I heard about that turtle and they live a long time.

00:37:05.360 | Yeah.

00:37:05.640 | I've seen things.

00:37:06.600 | They've seen things that there's a, there's a great like internet joke where

00:37:11.520 | they're like, they're like accusing him of like being incongruous with modern

00:37:15.200 | times.

00:37:15.560 | They're like, he did nothing to stop slavery.

00:37:17.280 | He didn't fight in world war two, canceled the turtle.

00:37:21.560 | Oh shit.

00:37:23.120 | What a world we live in.

00:37:24.800 | So it's interesting.

00:37:26.400 | You mentioned black came in and, uh, anacondas are both apex predators.

00:37:32.200 | So it seems like the reason they can exist in similar environments is because

00:37:37.080 | they feed on slightly different things.

00:37:39.000 | How's it possible for them to coexist?

00:37:43.520 | I read that anacondas can eat came up, but not black came in.

00:37:47.080 | How often do they come in conflict?

00:37:48.960 | So anacondas in Cayman occupy the exact same niche and they're born at almost

00:37:55.120 | the exact same size.

00:37:56.200 | And unlike most species, they don't have sort of a size range that they're

00:38:01.000 | confined to, they start at this big baby came in or this big baby anacondas are a

00:38:06.120 | little longer, but they're still, they're thinner and they don't have legs.

00:38:08.840 | So it's the same thing in terms of mass and.

00:38:12.240 | They're all in the streams or at the edges of lakes or swamps.

00:38:15.840 | And so the baby anacondas eat the baby came in, baby came in, can't

00:38:19.600 | really take down an anaconda.

00:38:21.560 | They're, they're going for little insects and fish.

00:38:23.520 | They, they have a quite a small mouth.

00:38:24.960 | So they, again, it's in their interest to hide from everything.

00:38:28.960 | A bird, a heron can eat a baby came in, pop it back.

00:38:33.280 | And so they have to survive, but the anaconda and the Cayman kind

00:38:36.440 | of, kind of joust as they grow.

00:38:38.480 | Can you actually explain how the anaconda would take down a Cayman?

00:38:42.320 | Like would it first, uh, use constriction and then eat it or what's the methodology?

00:38:48.280 | Yeah.

00:38:48.640 | So anacondas have a kind of a, I don't know, like a three point constriction

00:38:53.360 | system where their first thing is anchor.

00:38:56.120 | So like jujitsu.

00:38:57.080 | So the first thing is latch on to you.

00:38:59.440 | I like how I'm writing this down.

00:39:00.960 | Like, all right, this is jujitsu, like a masterclass here.

00:39:04.120 | This is for when you're wrestling an anaconda, just in case.

00:39:07.520 | And you'd be like the coach in the sideline screaming.

00:39:11.480 | You got it, Lex.

00:39:12.120 | Don't let him take the back.

00:39:15.720 | Yeah.

00:39:16.600 | All right.

00:39:17.200 | So, so one time me and JJ were following a herd of collared peccary

00:39:19.880 | and JJ's teaching me tracking.

00:39:21.680 | So we're following the, you know, the, the, the hoof prints through the mud

00:39:24.920 | and we're doing this and I'm talking about no backpacks, just machetes,

00:39:28.480 | bare feet, running through the jungle.

00:39:30.040 | And we come to this stream and JJ's like, I think we missed them.

00:39:33.920 | You know, I think they went and I'm like, no, no, no.

00:39:35.440 | They went here.

00:39:35.920 | Look, and not cause I'm a great tracker.

00:39:37.760 | Cause I can see, you know, a few dozen footprints, hundreds of

00:39:41.200 | individual footprints right there.

00:39:42.920 | And I'm going, no, no, they just crossed here.

00:39:44.200 | And JJ was like, you know what?

00:39:45.240 | We're not going to get eyes on him today.

00:39:47.880 | He was like, it's okay.

00:39:48.920 | He's like, we did good.

00:39:49.680 | We followed him for a long time.

00:39:50.760 | And I was like, cool.

00:39:51.520 | And then I was trying to gauge, like, can I drink this stream?

00:39:54.760 | And I see a Culpa and a Culpa is a salt deposit where animals come to, to feed.

00:39:59.760 | Cause sodium is, is, is a deficiency that most herbivores have here.

00:40:03.080 | And all of a sudden I just hear like the sound of a wet stick

00:40:07.760 | snapping, just that bone crunch.

00:40:09.720 | And I looked down and there's about a 16 foot Anaconda wrapped around a

00:40:15.160 | freshly killed peccary wild boar.

00:40:19.240 | And what this Anaconda had done was as the, all the pigs were going across

00:40:23.800 | the stream, the Anaconda had grabbed it by the jaw, swiped the legs.

00:40:29.720 | Wrapped around it, bent it in half, and then crushed it to ribs.

00:40:34.960 | And that's what the Anaconda do, whether it's to mammals, to

00:40:38.360 | caiman, it's all the same thing.

00:40:39.680 | It's grab on, they have six rows of backwards facing teeth.

00:40:44.080 | So once they hit you, they're never going to come off.

00:40:47.480 | You actually have to go deeper in and then open before you can come out.

00:40:50.520 | All those backward facing teeth.

00:40:52.240 | So they have an incredible anchor system and then they use their

00:40:54.880 | weight to pull you down to hell, to pull you down into that water, wrap

00:40:59.040 | around you, and then start breaking you.

00:41:01.720 | And every breath you take, you go, and you, you're up against a barrier.

00:41:06.600 | And then when you, when you exhale, they go a little tighter and you're

00:41:09.840 | never going to get that space back.

00:41:11.280 | Your lungs are never going to expand again.

00:41:13.480 | And I know this because I've been in that crush before

00:41:16.880 | JJ pulled me out of it.

00:41:17.840 | And so this pig, the Anaconda had gotten it.

00:41:20.240 | And as the pig was thrashing and the Anaconda was wrapping

00:41:22.280 | around, I had bent it in half.

00:41:23.400 | And I just heard those vertebrae going.

00:41:26.000 | And so for a caiman, it's the same thing.

00:41:27.760 | They just grab and they wrap around it.

00:41:29.080 | And then they have to crush it until there's no response.

00:41:31.800 | They'll wait an hour.

00:41:32.720 | They'll wait a long time until there's no response from the animal.

00:41:35.600 | They'll overpower it.

00:41:36.480 | Then they'll, then they'll reposition, probably yawn a

00:41:39.920 | little bit, open their jaw and then start forcing that entire.

00:41:44.960 | Now, here's the crazy thing is that an Anaconda has stomach

00:41:49.200 | acid, capable of digesting an entire crocodile where nothing

00:41:54.640 | comes out the other side.

00:41:55.800 | And when you see how thick the bony plate of a crocodile skull

00:41:59.960 | is that that can go in the mouth and nothing comes out the other side.

00:42:03.640 | That's insane.

00:42:04.400 | And so it always made me wonder on a chemistry level, how you

00:42:07.520 | can have such incredible acid in the stomach that doesn't

00:42:10.200 | harm the Anaconda itself.

00:42:11.600 | And someone said, but it's able to digest.

00:42:15.320 | Oh, it's some kind of mucus.

00:42:16.480 | Oh, there's a lot.

00:42:18.200 | Oh, interesting.

00:42:19.120 | There's levels of protection from the Anaconda itself, but it

00:42:21.800 | seems like the Anaconda is such a simple system as an organism.

00:42:25.160 | Like that simplicity, taking a scale could just do the, can

00:42:29.760 | swallow a caiman and digest it slowly.

00:42:33.200 | I know.

00:42:33.720 | But my question was how, how on earth is it physically possible

00:42:37.200 | to have this hellish bile that can digest anything, even something

00:42:41.880 | as, as, as horrendous as a, as a caiman scales and bones and all

00:42:45.960 | the hardest shit in nature, and then not hurt the snake itself.

00:42:50.480 | And I had a chemist explain to me that it's probably some sort

00:42:53.680 | of mucus system that, that lines the stomach and neutralizes the

00:42:57.000 | acid and keeps it floating in there.

00:42:58.320 | But my God, that must be powerful stuff.

00:43:00.320 | So what does it feel like being crushed, choked by an Anaconda?

00:43:07.520 | Uh, you, when an Anaconda is wrapped around you and you, you

00:43:14.480 | find yourself in, in the, in the shocking realization that these

00:43:19.480 | could be your last moments breathing, you are confronted with.

00:43:23.280 | The vast disparity in power that there is so much power in these

00:43:28.720 | animals, so much crushing, deliberate reptilian, ancient

00:43:33.560 | power that doesn't care.

00:43:34.920 | They're just trying to get you to stop.

00:43:37.520 | They just want you to stop ticking and there's nothing you can do.

00:43:41.160 | And there's, I find it very awe-inspiring when I encounter that

00:43:44.080 | kind of power, when you, even if it's that you see, you know, you

00:43:46.840 | see a dog run, you know, you ever try and outrun a dog and they

00:43:50.040 | just zip by you and you go, wow, you know, or you see a horse

00:43:54.200 | kick and you go, oh my God, if that, if that hoof hit anyone's

00:43:57.440 | head, it knock them three States over.

00:43:59.600 | And it's like, it's like, there, there is muscular power that is

00:44:02.120 | so far that, like you said, that explosive that we, we dream of

00:44:06.480 | doing it, like, imagine if like a Muay Thai kickboxer could, could

00:44:09.720 | harness that sort of Cayman power, that smash.

00:44:13.160 | Um, and so it's, it's just awe-inspiring.

00:44:15.400 | I think it's really, really impressive what animals can do.

00:44:17.960 | And we're, we're all, you know, we're all the same sort of

00:44:20.880 | makeup for the most part.

00:44:22.120 | All the mammals, you know, we all have our skeletal

00:44:24.160 | skeletons look so similar.

00:44:25.480 | We all have like, you know, if you look at like a kangaroos,

00:44:27.320 | biceps and chest, it looks so much like a, like a, like a, a man's.

00:44:31.600 | And if same thing goes for a bear or you ever see a naked chimp.

00:44:34.600 | There's like chimps with alopecia.

00:44:37.520 | Oh shit.

00:44:38.440 | And so it looks like a body builder, like it's got cuts and

00:44:42.840 | huge, huge everything.

00:44:44.880 | Like it's got pecs and they got that face.

00:44:47.200 | That's just like, just let me in where's your wallet do something.

00:44:53.240 | But yeah, but there's a, the specialization of a lifetime of doing

00:44:59.560 | damage to the world and using those muscles.

00:45:02.760 | It just makes you, makes you just that much more powerful than most

00:45:05.760 | humans because humans, I guess, have more brain.

00:45:10.160 | So they get lazy.

00:45:12.280 | They start puzzle solving versus, you know, using the biceps directly.

00:45:16.760 | Well, yes and no.

00:45:17.600 | And I have this question.

00:45:18.360 | Okay.

00:45:18.600 | So I, you know, that whole, you are what you eat thing.

00:45:21.120 | Now we, one time here had two chickens and one of them was a wild chicken,

00:45:26.800 | like from the farm had walked around its whole life finding insects and the

00:45:30.000 | other chicken was like factory raised.

00:45:32.320 | And so we cut the heads off of both of them and started getting ready to cook them.

00:45:37.440 | Now the factory raised chicken was like a much higher percentage of fat had less

00:45:42.520 | muscle on its body was softer tissue, a lighter color, the farm raised chicken

00:45:48.840 | had darker, more sinewy muscles, less fat was clearly a better made machine.

00:45:54.560 | And so my question is, is that what's happening with us?

00:45:58.480 | You know, like if you go see a Sherpa who's been walking his whole life and

00:46:02.240 | pulling, you know, and walking behind musk oxes and lifting things up mountains

00:46:05.800 | and breathing clean air and not being in the city versus someone that's just

00:46:10.480 | been chowing down at IHOP for 40 years and never getting off the couch.

00:46:15.040 | Like, I imagine it's the same thing that you, you become what you eat.

00:46:18.760 | Yeah.

00:46:19.640 | I mean, like you and I were like, have dead running up a mountain.

00:46:24.360 | Meanwhile, there's a grandma just like walking and she'd been walking that

00:46:28.080 | road and she's just built different with her alpaca on her shoulders with a baby.

00:46:32.800 | She just, they're just built different when you, when you apply your body

00:46:38.000 | in the physical way, your whole life.

00:46:39.680 | Yeah.

00:46:40.040 | Like you can't replicate that.

00:46:41.960 | Like, like just like that chimp has those from constantly moving through

00:46:46.040 | the canopy, constantly using those arms.

00:46:48.320 | Just like if you're, you know, if you see an Olympic athlete or you hug Rogan.

00:46:53.560 | Exactly.

00:46:55.400 | You just go, what, why is there so much muscle?

00:46:57.360 | That's exactly what I, uh, what I feel like when you give them a hug.

00:47:01.880 | This is, this is definitely a chimp of some sort.

00:47:04.920 | How, how does that, uh, just, just that the constriction of the Anaconda,

00:47:10.800 | just the, the, the feeling of that as.

00:47:13.800 | Are they doing that based on instinct or is there some brain stuff going on?

00:47:21.000 | Like, is this just like a basic procedure that they're doing and

00:47:26.000 | they just really don't give a damn.

00:47:27.560 | They're not like thinking, oh, Paul, this is this kind of species.

00:47:32.400 | He would taste good.

00:47:33.720 | Or is it just a mechanism to just start activating and you can't stop it.

00:47:37.120 | With an Anaconda, I really think it's the second one.

00:47:40.200 | I do think that they're impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane.

00:47:45.280 | I think they're a very simple system, a very ancient system.

00:47:49.680 | And I think that once you, once you hit predation mode, it's

00:47:54.160 | going down no matter what.

00:47:56.000 | The stupid mosquito.

00:47:56.920 | I'm going like this.

00:47:57.640 | And every time he just flies around my hand, like I'm a big, slow giant.

00:48:00.880 | And he just goes around my hand and then he goes back to the same spot.

00:48:05.200 | Like, and I'm like, no.

00:48:06.080 | And then he comes right back to the same spot.

00:48:07.360 | It's like, it's like, he's just going, fuck you.

00:48:09.320 | No, here's the question.

00:48:11.040 | If the mosquito is stupid and you can't catch it, what does that make you?

00:48:14.560 | Fucking stupid, dude.

00:48:16.320 | I flicked a wasp off me the other day.

00:48:17.960 | It flew back like 12 feet in the air, corrected, and

00:48:21.240 | then flew back at my face.

00:48:22.680 | It made so many correct, like calculations and corrections and decided to come

00:48:27.000 | back and let me know about it.

00:48:28.320 | And it was like, shoot.

00:48:29.240 | And that wasp probably went back to the nest, said, guess what happened today?

00:48:32.800 | This bitch ass kid from Brooklyn tried to flick me and I showed him what's up.

00:48:35.720 | I had him running.

00:48:36.320 | They had a good chuckle on that one.

00:48:38.040 | Uh, yeah, you actually mentioned to me, uh, just on the topic of anacondas

00:48:42.120 | that you've been, uh, participating in a lot of scientific work, uh, on, on the topic.

00:48:48.360 | So like really in everything you've been doing here, you are celebrating the

00:48:53.360 | animals, you're respecting the animals, you're protecting the animals, but you're

00:48:58.120 | also excited about studying the animals and their environment.

00:49:02.040 | So you've, you're actually a coauthor on a paper, uh, on a couple of papers.

00:49:06.640 | Well, one of them is on anacondas and, uh, studying green anaconda hunting patterns.

00:49:11.680 | What's that about?

00:49:13.360 | So, um, the lead authors of that paper, Pat Champagne and Carter

00:49:17.960 | Payne, uh, friends of mine.

00:49:20.160 | And what we started noticing for me began at that story, I told you where we were

00:49:25.640 | coming across the stream and we saw the anaconda had, had, had been positioned

00:49:31.880 | just below a culpa and then other people began noticing that anaconda seemed to

00:49:37.960 | always be beneath these culpas where mammals were going to be coming.

00:49:41.360 | And that, that contrasted with what we knew about anacondas because what we

00:49:45.400 | understood about anacondas is that they're purely ambush predators and

00:49:47.920 | they don't pursue their prey.

00:49:49.920 | But what we began finding out here and Pat led the process of amazing scientists.

00:49:57.320 | He worked with the Cady university for a long time, worked with us for a long time.

00:50:00.680 | And, and he, he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an anaconda right

00:50:07.880 | around here and we were able to see their movements and that's what these papers

00:50:10.840 | are showing is that they actually do pursue their prey.

00:50:14.000 | They do move up and down using the streams as corridors through the forest.

00:50:17.880 | They actually do pursue their prey.

00:50:19.400 | They actually do seek out food.

00:50:21.000 | So, I mean, think about it.

00:50:22.480 | It's a, it's a giant anaconda.

00:50:24.080 | Obviously it's not, it can't just sit in one spot.

00:50:26.520 | It has to put some work into it.

00:50:27.960 | And so they're using scent and they're using communication to use the streams.

00:50:32.760 | So you could be walking in the forest in a very shallow stream and see a

00:50:36.040 | sizable anaconda looking for a meal.

00:50:38.560 | So in the shallow stream, it moves not just in the water, but in the sand.

00:50:43.960 | Yeah.

00:50:44.280 | So it's, it, it also likes to borrow a little bit.

00:50:47.560 | They borrow quite a bit.

00:50:48.760 | And so these large snakes operate subterranean more than we think.

00:50:55.160 | Interesting.

00:50:56.200 | Like there's times that you'll go with a tracker, you go with the telemetry set

00:50:59.840 | and it'll say, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, like it will be over the snake.

00:51:03.080 | Snake's underground.

00:51:04.560 | Snake has found either a recess under the sides of the stream.

00:51:07.520 | You saw it last night where all the fish have, have their

00:51:11.240 | holes under the side of the stream.

00:51:12.720 | There was a, there was a six foot dwarf came in right in the stream,

00:51:16.880 | right where we were standing and he had his cave.

00:51:19.360 | He goes under there.

00:51:20.160 | They know they have their system.

00:51:22.400 | Yeah.

00:51:22.760 | We walked by it.

00:51:23.760 | We walked by it and he stuck his head out cause he thought we'd gone.

00:51:26.840 | And then we turned around and I just got a glimpse of him cause I was in the

00:51:30.040 | front of the line and he just went right back into his cave.

00:51:33.200 | You, you guys are not going to touch me.

00:51:36.360 | And so, yeah, with the anacondas, it's been really exciting.

00:51:38.680 | And, uh, in 2014, JJ and me and Mohsen and Pat and Lee, we all, we ended up

00:51:46.720 | catching what at the time was the record for eunectes marinus scientifically.

00:51:50.760 | Measured.

00:51:51.760 | It was 18 feet, six inches, 220 pounds.

00:51:54.160 | One of the largest female anacondas on record.

00:51:56.480 | And since that time, these guys have been continuing to study the species,

00:52:01.880 | continuing to just, again, just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge

00:52:05.680 | we have of the species and studying green anacondas in low land, tropical

00:52:10.560 | rainforest, you've seen how hard it is.

00:52:12.400 | To, to move, to operate, to navigate in this environment.

00:52:16.560 | And so when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about this

00:52:22.000 | species, you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them and then

00:52:27.560 | finding out a way to keep tabs on them.

00:52:29.800 | Cause even if you get lucky enough to see an anaconda by the edge of a stream,

00:52:35.000 | to, to be able to observe it over time, to learn its habits or to put a radio

00:52:39.680 | transmitter on it, or to take any sort of valuable information from the

00:52:43.720 | experience is almost impossible.

00:52:46.200 | And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote about mother of God, us jumping on

00:52:49.960 | anacondas and trying to catch them.

00:52:51.520 | And at first it just seemed like.

00:52:53.600 | Something we were doing to learn to, to just try and see them, but it ended up

00:52:57.920 | being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would have

00:53:01.960 | scientific implications later on, because now it's allowing us to try

00:53:05.640 | and find the largest anacondas.

00:53:07.560 | And people used to say, there's no way there's 25 foot, 27 foot.

00:53:10.680 | Well, there was just that video of the guy swimming with the 20 foot anaconda.

00:53:14.120 | And so now as we keep going, I'm going, well, maybe through drone identification,

00:53:19.400 | we could find where the largest anacondas are sitting on top of floating vegetation.

00:53:23.720 | And even then, how do we restrain them so that we could measure them

00:53:27.920 | and prove this to the world?

00:53:29.200 | It's sort of a side quest, but.

00:53:31.520 | So by doing these kinds of studies, you figure out how they move about the

00:53:36.080 | world, what motivates them in terms of when they hunt, where they hide in the

00:53:39.680 | world as the size of the anaconda change.

00:53:42.200 | So all of that, that's, that's, those are scientific studies.

00:53:45.000 | Yeah.

00:53:45.840 | I mean, look, there's so much that we don't know about this forest.

00:53:48.880 | We don't know what medicines are in this forest.

00:53:50.840 | We don't know with a lot of the 1500, there's something like 4,000 species of

00:53:55.520 | butterflies in the Amazon rainforest.

00:53:57.200 | And of the 1500 species that are here in this region, all of them have

00:54:01.760 | a larval stage caterpillars, right?

00:54:03.600 | And each of the caterpillars has a specific host plant that they need

00:54:06.720 | to need to eat in order to become a successful butterfly

00:54:09.920 | to enter the next life cycle.

00:54:11.760 | And for most of the species that fill the butterfly book, we don't

00:54:15.520 | know what those interactions are.

00:54:18.080 | I recently got to see, uh, the white witch, which is a huge moth.

00:54:22.560 | It's, it's one of the, it's, it's one of the two largest moths in the world.

00:54:25.880 | It's the largest moth by wing span.

00:54:28.440 | Wow.

00:54:29.040 | Huge.

00:54:29.680 | It looks like a bird, big white moth.

00:54:31.920 | We still, I believe, I believe that we still don't know

00:54:36.000 | what the caterpillar looks like.

00:54:37.320 | It's 2024.

00:54:40.200 | We have iPhones and penis shaped rocket chips.

00:54:42.360 | Like we don't know where that moth starts its life.

00:54:45.520 | Yeah.

00:54:45.920 | We still haven't figured that out.

00:54:47.080 | By the way, the rocket ships are shaped that way for efficiency purposes,

00:54:50.720 | not because they want it to look, make it look like a penis.

00:54:53.160 | Speaking of which I've ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring

00:54:58.000 | and make me, I know it's not just a figment of my imagination.

00:55:02.040 | I'm pretty sure they're real.

00:55:03.120 | In fact, you explained it to me and they, they make me very uncomfortable

00:55:06.760 | because there's just a lot of penises hanging off of a tree.

00:55:09.400 | Yes.

00:55:09.960 | I don't know what the purpose is, who they're supposed to attract,

00:55:13.760 | but it certainly makes, but certainly Paul, like, uh, really enjoys them.

00:55:18.600 | Yeah.

00:55:19.080 | Uh, yeah.

00:55:19.680 | Well, it's clearly you've, you've done some, some research and you've

00:55:22.560 | noticed a lot of them.

00:55:23.360 | I haven't even seen them.

00:55:24.120 | There was, there was, there was a time where I almost fell and to catch my

00:55:27.840 | balance, I had to grab one of the penises of the penis tree and unforgettable.

00:55:31.920 | Uh, Anaconda, the biggest, baddest Anaconda in the Amazon versus the biggest,

00:55:37.800 | baddest Black Caiman.

00:55:39.080 | Cause you mentioned there, like there's a race.

00:55:41.280 | If there's a fight, this UFC in cage who wins underwater.

00:55:44.880 | Biggest and the baddest.

00:55:46.000 | The biggest and the baddest that you have can imagine, given all the studies

00:55:50.880 | you've done of the two animals species.

00:55:53.560 | You're talking about an 18 foot, several hundred pound Black Caiman

00:55:57.440 | versus a 26 foot, 350 pound Anaconda.

00:56:03.200 | Yeah.

00:56:04.280 | I think it's a, it's a, it's a death stalemate.

00:56:07.200 | I think the Caiman slams, the Anaconda bites onto it.

00:56:10.360 | The Anaconda wraps the Caiman and then they both thrash around until

00:56:13.200 | they both kill each other.

00:56:14.080 | Cause I think the Caiman will tear them up so bad.

00:56:16.360 | And the Caiman is not going to let go.

00:56:18.000 | He's never going to let go, but then he's going to, he's going to realize

00:56:21.240 | that he's, he's also being constricted.

00:56:22.880 | So then he's going to stop and he's going to, he's going to keep

00:56:24.680 | slamming down on that Anaconda.

00:56:26.160 | And the Anaconda is just going to keep constricting.

00:56:28.520 | But if the Caiman can do enough damage before the end, it's, again, it's

00:56:31.640 | almost like a striker versus a jujitsu.

00:56:33.480 | Yeah.

00:56:33.960 | You know, if you can get enough elbows in before they lock you.

00:56:37.240 | How fast is the constriction?

00:56:38.880 | So it's pretty slow.

00:56:39.800 | It's no, it's, it's incredibly, it's, it's incredibly quick.

00:56:42.760 | So it's, it's, it's you, you see, you take the back and get me in choke hold.

00:56:46.360 | It's that, it's, I have maybe 30 seconds, maybe on the upward side, if you haven't

00:56:52.120 | cinched it under my, under my throat, but if you've gotten good position, it's over.

00:56:56.800 | Is there any way to unwrap the choke, undo the choke defending?

00:56:59.600 | No, not unless you have outside help, unless you have, you know, another

00:57:02.200 | human or another 10 humans coming to unwrap the tail, help you.

00:57:05.840 | But for an animal, like if a deer gets hit by an Anaconda, no way.

00:57:09.360 | They don't stand a chance.

00:57:11.200 | So the, the, the, the Black Caiman would bite somewhere, somewhere close to the

00:57:15.840 | head and then, and just try to hold on a thrash.

00:57:19.160 | Yeah.

00:57:19.480 | I don't, I don't think a large Black Caiman, here's the thing.

00:57:22.400 | Every fisherman knows this.

00:57:24.600 | So like the biggest fish, they're smart.

00:57:26.760 | Yeah.

00:57:27.360 | And more importantly, they're shrewd.

00:57:29.040 | They're careful.

00:57:30.760 | A huge Black Caiman that's 16 feet long.

00:57:34.240 | Isn't going to be messing with a big Anaconda.

00:57:36.200 | Like they, they, they'll, they won't, they won't cross paths because while

00:57:40.240 | they technically occupy the same type of environment, that Black Caiman is

00:57:46.560 | going to have this deep spot in a lake.

00:57:48.520 | And that Anaconda is going to have found this floating forest, like sort of

00:57:51.840 | black stream backwater where it's going to be, and they'll have made that their

00:57:55.200 | home for decades and they'll already have cleaned out the competition.

00:57:57.920 | So maybe if there was a flood and they got pushed together there, they, they

00:58:02.040 | could have some sort of a showdown, but almost more certainly is that when they

00:58:05.880 | get to that size, that Caiman at any sign of danger, right under the water, just,

00:58:11.560 | you know, it's almost like, it's like, even if you, what do you learn when

00:58:14.560 | you're a Black Belt, you know, what do you do with a street fight?

00:58:17.480 | You still run away.

00:58:18.560 | There's no reason for a street fight.

00:58:21.120 | And I think the animals really understand that there's no reason for this.

00:58:25.400 | So like a giant Anaconda and a giant Black Caiman, they could probably even

00:58:29.840 | coexist in the same environment, just knowing, using the wisdom to avoid the

00:58:34.960 | fight, like why, or they would have a big showdown and one of them would

00:58:38.440 | either die or have to leave.

00:58:39.640 | They would have a territorial dispute.

00:58:41.440 | Yeah.

00:58:41.880 | Yeah.

00:58:42.600 | Without killing either of them.

00:58:44.880 | Yeah, on it, dude.

00:58:46.920 | Nature, anything could happen.

00:58:49.680 | One of the things that me and Pat wrote up was that I saw a yellow-tailed

00:58:53.600 | Creepo, which is like a six foot rat snake eating an Oxyropis melanogenes,

00:58:57.880 | which is the, the, the red snake that we found last night.

00:59:01.160 | And just no one had ever in scientific literature, we'd never seen a

00:59:05.400 | Creepo eating an Oxyropis before.

00:59:07.400 | And so I had the observation in the field.

00:59:10.120 | I sent it to Pat Champagne, Pat writes it up, paper.

00:59:13.240 | And so it's like, it's this really cool, that's a really cool system.

00:59:16.720 | Cause we're just out here all the time.

00:59:18.120 | You end up seeing things.

00:59:19.040 | JJ's dad saw an Anaconda eating a tapir.

00:59:22.160 | Tapir is the size of a cow.

00:59:23.520 | Damn.

00:59:24.320 | And it's, that guy didn't lie.

00:59:26.000 | You know, some people, you trust your sources on that.

00:59:28.320 | He, he saw enough stuff.

00:59:29.720 | He didn't need to make up stories.

00:59:31.400 | And you know how you, you know, what I love now is when you go to, so when

00:59:34.520 | you ask people, when we were going up the mountain with Jimmy, JJ said to him, he

00:59:39.640 | goes, have you ever seen a Puma up here in the mountains?

00:59:42.840 | And Jimmy goes, they're up here.

00:59:43.960 | And JJ went, no, no, no.

00:59:45.400 | Have you seen it?

00:59:46.240 | And Jimmy went, no, never seen one.

00:59:48.200 | And you know how most people will go.

00:59:51.400 | Yeah, I've seen.

00:59:52.600 | That makes me trust a person when they admit, nah, I haven't seen it.

00:59:56.600 | They're up here.

00:59:59.360 | I haven't seen it.

01:00:00.360 | And Jimmy has been living there his whole life.

01:00:03.120 | His whole life.

01:00:03.600 | There's Pumas in the mountains?

01:00:06.480 | You know, mountain lions, Pumas, whatever the, you know, there's

01:00:08.920 | all different names for them.

01:00:09.880 | They're distributed from, I think from Alaska down through Argentina.

01:00:14.040 | That's, they're everywhere.

01:00:15.440 | It's an extremely successful species from deserts to high mountains, everything.

01:00:20.840 | I think you're saying Pumas have a, have a curiosity, have a way about

01:00:25.160 | them where they like explore, like follow people, like just to kind of figure out

01:00:33.080 | like, uh, just that curiosity versus like, as opposed to causing harm or hunting

01:00:37.960 | and that kind of stuff, like, what is this about?

01:00:40.320 | I think it's based in predatory instincts, but I also think there is a

01:00:44.600 | playfulness to higher intelligence animals that you don't see in

01:00:47.600 | lower intelligence animals.

01:00:48.760 | And so something like a rabbit, for instance, you're never going to see a

01:00:53.120 | rabbit come in to check you out or you just, you just, you can't even think of

01:00:57.640 | it like that, like a rabbit's just going to either eat or run away.

01:01:00.040 | There's really two settings.

01:01:01.280 | When you think of something like a river, giant river otter or a Tyra,

01:01:07.200 | which is a, they call it Monko here.

01:01:08.840 | It's a, it's a huge arboreal weasel and they'll come check you out.

01:01:13.120 | I woke up at my house the other day and there was a Tyra climbing up the

01:01:17.880 | side of the house and he was looking down at me sleeping and it's like,

01:01:23.400 | he came to check me out.

01:01:24.400 | Like, it's like, they're smart enough and they're brave enough.

01:01:26.760 | Here's the important thing.

01:01:27.720 | They know that they can fend for themselves.

01:01:29.400 | They can fight, they can climb, they can run.

01:01:31.240 | And so they're like, let me, I'm curious.

01:01:34.080 | I got time.

01:01:34.920 | Let me check this out.

01:01:35.720 | Yeah.

01:01:35.960 | They're gathering information.

01:01:37.040 | I wonder how complex and sophisticated their world model is, like how they're

01:01:41.880 | integrating all the information about the environment, like where all the

01:01:45.120 | different trees are, where all the different nests of the different insects

01:01:48.520 | are, what the different creatures are by size, all that kind of stuff.

01:01:52.040 | I'm sure they don't have enough, you know, storage up there to like keep

01:01:57.000 | all of that, but they probably keep the important stuff based, you know,

01:02:01.120 | sort of integrate the experiences they have into like, what is dangerous?

01:02:04.680 | What is tasty?

01:02:06.040 | All that kind of stuff.

01:02:07.040 | I think it's more complex than we realize.

01:02:11.840 | You go back to that friends to wall book.

01:02:14.080 | Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?

01:02:16.440 | There's so many incredible examples of controlled studies where the

01:02:20.840 | researchers weren't understanding how to shed being so insurmountably human and

01:02:28.040 | understand that there are other types of intelligence and whether that's elephants

01:02:32.240 | or cats, so big cats, for instance, we just saw a camera trap video from last

01:02:38.680 | night where you see one of our workers walk down the trail and then five

01:02:43.680 | minutes later, a cat behind them.

01:02:45.680 | By the way, we're walking just exactly the same area.

01:02:48.440 | Also exact same time.

01:02:49.720 | Yeah.

01:02:50.080 | Yeah.

01:02:50.320 | So we're out there and there's deer and there's cats and there's a jaguar and

01:02:54.160 | there's a Puma and there's all these animals out there and we're out in the

01:02:57.600 | night in the inky black night in this ocean of darkness beneath the trees.

01:03:01.080 | And we're just exploring and getting to see everything.

01:03:03.080 | And there's all these little eyes and heartbeats.

01:03:04.880 | I love the jungle at night, man.

01:03:06.040 | It's the most exciting thing.

01:03:07.040 | You're one of the things you do when you turn off the headlamp, complete

01:03:10.080 | darkness all around you.

01:03:12.960 | It's just the sounds, everything you hear, the cicadas, the birds, they're

01:03:18.280 | all screaming about sex all the time.

01:03:20.960 | So they're just trying to get laid.

01:03:22.080 | So all of them are making mating calls.

01:03:24.360 | Now the trick is to make your mating call without attracting a predator.

01:03:26.960 | But at night, what, what, what amazes me is that for us, it's so from the, from

01:03:36.000 | the caveman logic of it's hard to make fire here, it's hard to even light a fire

01:03:41.320 | here to having this, this, this incredible beam of, of, of it, you know, all of a

01:03:47.880 | sudden we can look at the jungle and walk through that darkness.

01:03:52.360 | Then we're seeing the frogs on those leaves and the snakes moving through the

01:03:56.520 | undergrowth and the deer sneaking through the shadows.

01:03:59.000 | It's like, it's almost as supernatural as skydiving.

01:04:04.000 | It's a strange thing to be able to do that technology allows us to do.

01:04:07.480 | We're doing something really complex and we're walking on trails

01:04:10.120 | that have been cleared for us that we've planned out.

01:04:12.520 | And so walking through the jungle at night, you just get this freak

01:04:15.960 | show of, of, of biodiversity.

01:04:18.680 | And I'm, I'm addicted to it.

01:04:19.760 | I truly love it.

01:04:20.520 | Except for the times over the last few days when we walked on through

01:04:25.280 | jungle without a trail and that's just a different experience.

01:04:28.680 | Well, how would you categorize if somebody said, Lex, I think I'm going to

01:04:33.280 | go for a hike through the jungle, not on the trail, what would you tell them?

01:04:37.800 | Every step is really hard work.

01:04:41.240 | Every step is a puzzle.

01:04:42.560 | Every step is a full of possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude of ways.

01:04:48.920 | You just, a wasp nest under a leaf, a hole under a leaf on the ground,

01:04:56.640 | where if you step in it, you're going to break a knee, ankle, leg, and going

01:05:01.520 | to not be able to move for a long time.

01:05:04.240 | Uh, there's all kinds of ants that can hurt you a little or

01:05:08.840 | can hurt you a lot, uh, bullet ants.

01:05:11.800 | There's snakes and spiders and, uh, oh, my favorite that I've gotten

01:05:21.240 | to know intimately, uh, is different plants with different defensive

01:05:27.320 | mechanisms, one of which is just spikes.

01:05:29.920 | So sharp you have, I don't know if you brought it, but there's

01:05:33.120 | an epic club with the spikes, but there's so many trees that have spikes on them.

01:05:40.840 | Sometimes they're obvious spikes, sometimes less than obvious spikes.

01:05:43.800 | And, you know, it could be just an innocent, as you take a step through

01:05:48.080 | a dense jungle, it could be an innocent placing of a hand on that tree that

01:05:53.400 | could just completely transform your experience, your life by penetrating

01:06:00.240 | your hand with like 20, 30, 40, 50 spikes and just changing everything.

01:06:06.760 | That's just a completely different experience than going on a trail where

01:06:10.360 | you were your observer of the jungle versus the participant of it.

01:06:13.760 | And, and it truly is extreme hard work to take every single step.

01:06:20.000 | Now, just think about this.

01:06:21.240 | I think scientifically, cause people like to summarize, people like to get really,

01:06:24.720 | really, uh, sort of cavalier with our scientific progress and they go, you

01:06:28.480 | know, we've already explored the Amazon.

01:06:29.720 | It's like, well, have we?

01:06:30.400 | Because in between each tributary is, you know, let's say just between

01:06:34.800 | some of them, let's just say a hundred miles of unbroken forest.

01:06:38.360 | Who's explored that?

01:06:39.880 | Yeah.

01:06:40.520 | Maybe some of the tribes have been there.

01:06:42.160 | Maybe some areas they haven't been.

01:06:44.920 | Now, when you're talking about scientists, whether they're indigenous

01:06:49.080 | scientists, Western science, whatever, so many of the areas in this jungle that

01:06:54.200 | is the size of the continental U S still have not been accessed and the places

01:06:59.600 | where people are doing research.

01:07:00.960 | See, I've been down here long enough.

01:07:02.640 | I see all the PhDs come down here and they all go to the

01:07:04.800 | same few research stations.

01:07:06.240 | They're safe.

01:07:07.000 | They have a bed.

01:07:08.040 | If you get hella dropped into the middle of the jungle, in the

01:07:11.720 | deepest, most remote parts, you're going to find micro ecosystems.

01:07:15.160 | You're going to see little species variations.

01:07:17.040 | You're going to see a type of flower that JJ has never seen before.

01:07:20.600 | Like what happened the other day, as you start walking through new patches

01:07:24.040 | of forest, you start finding new species and everything here changes.

01:07:27.280 | You just go a little bit up river and the animals you see differ.

01:07:30.240 | You go on this side of the river versus on the North side of the river.

01:07:33.520 | There's two other species of primates there that don't exist here.

01:07:36.720 | And that's in the mammal paper that we did with the, the emperor

01:07:39.480 | Tamarins and the pygmy marmosets that the Rangers found.

01:07:42.280 | Yeah.

01:07:43.080 | The, the mammal paper is looking at the diversity of life in

01:07:48.160 | this one region of the Amazon.

01:07:50.720 | What kind of, can you talk more about that paper?

01:07:54.080 | Mammal diversity along the, let's be address river.

01:07:57.120 | Once again, the mammal paper, Pat Champagne, the prodigy, um, he

01:08:01.960 | was sort of leading on this with a bunch of other scientists who

01:08:05.000 | have worked in the region, including Holly O'Donnell out of Oxford.

01:08:08.040 | Um, myself, I really just made a few observations.

01:08:11.280 | The jungle keepers, Rangers got featured because they're the ones

01:08:13.920 | that spotted a pygmy marmoset that had previously been unrecorded on the river.

01:08:18.400 | I got to, I got to contribute because I had, I had the only photograph

01:08:23.880 | that I believe anyone has of an emperor Tamarin on this river.

01:08:27.440 | It's the first proof of emperor Tamarin on this river.

01:08:31.040 | And that's exciting.

01:08:32.120 | It's exciting because, um, You know, you'll, you can post, post a picture

01:08:37.840 | or share a scientific observation or write about something.

01:08:40.480 | And then what happens is you get these, these like couch experts, these

01:08:44.080 | armchair experts who, who will come and say, you know, no, no, you

01:08:47.680 | don't get blue and yellow macaws there.

01:08:49.000 | I can tell from my bird book, it says they're not there.

01:08:51.320 | And they'll tell you you're wrong.

01:08:53.080 | You know, no, you don't get woolly monkeys or, or emperor Tamarins.

01:08:55.760 | It's like, but, but we, but we have proof.

01:08:58.600 | And so we're coming together to try and add to that knowledge.

01:09:01.400 | My general sort of amateur experience of the species I've encountered here

01:09:05.200 | is like, this should not exist, whatever this is, this is not real.

01:09:10.000 | This is CGI.

01:09:11.680 | Like what, just the colors, the weirdness.

01:09:15.080 | I mean, there's, uh, I think I called it the, the Paris Hilton, uh,

01:09:19.440 | caterpillar because it's like fur.

01:09:20.840 | It looks like a dog, like, yeah, yeah.

01:09:24.080 | It's like really furry and it's transparent and sort of it's transparent.

01:09:29.600 | All you see is this white, beautiful fur.

01:09:31.240 | And it's just like this caterpillar.

01:09:32.640 | It doesn't, doesn't look real.

01:09:33.920 | Do you think there are species, like how many species have we not discovered?

01:09:38.320 | And is there a species that are like extremely bad-ass

01:09:42.000 | that we haven't discovered yet?

01:09:43.240 | If you look up how many trees are in the Amazon rainforest, it's

01:09:49.760 | something in the order of 400 billion trees, there's something like

01:09:55.560 | 70 to 80,000 species of plants, individual types of plants here.

01:10:01.800 | 1500 species of trees.

01:10:04.080 | It's, it's so vast that it's comparable.

01:10:08.760 | Like the, the, the scale is like only comparable to the universe in

01:10:14.880 | terms of stars and galaxies and, and, and, and for the sheer immensity of it.

01:10:19.520 | And so we're, we're, we're describing new species every year.

01:10:23.800 | And just walking on the trail at night, you and I have seen, you know, you

01:10:28.520 | see a tiny little spider hidden in a crevice and has the scientific

01:10:32.560 | eye ever seen that spider before?

01:10:34.440 | Has it been documented?

01:10:35.560 | Do we know anything about its life cycle?

01:10:37.120 | There's still so much that's here that is completely unknown.

01:10:41.680 | You know, we have pictures of all these butterflies.

01:10:43.480 | Somebody went out with a butterfly net and caught these butterflies.

01:10:45.640 | Took a picture of it, gave it a name, put it in a butterfly book.

01:10:48.720 | But what do we know?

01:10:49.960 | What host plant do they use for their caterpillars?

01:10:52.800 | What's their geographical range?

01:10:54.240 | What, what do we actually know?

01:10:55.960 | Not that much.

01:10:56.560 | So are there creatures out here that haven't been described?

01:10:58.920 | Absolutely.

01:10:59.560 | And some of them could be extremely effective predators in a niche environment.

01:11:05.600 | Yeah, absolutely.

01:11:07.360 | I mean, certainly, certainly in the canopy, 50% of the life in a

01:11:11.320 | rainforest is in the canopy and we've had very limited access to

01:11:15.560 | the canopy for all of history.

01:11:17.680 | You know, if you want it to get up into the rainforest canopy, you

01:11:19.880 | basically have to climb a vine or what scientists, when I was a kid, I

01:11:23.320 | always used to see them with like the slingshots or the bow and arrows.

01:11:25.760 | They would, they would shoot a.

01:11:26.680 | A piece of paracord over a branch, pull the rope up and then, you

01:11:30.720 | know, do the Ascension thing.

01:11:31.800 | And then you're up in this tree getting swarmed by sweat bees,

01:11:35.240 | getting stung by wasps.

01:11:36.720 | You're trying to do science up there in that environment.

01:11:39.120 | It's incredibly hostile.

01:11:40.240 | And so having canopy platforms, I actually met a guy at a French

01:11:44.600 | film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over the

01:11:50.120 | canopy of the Amazon and then lay these big nets over the, over

01:11:53.760 | the broccoli of the, of the trees.

01:11:55.320 | And the nets were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets

01:11:58.640 | and then reach through and pull cactuses and lizards and snakes

01:12:01.800 | and whatever, just take specimens from the canopy.

01:12:03.760 | That's how difficult it is that, that scientists have

01:12:06.680 | resorted to using hot air balloons.

01:12:08.720 | And so having a tree house, having canopy platforms, having, it's,

01:12:13.400 | it's starting to get, there's starting to be more and more access

01:12:16.160 | to the rainforest canopy.

01:12:17.160 | And so we're beginning to log more data.

01:12:21.240 | You know, we've even observed in our tree house, which is supposed

01:12:24.720 | to be the tallest in the world.

01:12:25.760 | We're seeing lizards that we don't see on the ground, lizards that have

01:12:29.400 | never been documented on this, on this river, like we're seeing snakes

01:12:32.400 | where they're saying we saw the snake inside a crevice on that tree in

01:12:35.960 | the Strangler fig and we don't know what it is, it's just, people

01:12:39.840 | haven't been up there.

01:12:41.200 | And that's where a lot of the monkeys are.

01:12:43.360 | That's where there's just a lot of dynamic life up there.

01:12:46.760 | Yeah.

01:12:47.640 | I mean, you, when you wake up in the canopy in the morning, in the

01:12:51.520 | Amazon rainforest, as soon as that the darkness lifts, as soon as that

01:12:55.960 | purple comes in the East in the morning, the howler monkeys start up.

01:12:59.560 | Yeah.

01:12:59.960 | And then the parrots start up and then the tinamou start going and

01:13:03.080 | then the macaws start going.

01:13:04.000 | And pretty soon everybody's going to the spider monkey groups are

01:13:06.080 | all calling to each other.

01:13:07.040 | And it's just the whole dawn chorus starts.

01:13:09.520 | And it's so exciting.

01:13:10.440 | So you're saying when they're screaming, it's usually about sex.

01:13:12.880 | Sex or territory.

01:13:14.280 | Usually.

01:13:15.480 | Sex and violence or implied violence or the threat of violence.

01:13:19.440 | Yeah.

01:13:20.000 | I mean, howler monkeys in the morning, they're letting other groups know

01:13:22.480 | this is where we're at.

01:13:23.440 | We're going to be foraging over here.

01:13:24.960 | You better stay away.

01:13:26.480 | And so it's a little bit respectful as well.

01:13:28.480 | There is order in the chaos.

01:13:29.800 | So just speaking of screaming, macaws are like these beautiful creatures.

01:13:34.680 | They're a lifelong partners.

01:13:37.880 | They stick together.

01:13:38.800 | So there's, they're monogamous.

01:13:40.880 | So you see two of them together, but when they communicate their

01:13:44.240 | love language, it seems to be very loud screaming.

01:13:47.040 | Yeah.

01:13:47.400 | What, what do you learn about relationships from a cause?

01:13:51.320 | That, that it can be loud and rough and still be loving.

01:13:54.520 | And still be loving.

01:13:55.600 | But is that interesting to you that there's like monogamy in some

01:13:58.920 | species that they, they're lifelong partners.

01:14:01.200 | And then there's like total lack of monogamy in other species.

01:14:04.240 | It's all interesting.

01:14:05.560 | I mean, there's the anti-monogamy crew.

01:14:07.560 | Who's like, you know, we were never meant to be monogamous.

01:14:09.920 | We're supposed to just be animals.

01:14:11.440 | And then there's the other side of the crew.

01:14:13.320 | That's like, we were meant to be monogamous.

01:14:15.680 | We are monogamous creatures.

01:14:17.480 | That's what God wanted between a man and a woman.

01:14:19.840 | And then other people like, yeah, but I know about these two gay penguins.

01:14:23.000 | And so that's natural too.

01:14:24.120 | And so then everyone tries to draw their, their identity.

01:14:28.040 | They're trying to justify their identity off of the laws of nature.

01:14:31.200 | So the fact that macaws are monogamous really doesn't have anything to do

01:14:34.520 | with anybody except for that it's beneficial for them to

01:14:37.320 | work together to raise chicks.

01:14:39.000 | It's difficult.

01:14:40.000 | They rely on Ironwood trees or Aguaje palms, and it's difficult

01:14:45.160 | to find the right hole in a tree.

01:14:46.960 | There's only so much macaw real estate.

01:14:48.840 | And so they need to use those holes.

01:14:50.480 | And each one of those ancient trees, it's usually 500 years or more is a, is

01:14:56.440 | a, is a valuable macaw generating site in the forest.

01:14:59.760 | And so if those trees go down, you lose exponential amounts of macaws and

01:15:04.800 | that's how you get endangered species.

01:15:06.000 | And so that's why we're trying to protect the Ironwood trees.

01:15:08.000 | Another ridiculous question.

01:15:10.600 | Tell me if every jungle creature was the same size, who would be the new apex

01:15:16.280 | predator, the new alpha at the top of the food chain?

01:15:18.400 | Dude, that's like super smash brothers of the jungle.

01:15:21.760 | That's incredible.

01:15:22.800 | Yeah.

01:15:23.120 | Like bullet ants.

01:15:24.440 | If you had a bullet ant that was the size.

01:15:26.760 | Yeah.

01:15:28.560 | Can it be like a, like a tournament?

01:15:30.280 | So everyone is pound for pound ratioed for efficiency.

01:15:33.880 | So you have basically like a six foot bullet ant versus a huge black

01:15:38.600 | caiman versus an anaconda versus ocelots are the size of jaguars versus.

01:15:42.000 | Yeah.

01:15:42.360 | Well, let's, let's go bullet ant versus black caiman.

01:15:45.400 | But they're comparable size.

01:15:47.600 | I don't know, man.

01:15:50.520 | I never thought about it.

01:15:51.240 | I mean, bullet ant has these giant, giant, giant mandibles.

01:15:55.000 | It could probably grab the black caiman.

01:15:56.680 | And then at that amount of venom, you're talking about a bucket of venom

01:15:59.880 | going into that black caiman.

01:16:01.080 | Black caiman is going to get paralyzed immediately.

01:16:03.120 | Well, insects have just a, just a tremendous amount of like strength.

01:16:07.400 | I don't know how they generate what the geometry of that is.

01:16:09.600 | The natural world can't create that same kind of power in the bigger thing.

01:16:12.840 | It seems like, it seems like ants and like just these tiny

01:16:17.360 | creatures are the ones that are able to have that much strength.

01:16:19.520 | I don't know how that works.

01:16:20.600 | What the physics of that is.

01:16:21.200 | Yeah, so like an ant, a leaf cutter ant lifting that leaf.

01:16:23.880 | That doesn't make any sense.

01:16:25.000 | Yeah.

01:16:26.160 | It doesn't make any sense.

01:16:27.440 | I don't know.

01:16:28.120 | I don't know if that's a limit of physics.

01:16:29.520 | I think it's just the limit of evolution of how that, that works.

01:16:32.240 | One of the most interesting limits that I heard, uh, somebody talking about

01:16:35.520 | recently was the reason that dinosaurs didn't get bigger, even bigger because

01:16:39.360 | that's the, the, the, the, the conditions on earth were favorable towards it was

01:16:43.760 | that at some point their eggs reached this physical limits that their eggs

01:16:47.840 | reached a size that the eggs were so big that, that eggs need to breathe for the

01:16:51.480 | embryo to survive and their eggs reached a limit where in order to have a shell

01:16:55.640 | that could hold the mass of the liquid and the, and the young dinosaur, if they

01:16:59.920 | got bigger, it wouldn't be permeable anymore.

01:17:02.040 | And I thought that was so interesting because the entire size of physical

01:17:05.720 | creatures was determined by how thick shell can be before it breaks or before

01:17:10.040 | it can't pass air through it.

01:17:12.360 | Yeah.

01:17:12.480 | There may be a lot, a lot of the like biophysics limits, you know, fascinating

01:17:18.440 | stuff, just like the, the interplay between biology, chemistry, and physics

01:17:22.640 | of a, like a life form is like this thing, there's a lot involved in creating a

01:17:27.440 | single living organism that could survive in this world and bigger, you know, being

01:17:31.920 | big is not always good, but being a big creature, it's for many reasons, like you

01:17:36.320 | were saying, the big creatures seem to be going extinct for many reasons, but in a

01:17:41.640 | human world is because there seem to be of higher value.

01:17:45.240 | Given the current size of the jungle, I think that the, the MVP, the pound for

01:17:50.320 | pound goat is ocelots, you talking about like a midsize 40, 40, 50 pound cat that

01:17:58.840 | can climb that does unlike a Jaguar, Jaguar, every time it hunts, it's going

01:18:03.480 | after a deer catches a deer, the deer could hit it with its, with its antlers.

01:18:07.440 | It can tear it with its hooves.

01:18:08.680 | It's risking its life for that meal and ocelot ocelots walk around at

01:18:14.000 | night and they climb a tree, eat a whole bunch of eggs, eat the mother bird too.

01:18:20.280 | Kill a snake, maybe mess around and eat a baby came and they

01:18:23.600 | can have whatever they like.

01:18:25.040 | And they're, they're sleek enough and smart enough to get away from predators.

01:18:30.000 | They don't really have predators.

01:18:32.120 | And so they're sort of, they sort of occupy this perfect niche where they can

01:18:36.120 | hunt small prey in high quantity without taking on big risks.

01:18:40.120 | And so if you had to choose an animal to be, it'd probably be like an ocelot, or I

01:18:44.280 | would say giant river otters, which are so damn cool because they're, the locals

01:18:49.960 | call them Lobos de Rio, river wolves, because they're so tough and they're so

01:18:53.960 | social and they're so like us because they're intensely familial groups.

01:18:58.360 | They live in holes by the sides of lakes and they swim through the water and

01:19:01.400 | they catch fish all day long, piranhas, they eat them just like the scales go

01:19:05.200 | flying as they eat these piranhas and they're so joyous in the way they swim

01:19:09.640 | and they have friends and they have family and they, I think it would be, I

01:19:13.160 | think we could relate to being a river otter really, because I can't picture

01:19:16.520 | being a cat and being so solitary and just marching along a 15 mile route and

01:19:23.920 | making sure there's no other cats and coming in on your territory and marking

01:19:27.760 | that territory.

01:19:28.240 | It seems, it seems very solo and very cat-like.

01:19:32.880 | It's a lonely existence.

01:19:34.000 | Lonely existence.

01:19:34.960 | And we humans are social beings.

01:19:36.360 | We're so social.

01:19:37.280 | And so to me, river otters, it's like having a big Italian family.

01:19:40.680 | You're like constantly eating, you're freaking out.

01:19:42.400 | You know, just like causing problems with the black caiman.

01:19:44.760 | Take down a black caiman.

01:19:45.960 | Yeah, start a street fight.

01:19:46.840 | Yeah, it's a family thing.

01:19:48.800 | You mentioned piranhas.

01:19:50.120 | Yeah.

01:19:50.440 | What do you think, you know, they're, they're a source of a lot of fear for

01:19:53.480 | people.

01:19:53.840 | What, what do you find beautiful and fascinating about these creatures?

01:19:56.320 | They're also kind of social or at least they hunt in operating groups.

01:20:00.000 | Yeah, not in the mammalian way though.

01:20:02.320 | Piranhas are in large schools, but I, Fisher is so different.

01:20:06.640 | Like if you, I can talk to you all day about how, how much I'd love to be an

01:20:10.520 | otter also going back to the fighting thing, otters and weasels muscle a day

01:20:15.640 | tend to be very loose in their skin.

01:20:17.360 | So if you grab an otter, it can still rotate around to bite you.

01:20:20.200 | So it's like, if I grab you by the back, you're stuck.

01:20:22.520 | You know, like we can't, you grab them by the skin.

01:20:25.480 | Yeah.

01:20:26.040 | They can rotate around and just shred you apart.

01:20:28.600 | So they're, they're really cool fighters.

01:20:30.320 | Um, piranha fish fish.

01:20:33.280 | I don't, I don't, you know, I don't identify with fish in terms like that.

01:20:36.960 | I think living out here has made me think of fish as, um, kind of rapid

01:20:43.560 | food that can or can't be gotten.

01:20:45.080 | Like, you know, so to me, a piranha is just, is when I see a piranha, I think

01:20:48.480 | about how I want to, how I want it to taste.

01:20:50.320 | Yeah.

01:20:50.800 | So like fish is a, is a food source for so many creatures in the jungle.

01:20:55.080 | So they're primarily food source, but piranhas are, I mean, they're predators.

01:21:00.200 | They're serious predators.

01:21:01.600 | They are serious predators.

01:21:02.740 | I found a baby black caiman not that long ago and he was missing all of his toes

01:21:06.760 | because the piranhas had eaten them off.

01:21:08.120 | It was really sad.

01:21:08.880 | He just had these stumps and he was swimming around the water and I was

01:21:11.120 | like, you are not going to make it.

01:21:12.320 | He was like eight inches and he was such a cute little puppy.

01:21:15.760 | He had those big eyes.

01:21:16.760 | And I was just like, man, you already are missing all your toes.

01:21:20.120 | I was like, it's just a matter of time.

01:21:22.200 | Now he can't get away.

01:21:23.840 | So some big agami heron is going to come and just nail him, pop him down his throat.

01:21:28.400 | And that's the end of that for the caiman.

01:21:29.640 | I mean, nature is metal.

01:21:31.480 | Nature sure as shit is metal.

01:21:33.200 | Bite off a little bit and then makes you vulnerable.

01:21:35.720 | And then that vulnerability is exploited by some other species.

01:21:38.240 | And then that's it.

01:21:39.040 | That's the end.

01:21:39.760 | Yeah.

01:21:40.120 | But humans are brutal too.

01:21:41.760 | Like, like, like that story we heard about that guy the other day who caught a

01:21:45.880 | stingray on a fishing hook, chopped its tail off to make it safe for humans, cut a

01:21:51.840 | piece of the stingray off so he could use it for bait and then threw the live fish

01:21:56.000 | back in the river.

01:21:56.680 | Like to me, that is incomprehensible amounts of cruelty with, with, with flawed

01:22:02.280 | logic in every direction.

01:22:03.440 | Like if you're going to use the thing as bait, use it as bait.

01:22:05.960 | If you're going to remove its tail, well then just kill it all together.

01:22:09.160 | Yeah.

01:22:09.560 | Or if you want to save the animal and not kill it, then don't maim it before you

01:22:14.760 | return it to its, it was so weird.

01:22:16.760 | So if you kill an animal, you want to use it to its fullest by using it as a food

01:22:21.760 | source, by cooking it, by, you know, eating every part of it, all that kind of stuff.

01:22:26.160 | Yeah.

01:22:26.640 | So we have, we've been eating Paco.

01:22:28.480 | Yeah.

01:22:28.960 | In your time here.

01:22:29.800 | Fried Paco is great.

01:22:31.360 | Fried Paco is delicious, full of nutrients.

01:22:33.520 | You could tell it makes you healthy.

01:22:34.640 | I feel like we'd better work out so that we can go harder in the jungle.

01:22:37.680 | And so, uh, a few months ago in August, when the river was down, it was, there

01:22:43.560 | was a day that the river was clear.

01:22:45.120 | And a friend of mine, Victor, who's, who's married to a native girl.

01:22:49.760 | He said, it's time to go Paco fishing.

01:22:52.120 | And at the time we were stuck out here and we had no resupply.

01:22:54.840 | Everybody was busy.

01:22:56.880 | And so everyone was demoralized.

01:22:59.640 | The staff was hungry.

01:23:00.680 | We were hungry.

01:23:01.440 | And it really became this thing of like, Hey, go catch us some Paco.

01:23:04.800 | They were working on the trails.

01:23:06.240 | They were installing the solar.

01:23:07.200 | We were working hard and we didn't have food.

01:23:09.000 | And so we went out to the river and what we did was we went up river, we camped on

01:23:14.360 | the beach and in the morning, Victor's wife was, was canoeing with the, with the

01:23:21.000 | paddle dead quiet, don't let the paddle touch the wooden boat.

01:23:23.920 | Nikita was balanced in the middle of the thing.

01:23:27.080 | Victor's on the front with this huge fishing rod.

01:23:29.720 | And I'm sitting there and he goes, I'll catch the first one.

01:23:31.920 | You catch the second one.

01:23:32.880 | And he's got this huge fishing rod and a piece of half rotten

01:23:35.880 | meat from the day before.

01:23:37.680 | And he's smacking it against the wall, 6am.

01:23:39.680 | He's just letting it smack against the water.

01:23:41.880 | And I'm going, and we're floating down the river and I'm

01:23:45.200 | going, this is not going to work.

01:23:46.440 | And we're floating and we're floating and a half hour passes.

01:23:49.880 | And I'm going, it's dawn.

01:23:50.840 | I want to go back to sleep.

01:23:51.960 | I'm such an, I'm just not a morning person.

01:23:54.440 | And all of a sudden a fish hits that line, almost pulls

01:23:57.160 | this man off of his feet.

01:23:58.600 | And he swings the thing in the fish comes on the boat.

01:24:01.680 | And then I realized he's got a big metal mallet on the boat so that you

01:24:04.680 | could try to shut that fish off.

01:24:06.160 | And it's this huge or shaped thick muscular Paco.

01:24:11.160 | And as soon as I saw that fish, I just thought, wow, the strongest of this

01:24:18.600 | species for millions of years have been swimming in this river and suddenly

01:24:23.960 | we've through this incredible combination of the boat and the, and the, and the

01:24:28.120 | cord and the hook, none of which we made and the skill that he had from knowing

01:24:32.720 | how to fish a Paco, because otherwise no chance that you're getting that fish.

01:24:35.880 | They hide.

01:24:36.520 | They're very, very suspicious of what you're doing.

01:24:38.920 | We had gotten this fish onto the boat and boom, you hammer it like a caveman.

01:24:43.360 | Boom.

01:24:43.840 | Doesn't die.

01:24:44.880 | Boom.

01:24:45.480 | You have to crush its skull.

01:24:46.600 | And now you have this fish and you're, you're holding this genetic

01:24:50.800 | material, this sustenance for your life that has been developing

01:24:54.680 | since the dinosaur times.

01:24:56.680 | It's so beautiful.

01:24:58.360 | The act, the sacred act of eating that of, of the fish, of the competition with the

01:25:05.480 | fish, and we spent the morning fishing.

01:25:07.000 | We got three Pacos, three huge giant vegetarian Piranha.

01:25:11.160 | And I just remember touching them with so much reverence, thinking about the

01:25:15.600 | incredible history and how that before these rivers existed, those Pacos were.

01:25:20.880 | We're swimming through the water and, and, and, and trying to survive through,

01:25:25.880 | through, through history, through history, through history until this, until we, we

01:25:29.720 | took just a few and we did it respectfully and we did it when we needed it most, not

01:25:35.360 | at a time when it was just for fun.

01:25:36.600 | And it was, it was really, really special.

01:25:38.320 | Well, humans using them for sustenance.

01:25:40.800 | There's a collaboration there.

01:25:42.360 | That's, that's something also that I've seen in the jungle, that there's

01:25:45.680 | creatures using each other and it's like a dance of either, uh, mutually using each

01:25:51.360 | other or it's parasitic or symbiotic.

01:25:54.480 | It's interesting.

01:25:55.800 | Like there's, uh, uh, a medicinal plant you grabbed that was full of ants that

01:26:03.360 | were like trying to, uh, murder you by biting, but they were defending the plant

01:26:08.680 | that they were using for whatever purpose, but there's a clear dance there of the

01:26:12.720 | ants using the plant and the plant existing there for other applications and all they

01:26:16.880 | use for humans.

01:26:17.880 | And there's that kind of circle of life happening, but the ants were a defense

01:26:21.760 | mech, so that the plant didn't have its own defense mechanism.

01:26:24.920 | The ants, the army of ants was there to protect the plant.

01:26:28.880 | And did you actually, when you, remember we put our backpacks down at that one spot

01:26:34.000 | and it was like the ants got on your backpack and I said, oh shit, this is that

01:26:37.400 | tree.

01:26:37.680 | Did you actually get bitten by one of those?

01:26:40.120 | Because they're incredibly painful.

01:26:41.520 | Yeah.

01:26:42.000 | Tangorana one.

01:26:42.800 | They're like, yeah.

01:26:43.400 | Yeah.

01:26:44.440 | Surprisingly painful.

01:26:45.360 | Cause there's small, there's nothing like, um, luckily have not been bitten by a

01:26:49.840 | bullet yet.

01:26:50.680 | But it's just, it's amazing because they live inside the tree.

01:26:54.120 | The tree comes standard with holes in it that allow the ants to move and to exist

01:26:59.400 | safe and it protects their eggs and they protect the tree.

01:27:04.000 | And so we saw that spot where there was a perfect circle around the trees because

01:27:07.880 | the ants had excavated the other vegetation so that those trees could

01:27:13.160 | have no competition to grow.

01:27:14.560 | The incredible calculation of how ants know to guard come programs to garden

01:27:22.400 | that tree and the tree somehow has been genetically informed to have

01:27:27.920 | ant habitat within itself.

01:27:29.760 | It's, it's, it's mind blowing.

01:27:31.880 | And it actually is the foundation of a lot of existential confusion for me,

01:27:36.000 | because how the hell is this possible?

01:27:38.040 | Yeah.

01:27:38.760 | Well, one of the things you mentioned, that's also a source of a lot of

01:27:43.640 | existential confusion for me is ants and the intelligence of different

01:27:47.960 | creatures in the forest.

01:27:49.040 | There's these giant colonies, there's just giant systems, but even just looking

01:27:54.080 | at a single colony of ants, them collaborating leafcutter ants is an

01:27:59.320 | incredible system.

01:28:00.680 | So individually, the ants seem kind of dumb and simplistic, but taken together,

01:28:05.640 | there is a vast intelligence operating that's able to be robust and resilient

01:28:11.840 | in any kind of conditions, is able to figure out a new environment, is able

01:28:15.680 | to be resilient to any kinds of attacks and all that kind of stuff.

01:28:19.200 | What do you find beautiful about them?

01:28:21.040 | Like, as you said, just leafcutter ants in this jungle, that's forgetting all

01:28:25.560 | the other hundreds of species of ants that are in this jungle, but just the

01:28:28.480 | leafcutters apparently digest roughly 17% of the total biomass of the forest.

01:28:36.960 | Everything, all these giant trees, all that leaf litter, 17% of that, almost

01:28:42.160 | a fifth of this forest cycles through leafcutter ant colonies.

01:28:45.600 | So they're constantly regenerating the forest.

01:28:48.280 | They're a huge source of the, of the driver of this ecosystem.

01:28:52.400 | And so to me, when you see them working, it's again, like I said, you see

01:28:55.920 | friends as you go through the jungle, you see all the Kapok trees, you see

01:28:58.440 | Kenya tree, you see, oh, there's leafcutter ants doing what they're supposed to do.

01:29:01.720 | And it's, it's just so beautiful.

01:29:03.120 | I find them very beautiful.

01:29:04.680 | Army ants, they're so tough.

01:29:06.640 | They're so ready to fight.

01:29:07.920 | They have this huge mandibles.

01:29:09.040 | They're just ready to, they're just, they're transporting their eggs.

01:29:11.960 | They're moving from here to there.

01:29:13.000 | Anything that's in the way is getting eaten.

01:29:14.720 | They're just savage.

01:29:15.720 | And they're kind of cute for that.

01:29:16.920 | Unless you're tied to a tree.

01:29:18.600 | The savagery is cute.

01:29:20.400 | I find that, yeah, it's kind of reassuring.

01:29:22.120 | You know, you want certain things to be tough.

01:29:24.200 | That's their part.

01:29:25.120 | Oh, that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the nature mechanism.

01:29:31.240 | Yeah.

01:29:31.760 | Powerful play.

01:29:32.520 | Um, but, but, but yeah, but the army ants are so savage.

01:29:39.560 | You know, like if you, if you step on army ants, they will all kamikaze and

01:29:43.680 | just attack onto your feet and they'll just, they'll just sacrifice their own

01:29:46.800 | life for the good of the thing.

01:29:47.880 | And there'll be trying to kill your, your shoes.

01:29:50.160 | And there's something funny about that to me.

01:29:53.120 | There's something like kind of reassuring.

01:29:54.720 | Again, unless, unless imagine if you're going through the jungle and you slip

01:29:59.760 | and you fall and you twist your knee and you fall in just the right way,

01:30:03.920 | but you can't get up, you can't, you're stuck there and then army ants find you.

01:30:09.480 | They will take you apart.

01:30:11.080 | There are records of horses that have been tied up and army ants come and

01:30:17.880 | they'll take out the whole horse.

01:30:19.120 | Imagine the pain of that.

01:30:20.520 | It might be raining on us very hard, very soon.

01:30:25.360 | You want to pause?

01:30:26.120 | Nope.

01:30:26.480 | I think we'll stay here until the ship goes down.

01:30:28.760 | We should mention that there's this one source of light and

01:30:32.440 | we're shrouded in darkness.

01:30:33.760 | And now the night shift is going to take over soon.

01:30:35.960 | And we are in the Amazon rainforest.

01:30:37.720 | What does the rainforest represent to you?

01:30:40.080 | When you zoom out, look at the entirety of it.

01:30:44.080 | Carl Sagan's pale blue dot resonated with a lot of people.

01:30:50.760 | That everything you've ever heard of all the heroes, all the villains, all of your

01:30:56.160 | ancestors, every achievement, tragedy, triumph, everything has happened on that

01:31:02.200 | one spot, this one tiny, tiny little rock that has life on it.

01:31:06.720 | And to me, the rainforests represent the crown jewel of that.

01:31:10.960 | As far as we know into the best of our knowledge and with our shrewd scientific

01:31:16.280 | brains at their fullest capacity, this is still the only place that we know that

01:31:22.320 | has life and given that the fact that there are still these tropical towering

01:31:31.240 | complex ecosystems that we are barely understand crawling and full of the most

01:31:39.040 | incredible life is just, to me, it's, it's, it's so wonderful.

01:31:43.440 | It's so incredible.

01:31:44.240 | Those are the waterfalls and the birds and the macaws and the

01:31:47.120 | Jaguars, it's barely believable.

01:31:48.640 | Like if you were to theoretically tell a hypothetical alien that I live on this

01:31:53.040 | planet and there, there's just these places where everything is interconnected.

01:31:56.480 | Everything means something to something else.

01:31:58.480 | And the whole thing is this system that keeps us alive.

01:32:01.200 | And each tree is pumping air into the river and there's an invisible

01:32:04.280 | river above the actual river.

01:32:05.960 | And the whole thing goes into stabilizing our global climate.

01:32:08.920 | And each little tiny leaf cutter and somehow contributes to this giant

01:32:14.240 | biotic orchestra that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible.

01:32:18.400 | That is beautiful.

01:32:19.840 | I love that.

01:32:21.360 | And so the, the rainforests to me are the greatest celebration of life and probably

01:32:26.160 | the greatest challenge for us as a global society, because if we can't protect the

01:32:30.720 | crown jewel, the best thing, you know, the most beautiful part, then, then we're

01:32:36.480 | really, really missing the point.

01:32:38.840 | Yeah.

01:32:39.040 | The diversity of organisms here is the biggest celebration of life.

01:32:44.880 | That is at the core of what makes earth a really special thing.

01:32:49.600 | That said, you and I have been arguing about aliens for pretty

01:32:53.080 | much the day I showed up.

01:32:54.240 | All right.

01:32:56.680 | So you brought a machete to this fight.

01:32:58.880 | Um, luckily the table is long enough.

01:33:02.000 | You can't reach me.

01:33:04.080 | So to you, earth is truly special.

01:33:07.640 | Yeah.

01:33:08.080 | You don't think there's other earths out there.

01:33:10.120 | Millions of other earths in our galaxy.

01:33:12.200 | When you look up, you know, we were sitting in the Amazon river.

01:33:14.880 | Okay.

01:33:15.640 | At dark, the storm rolled over and you started counting the stars one, two, and

01:33:21.280 | that was, once you can count the stars, that was a sign that the storm will

01:33:24.560 | actually pass, eventually will pass.

01:33:26.640 | And that's what you were doing three, four, five, and it's going to pass.

01:33:29.520 | So you're not going to have to sit in that river for like all night.

01:33:32.840 | So just a couple hours to keep yourself warm.

01:33:35.360 | Okay.

01:33:36.320 | Each of those stars, this earth like planets around them.

01:33:39.800 | Okay.

01:33:40.320 | Why do you think there's not alien civilizations there?

01:33:44.440 | You can write down a calculation on a napkin.

01:33:49.720 | You can cite different Hollywood movies.

01:33:51.960 | You can point up to the pieces of light in the stars.

01:33:54.560 | But if you, if I talk about, show me a single cell that's not from this planet,

01:33:59.600 | it's still not possible.

01:34:01.400 | And so I agree with you that the likelihood is there.

01:34:03.720 | All indications point to it.

01:34:05.320 | It would be fascinating, especially if it was done in, especially, you know,

01:34:09.280 | imagine finding a planet of alternative life forms, not necessarily even

01:34:13.320 | intelligent, imagine just a planet of butterflies, whatever, you know, something

01:34:17.080 | else that would be amazing.

01:34:18.880 | But, but I'm concerned with the reality that we have in front of us is

01:34:23.640 | that this is the spaceship, this is life.

01:34:25.720 | And so right now, given that reality, maybe that's, maybe that's the case.

01:34:30.000 | Maybe, maybe there are other planets or, or maybe we are the first, maybe life

01:34:39.320 | originated here, maybe God, the universe, whatever, maybe, maybe this is it.

01:34:45.840 | This is the, this is the, this is the testing ground for something bigger.

01:34:50.320 | And, and, and, and this complexity and this diversity of life and this

01:34:54.880 | life that we have is that important.

01:34:57.640 | And I think that part of what we do when we go, oh yeah, but there's other

01:35:00.600 | planets where, first of all, we're, we're, we're taking an assumption into

01:35:05.560 | reality without, I mean, you know, aliens are right now are about as real as Santa

01:35:09.760 | Claus.

01:35:10.240 | We think they're out there, but we're not sure.

01:35:12.280 | Maybe a little more real because, you know, it could make sense.

01:35:14.520 | We, no one has an alien.

01:35:16.520 | No one's seen an alien.

01:35:17.800 | No one's even seen cellular life.

01:35:19.440 | And so I'm not again, if they showed up tomorrow, great, let's study them.

01:35:23.480 | But right now we have this very simple threat going on where we can't stop

01:35:30.600 | killing each other and our living environment.

01:35:32.520 | And so while some people can specialize in looking to the stars and to other

01:35:36.880 | planets and talk about being an interplanetary species, I'm very much

01:35:40.920 | concerned with the fact that here in our home turf, our living environment, where

01:35:45.640 | the air is good and the rivers are clean and the trees are big and there's macaws

01:35:50.080 | flying through the sky and salmon in the rivers, not only do we have a responsibility

01:35:56.320 | to each other and to our children to protect this incredible gift, that is our

01:36:01.000 | entire reality seems kind of weird too.

01:36:03.800 | At some point it, conservation seems kind of ridiculous.

01:36:07.400 | Like you're begging people to not pollute the things that keep them alive.

01:36:11.080 | It's, it's, it's almost kind of silly at a point, but, but we have this incredible

01:36:17.880 | thing where there are fish in the ocean and in the rivers, they come standard

01:36:20.920 | with life on earth and, and we're, we're, we're harming the ability of earth's

01:36:24.800 | ecosystems to provide for that life.

01:36:27.080 | And we are the generation that's going to decide if those systems continue

01:36:32.520 | to provide life to all the people on earth and all the generations.

01:36:35.720 | And by the way, all the other animals that exist for their own reasons, other

01:36:40.520 | consciousnesses that we're just beginning to understand elephants, humpback whales,

01:36:45.360 | whatever families of giant river otters, you, not everything can be

01:36:50.320 | seen from a human perspective.

01:36:51.880 | These are other species that have their own stories.

01:36:54.160 | And so I'm, I'm more biocentric than anthropocentric in that I, I, I think

01:36:59.960 | that that nature is important, but I also believe that we are, we are special.

01:37:07.840 | We are the most intelligent animal.

01:37:10.480 | So one, I agree with you.

01:37:12.080 | There's some degree to which when you imagine aliens, you forget if by, for a

01:37:19.120 | moment, how special and important life is here on earth.

01:37:23.120 | Yes.

01:37:23.800 | But it's also a way to reach out through curiosity and trying to

01:37:33.480 | understand what is intelligence, what is consciousness, what is exactly the

01:37:36.800 | thing that makes life on earth special.

01:37:39.680 | Another way of doing that, and I see the jungle in that same way is basically

01:37:44.160 | treating the animals all around us, the life forms all around us as kinds of

01:37:48.080 | aliens, as that's a humbling way, that's an intellectual humility with which to

01:37:55.040 | approach the study of like, what the hell is going on here?

01:37:58.720 | This is truly incredible.

01:38:01.040 | Like are the animals we've met over the last few days, conscious, what is the

01:38:09.280 | nature of their intelligence?

01:38:10.480 | What is the nature of their consciousness?

01:38:12.040 | What motivates them?

01:38:12.960 | Are they individual creatures or they're actually part of the large system?

01:38:17.240 | And how large is the system?

01:38:18.800 | Is earth one big system and humans are just little fingertips of that system?

01:38:23.280 | Or are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything

01:38:30.320 | else is in the emerging complexity of the system?

01:38:33.280 | So I think thinking about aliens is a necessary, uh, I like my Tom with a

01:38:40.280 | little drop of poison from Tom Waits is a necessary perturbation of the system

01:38:44.560 | of our thinking to sort of say, Hey, we don't know what the fuck's going on

01:38:48.280 | around here.

01:38:48.720 | Sure.

01:38:49.120 | And aliens is a nice way to say, okay, uh, the mystery all around us is immense.

01:38:57.920 | Cause to me, likely aliens are living among us, not in a trivial sense, little

01:39:05.880 | green men, but the force that created life, I think permeates the entirety of

01:39:14.360 | the universe, that there is a force that's creative.

01:39:19.160 | Now, the force that created life is a, is a big one.

01:39:23.120 | And then the other thing is, what do you mean by that?

01:39:25.720 | There's aliens living among us.

01:39:29.440 | You mean extraterrestrials?

01:39:30.840 | Yes.

01:39:32.240 | Living among us.

01:39:33.360 | Yes.

01:39:34.280 | You believe that?

01:39:35.640 | Not like a hundred percent, but there's a, as a good percentage, I don't

01:39:40.600 | understand how it's possible for there not to be a very large number of alien

01:39:47.080 | civilization throughout just our galaxy.

01:39:50.760 | But that's different than saying that they're living among us.

01:39:53.840 | If you tell me that there's aliens living five galaxies over and that

01:39:56.920 | they're just out there somewhere, I'm kind of, I'm kind of more on your side

01:40:00.480 | than that they're here because just like Bigfoot, like we have camera traps, we

01:40:05.800 | have DNA sequencing through, through water now, like we can, you're telling

01:40:10.160 | me no one found one wing nut of a, of a, of a ship in all like the Egyptians up

01:40:17.600 | until right now, no one in Russia saw like a crash ship, took a picture,

01:40:21.080 | tweeted that shit real quick.

01:40:22.240 | And, you know, I think there's no Bigfoot.

01:40:24.880 | There's no trivial manifestations of aliens.

01:40:28.000 | I think if they're here, they're here in ways that are not comprehensible

01:40:32.200 | by humans because they're far more advanced than humans.

01:40:34.920 | They're far more advanced than any life forms on earth.

01:40:37.880 | So there, even if it's just their probes, we cannot just even comprehend it.

01:40:43.240 | I think it's possible that they operate in the space of ideas, for example,

01:40:50.160 | that ideas could be aliens, feelings could be aliens, consciousness

01:40:53.840 | itself could be aliens.

01:40:55.080 | So we can't restrict our understanding of what is a life form to a thing that

01:41:02.120 | is a biological creature that operates via natural selection on this particular

01:41:06.920 | planet, it could be much, much, much more sophisticated.

01:41:10.200 | It could be in the space of computation, for example, as we in the 21st century

01:41:14.120 | are developing increasingly sophisticated computational systems

01:41:18.120 | with artificial intelligence.

01:41:19.320 | It could be operating on some other level that we can't even imagine.

01:41:22.600 | It could be operating on a level of physics that we have not

01:41:25.640 | even begun to understand.

01:41:26.840 | Uh, we, we barely understand quantum mechanics.

01:41:31.400 | We use it, quantum mechanics is a way we use to make very accurate predictions,

01:41:36.320 | but to understand why it's operating that way, we don't.

01:41:40.840 | And there's so many gigantic, powerful cosmic entities out there that we detect.

01:41:49.280 | Sometimes can't detect dark matter, dark energy, but it's out there.

01:41:53.000 | We know it exists, but we can't explain why and what the fuck it is.

01:41:58.440 | We give it names, black holes and dark energy and dark matter, but those are

01:42:04.880 | all names for things that mathematical equations predict, but we don't understand.

01:42:10.120 | And so all of that is just to say that aliens could be here in ways that are for

01:42:17.800 | now and maybe for a long time going to be impossible for humans to understand.

01:42:22.040 | So aliens in the, in the strict biological sense, like, like, like, like horseshoe

01:42:27.280 | crabs, we agree that they're, they're not, we haven't found physical aliens.

01:42:33.040 | The only way I can imagine finding physical aliens is if alien species are

01:42:39.280 | trying to communicate with us humans, uh, or with other life forms and are trying

01:42:44.560 | to figure out a way to communicate with us such that we dumb humans would

01:42:49.760 | understand, like, let's create a thing.

01:42:52.360 | Yo, there's a moth the size of a small Eagle.

01:42:59.880 | Let's try to get us 15 minutes of attention, big fan of the podcast.

01:43:05.680 | Okay, Lex, I love you.

01:43:07.920 | Um, all right.

01:43:09.480 | So, so what's yours?

01:43:10.400 | Wouldn't it be interesting?

01:43:11.560 | It'd be really fascinating to me if we found out that there were aliens living

01:43:15.560 | among us and we couldn't see them.

01:43:17.200 | And what some of the people were calling aliens, the scientists, the, the religious

01:43:23.160 | people were calling angels, and then everybody had this realization that whether

01:43:26.560 | you call them aliens or angels, there are these other, there is more, way more to

01:43:31.640 | the universe than we're realizing.

01:43:33.160 | I just, for me, the fact that there's.

01:43:40.280 | There's a skull on the table.

01:43:41.400 | Yeah.

01:43:42.120 | There's a skull on your hand.

01:43:44.800 | There's now a skull in my hand of a monkey with a bullet in his head that I

01:43:49.320 | found on the floor of an indigenous community where they eat monkeys.

01:43:52.720 | I didn't kill the monkey, so save your comments.

01:43:55.560 | But, you know, in terms of, of the animals, I think, I think that when I see

01:44:02.040 | space, it, my feeling, and I'm not requiring anybody else to have this

01:44:06.080 | feeling, but because we know, because this is the only place that we know that

01:44:10.440 | there's life and we have no idea how it started, I just think it's so important.

01:44:16.640 | To protect it.

01:44:18.000 | And, and, and for me, it's just as much about our children as it is about the

01:44:22.600 | little spider monkeys and the little baby caiman that are in the river right now,

01:44:25.760 | because life is so beautiful.

01:44:28.240 | And I think that there's a huge amount of intellectual responsibility that we can.

01:44:34.920 | Transfer off of ourselves.

01:44:37.040 | If we go, yeah, the rivers are filled with trash and yeah, extinction is happening,

01:44:41.720 | but we have to be an interplanetary species anyway, because at any moment,

01:44:45.000 | this could all end from an asteroid and like, everything's going to shit anyway.

01:44:48.480 | And so it's like, we're fucking up this planet.

01:44:50.200 | And it's like, that's, that's, we're just being angry teenagers who are, you

01:44:54.600 | know, going goth for a while.

01:44:55.840 | And it's like, what if you just rolled up your sleeves and said, holy shit, wait a

01:44:59.400 | second, you know, we can pretty much do whatever we want, you know, we can do

01:45:03.720 | what we can fly all over the world.

01:45:05.680 | We have, we can do heart transplants.

01:45:07.800 | We can watch Netflix and the Amazon.

01:45:09.920 | If we wanted to like, we could do all this amazing stuff.

01:45:12.160 | We can capture on video or adventures and go back and watch

01:45:15.280 | them again and again and again.

01:45:16.520 | There's so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to do.

01:45:21.800 | And we're the, we're the richest in history.

01:45:23.200 | I mean, we can do everything.

01:45:24.200 | We could cross the whole planet in a second.

01:45:26.960 | And it's like, that's an amazing time to be alive.

01:45:29.000 | And if we just don't fuck up the ecosystems and kill all the

01:45:32.080 | other animals, we got it made.

01:45:34.440 | Yeah.

01:45:35.240 | So it is true that we can destroy ourselves in nuclear weapons, but it

01:45:39.120 | also is true that that snake that I got to handle yesterday is like one of the

01:45:44.480 | most beautiful things earth has ever created in the, in that little organism

01:45:49.560 | is encapsulated the entire history of earth and it's, it's beautiful.

01:45:53.560 | So we, both things are true.

01:45:55.960 | We should, we should worry about the existential destruction of human

01:45:59.600 | civilization through the weapons we create and we should become.

01:46:03.160 | Multi-planetary species as a backup for that purpose.

01:46:07.240 | But also remember that this place is, is really, really special.

01:46:12.040 | And probably if not difficult, probably impossible to recreate elsewhere.

01:46:16.600 | And by the way, there's something incredibly powerful about a skull.

01:46:22.400 | Yeah.

01:46:22.960 | You've ever hold a human skull.

01:46:25.120 | It'll give you, uh, it'll, it'll, it'll, it'll weigh on you for a sec.

01:46:29.440 | Cause you look into this, the hollow eyes of this face and suddenly you

01:46:33.360 | go, you feel your own teeth, you go, you feel your own skull and you go, holy shit.

01:46:38.360 | You go, what is going on?

01:46:40.280 | It's like taking acid.

01:46:41.120 | You just go, Oh boy.

01:46:42.120 | I forgot that I'm a ghost inhabiting a meat vehicle on a floating rock.

01:46:47.800 | But even, even a monkey, it's like looking at a ancestor, you know, not a direct

01:46:59.240 | ancestor, but there's a, it's like a, you know, like you look in a puddle at a

01:47:03.560 | reflection, a little blurry, but it's still there.

01:47:07.560 | It's still there.

01:47:09.120 | And like the roots of who we are is still there.

01:47:13.760 | And it's, it's all kind of incredible.

01:47:15.760 | Do you ever think of the tree of life?

01:47:17.440 | Just kind of like where we came from.

01:47:19.120 | Yeah.

01:47:20.160 | The jungle is ephemeral.

01:47:23.360 | It just keeps, it's a system that just keeps forgetting because it's just churning

01:47:27.400 | and churning and churning and churning has in some ways, no history, but to create

01:47:32.480 | the jungle, to create life on earth, there's a deep history of lots of death,

01:47:37.600 | sex and death, a festival of sex and death life on earth.

01:47:42.280 | That's what I see in the skull.

01:47:45.520 | Yeah.

01:47:45.960 | There's something, it's, there's something kind of terrifying about that image to me.

01:47:52.320 | Like when I hold that every now and then at night you hold that skull and you, it

01:47:56.080 | just reminds you that you're temporary.

01:47:57.800 | Yeah.

01:47:58.840 | Both you and I will one day have one of those.

01:48:01.560 | Yeah.

01:48:01.920 | Hmm.

01:48:04.360 | Mine will be bigger.

01:48:07.600 | The male competition continues.

01:48:12.680 | The silverback slaps the lesser male once again.

01:48:16.280 | Uh, do you have a lighter?

01:48:18.320 | Yeah, bro.

01:48:19.280 | You want to light this blunt?

01:48:20.240 | What are your favorite animals to interact with?

01:48:26.040 | I mean, my favorite, absolute favorite animal to interact with is 100% elephants,

01:48:32.160 | which there's no elephants here, but I've been incredibly privileged to spend some

01:48:36.040 | time with elephants, both in India and in Africa, and I think that they're so smart

01:48:44.600 | and so complex that we do a really bad job of understanding what an elephant really is.

01:48:50.240 | I think that most children probably think of elephants as like something kind of

01:48:55.760 | cuddly, most adults probably think of have a similar misconception of them.

01:49:00.920 | When you see an elephant, when you see a 12 foot tall bull elephant with bone

01:49:07.800 | coming out of its face with huge tusks and those giant, it's a, it's an octopus

01:49:12.760 | faced butterfly eared behemoth.

01:49:15.640 | That's a survival machine.

01:49:17.160 | And it'll look at you and just go, do I have to kill you to keep safe?

01:49:22.480 | And it's just, they're so tough and they have, they have dirt on their back and

01:49:26.760 | they flower pedals in their little hair.

01:49:28.600 | You realize they have hair all over their body and the power to throw a car over to

01:49:33.280 | flip it, just one of the most impressive animals on earth.

01:49:36.560 | And I think that I've gotten really good at interacting with wild elephants in a

01:49:40.960 | way that's respectful to them.

01:49:42.360 | And I think that, that when an elephant allows you to be in its space, it's because

01:49:47.840 | you're, you're showing submissiveness and respect for the elephant space.

01:49:52.480 | And they're so intelligent that they're communicating with seismic

01:49:57.360 | vibrations through the earth, that they have, you know, matriarchal society, that

01:50:01.360 | they can remember the maps of their ancestors and they know how to find water

01:50:06.480 | that they can solve problems.

01:50:07.640 | They're, they're such beautiful animals.

01:50:09.360 | And they're so talk about aliens.

01:50:11.320 | They're so alien looking these big weird heads and the trunks with all those

01:50:16.920 | muscles, and they're so different than us.

01:50:19.000 | But, but yet I actually think that we, we grew up together, you know, they, they,

01:50:24.560 | they kind of raised us sibling species that we've been, we've inhabited

01:50:28.080 | the same epoch in history.

01:50:30.280 | And, and we've relied on the ecosystems that they've created.

01:50:34.600 | And I think that they have a deep understanding of humans, elephants.

01:50:37.800 | And I think I see them more like aliens, more like non-human

01:50:44.200 | beings that we share the earth with.

01:50:45.960 | So I don't see it as we're humans and they're animals.

01:50:48.120 | I actually see humans, elephants as, as sort of a separate society along with

01:50:52.880 | humans as one of the dominant species on the planet.

01:50:54.960 | So almost every species, especially the intelligent ones, especially the big

01:50:58.880 | ones are their own societies that overlap and sometimes co develop.

01:51:03.800 | Yeah.

01:51:04.360 | I think whales, I think elephants, I think that there's, there's those higher,

01:51:08.920 | you know, no one's suggesting that sardines are, you know, somehow need

01:51:12.440 | human rights or something, but I think the elephants need representation in

01:51:16.120 | governments because they're, they occupy, they, they influence their landscape.

01:51:20.200 | They engineer their environment.

01:51:22.400 | They have emotions, they have families, they have burial rituals.

01:51:25.640 | They're so like us.

01:51:27.040 | And yet we treat them like they're just, just oversized cows

01:51:30.640 | that we have to be scared of.

01:51:31.560 | It's, they're not, they're not the same as, as domesticated livestock.

01:51:35.120 | They're one of the treasures of earth.

01:51:37.640 | I mean, look, let's just say little green men showed up and you said,

01:51:40.800 | they said, well, what's earth.

01:51:41.800 | It's like, well, there's mountains, there's rivers.

01:51:45.080 | It's like, well, how, how do I do this?

01:51:46.400 | You know, there's mountains, rivers, there's, there's elephants.

01:51:49.200 | Like, it's like one of the first things a baby learns is elephant.

01:51:52.800 | Even if he's never seen one, it's just so iconic on earth.

01:51:56.320 | Like you said, um, um, Darren Aronofsky, Darren Aronofsky, um, the,

01:52:02.080 | the elephant walking over the camera.

01:52:03.640 | I haven't seen it.

01:52:04.280 | You said it's incredible.

01:52:05.040 | So at the sphere, the postcard from earth, I mean, it's a celebration

01:52:10.160 | of earth in all forms and one of the critical big creatures in that film

01:52:16.960 | is an elephant and it steps over the audience and the whole, like the

01:52:22.720 | whole steer reverberates that power.

01:52:25.280 | I mean, some of it is size.

01:52:27.720 | Yeah.

01:52:28.640 | Some of it is like, how did earth create this?

01:52:31.880 | It is a weird looking creature, but we take it for granted.

01:52:35.480 | Cause we've accepted that this earth can't create this kind of thing,

01:52:38.880 | but it is weird, beautifully weird.

01:52:42.400 | Oh, it's beautifully weird.

01:52:43.760 | I mean, I mean, elephants, there's something really

01:52:46.160 | impressive and wise about them.

01:52:48.600 | There's also beautiful, weird.

01:52:50.480 | That isn't so, that doesn't come with so much grandeur.

01:52:52.960 | Like to me, a giraffe is beautifully weird, but they're just, you know,

01:52:58.040 | they're 18 foot tall camel deer things with, you know, giant necks and they're

01:53:03.360 | strange and they're, they're absolutely serenely beautiful, but they don't, they

01:53:07.560 | don't have that deep intelligence that, that elephants have there's something

01:53:12.280 | that elephants have, you see in their eyes.

01:53:14.480 | Where's, how does the intelligence manifest itself?

01:53:17.160 | Well, this is the thing.

01:53:18.920 | Uh, a lot of people, a lot of the, when I was reading friends to wall's book, a

01:53:23.480 | lot of what he was saying was that, you know, people give elephants human problems

01:53:28.800 | to solve in controlled environments and call it, you know, a study on elephant

01:53:33.160 | intelligence, whereas if you're watching wild elephants and you're in the wild,

01:53:39.360 | you're going to be watching them in a way that they're, they're looking, you've

01:53:43.320 | pulled up in a safari vehicle or you've pulled over to the side of the road and

01:53:46.800 | the elephants are wary of you.

01:53:48.000 | So they're not acting natural, but as soon as you start watching wild elephants,

01:53:52.160 | truly in the wild and comfort comfortable with your presence, you see how they

01:53:56.240 | start caring for their babies or, or how they can get annoyed.

01:54:00.040 | I once watched elephants around a water hole and there's this warthog and I

01:54:02.920 | don't know why, but this warthog decided he needed to get in and, and there's this

01:54:07.120 | young male elephant and he kept turning around to this warthog and just being

01:54:10.160 | like, don't make me do it.

01:54:11.280 | Now this elephant did not need to hurt the warthog.

01:54:14.080 | And the warthog was just like, I need a drink.

01:54:15.960 | I need a drink.

01:54:16.520 | I need a drink, much simpler brain.

01:54:17.920 | The elephant was like, you could just tell he was like, watch this.

01:54:21.600 | And he just went and crushed the warthog like it was a big beetle and crushed his

01:54:29.480 | pelvis.

01:54:30.040 | And the warthog dragged itself away on his front legs and probably went off to die.

01:54:33.280 | But this young elephant put out his ears and he like paraded around with his tail

01:54:38.480 | off and he was like, look what I did, destruction.

01:54:40.880 | And it's like, that's a very relatable type of, he was annoyed with the warthog.

01:54:45.400 | And, and, and, and so you see them do these things.

01:54:49.200 | I mean, the most magical thing, and I've spoken about this many times was that I

01:54:53.760 | was walking with a herd of semi-wild elephants that were crossing through a

01:54:57.400 | village in India because elephants have lost a lot of their territory because

01:55:01.840 | there's so much, so, so much population in India.

01:55:05.160 | And so we're crossing through a village, which is very delicate because the

01:55:07.960 | matriarchs are leading the babies and there's villagers who have no idea what

01:55:11.680 | an elephant is and they're watching the elephants cross and the matriarchs back

01:55:15.640 | this girl up against the wall.

01:55:16.800 | And she was terrified standing there with her back against the wall.

01:55:19.480 | And the elephant just put her trunk out and touch the girl's stomach.

01:55:23.440 | And then the other elephants came and they all started touching her stomach.

01:55:26.440 | And the, the, the, the ranger there explained to me, just went, she's pregnant.

01:55:31.440 | They know she's pregnant.

01:55:32.560 | They can smell, they can tell, and they're curious.

01:55:35.760 | And they, all the, all the female elephants came to

01:55:38.880 | investigate the pregnant girl.

01:55:40.240 | And she had no idea what was going on.

01:55:42.080 | And so it's like that stuff, that stuff.

01:55:44.360 | And it's cool to hear that, you know, with the, the, the crushing and the

01:55:49.600 | pride of the young elephant, that there's a complexity of behavior.

01:55:53.280 | It's just like with humans.

01:55:54.480 | I mean, you know.

01:55:55.480 | Yeah, it's not always pretty.

01:55:56.520 | Yeah.

01:55:57.280 | That's the thing, man, humans are capable of good and evil.

01:56:00.080 | And sometimes we attach these words.

01:56:02.040 | Uh, I love that there's just, it's an orchestra of different sounds.

01:56:11.160 | Yeah.

01:56:11.520 | And that's, that one is sexy, which.

01:56:13.440 | That's a bamboo rat calling out for a mate.

01:56:15.320 | A mate.

01:56:16.000 | All right.

01:56:16.840 | Good luck to you, buddy.

01:56:18.920 | Good hunting.

01:56:20.800 | Uh, you know, humans are capable of evil things and beautiful things.

01:56:27.800 | And I wonder if animals are the same.

01:56:29.920 | You think there's just different personalities and different

01:56:32.600 | life trajectories for animals, like as they develop in their

01:56:36.400 | understanding of social interaction of survival of maybe even primitive

01:56:44.120 | concepts of right and wrong within the social system, do you think there's

01:56:51.080 | a lot of diversity in personalities and, and behavior, just like different

01:56:58.080 | people, is there different elephants?

01:57:01.840 | Of course.

01:57:03.080 | And, and what I really like is that you said, is there a perception

01:57:06.440 | of what's right and wrong because elephants have a code of ethics.

01:57:09.280 | And so as the, for the simplest example is that as young males begin to grow,

01:57:15.640 | they start developing these tusks and those tusks are a tool and they use them.

01:57:19.440 | So for Indian elephants, the females don't have tusks and the males do.

01:57:22.600 | The females kick the males out of the herd.

01:57:26.800 | The females keep all the sisters and the aunts and the, and the, and the,

01:57:29.840 | and the cousins together, but the males are their own thing.

01:57:32.440 | And so here's the thing.

01:57:34.040 | If you have, so what you get is these, these crews of male elephants and the

01:57:39.200 | older males will, you know, there's play fighting that goes on around, you know,

01:57:42.920 | two young males can play fight, but the older males, they'll kick some ass.

01:57:46.920 | They'll show them how to behave.

01:57:48.920 | They'll explain who gets to talk to the females, who gets to interact,

01:57:52.800 | who gets to mate, who gets the best vegetation to eat.

01:57:56.960 | And so there's an order established.

01:57:58.400 | And so young male elephants have to be taught how to act.

01:58:01.880 | Just like a teenage human has to be taught.

01:58:04.800 | You know, you can't just haul off and break another kid's nose.

01:58:08.800 | You gotta, there's going to be consequence.

01:58:11.080 | Maybe you'll get suspended.

01:58:12.200 | Or maybe that kid will get his friends and beat the living shit out of you.

01:58:16.240 | Whatever it is, society regulates your behavior and elephants have a very

01:58:20.760 | strict, very predictable sort of like the males teach the males how to run things.

01:58:26.480 | And the females, which, which really have the final say, they're matriarchal.

01:58:30.200 | They're the ones leading the herd, where to go.

01:58:33.360 | The males follow where the, where the wise females tell them where to go.

01:58:36.840 | So that regulation mechanisms from that emerges a kind of moral

01:58:41.800 | system under which they operate.

01:58:43.480 | What's right and wrong for an elephant.

01:58:46.560 | Yeah.

01:58:46.840 | For an elephant.

01:58:47.680 | Right and wrong for an elephant is not the same as what's right

01:58:49.600 | and wrong for grizzly bear.

01:58:50.600 | Grizzly bear.

01:58:51.200 | If you're a male grizzly bear and you see a female with cubs, you just kill those

01:58:55.640 | cubs and then you can mate with that.

01:58:56.840 | You can mate with her and put your own cubs in there.

01:58:59.000 | And it's like, that's a whole different type of ethics.

01:59:02.160 | Yeah.

01:59:02.680 | The value of, uh, child life is different from species to species.

01:59:07.880 | Some of them hold a sacred, some of them not at all.

01:59:10.480 | And that's why I think I resonate so much with elephants because

01:59:13.480 | they're, I think they're, I think that we're, we're, we are kind of matriarchal.

01:59:17.280 | At least I grew up matriarchal, like women were the force in my life.

01:59:21.160 | Um, my family and most of my friends' families and women kind of have the final

01:59:25.440 | say, and, uh, I feel like that's the way it is with, with, with, with elephants.

01:59:30.760 | Like you might be bigger and stronger, but it doesn't really account for much

01:59:33.520 | if you're not smarter and, and more emotionally intelligent and you know

01:59:37.320 | how to take care of the group.

01:59:38.600 | Just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions as we were talking about aliens,

01:59:46.880 | there's a lot of people trying to understand, trying to study the origin of life.

01:59:51.400 | Oh, I love this.

01:59:52.760 | First of all, what do you think is life versus non-life?

01:59:57.920 | Like when you look at like ants or even like the simplest, simplest of organisms,

02:00:03.920 | we saw a frog in a stream yesterday that was like a leaf frog.

02:00:07.760 | It was like as flat as a sheet of paper.

02:00:10.320 | And it does a lot of weird things.

02:00:14.480 | And it found a way to exist in this world.

02:00:17.040 | But that's a single living organisms with a bunch of components to it.

02:00:21.080 | But there's a life form that exists in this world.

02:00:25.480 | What is the difference between that and a rock?

02:00:27.800 | What is like, what is the essence of that life?

02:00:31.720 | This might be an unanswerable question.

02:00:34.200 | There's probably a chemistry, physics, biology way of answering that.

02:00:37.280 | Like what to you is that?

02:00:40.760 | I think to me, life is something that grows in response to stimuli.

02:00:45.160 | Like in basic biology 101, I think, and I'm fine with that.

02:00:49.280 | I don't need it to be more romantic than that, but I think it's actually comical.

02:00:53.440 | How, how do you get from a rock to an orangutan?

02:00:58.560 | You know, and our answer for that is primordial soup.

02:01:04.240 | Maybe there was just stuff on earth and then the stuff just got up and started

02:01:10.000 | walking. Maybe they're just, there was nothing happening.

02:01:12.400 | And then there was all of a sudden there was a cell and the cell had function and

02:01:17.600 | then it complexified and then it started reproducing and found male and female

02:01:21.440 | parts. And, and what like we are so on under equipped to understand how the hell

02:01:28.440 | we got here, let alone answer or, or even bacteria.

02:01:31.560 | I see this so many, uh, in very simple mathematical models, like something called

02:01:39.120 | a game of life, their cellular automata.

02:01:40.880 | You could see from simple rules and simple objects when they're interacting

02:01:47.240 | together, as you grow that system, complex objects arise like that emergence of

02:01:54.960 | complexity is not understood by science, by mathematics at all.

02:01:59.280 | And it seems like from primordial soups, you can get a lot of cool shit.

02:02:05.120 | And the force of getting from soup to like two humans on microphones, uh, not

02:02:14.760 | understood.

02:02:15.400 | And it seems to be a thing that happens on earth.

02:02:17.800 | I tend to think that it's a thing that happens everywhere in the universe.

02:02:22.440 | And there's some deep force that's pushing this along in some way that there's

02:02:30.160 | something we, uh, I don't want to sort of, uh, simplify it, but there is something

02:02:37.040 | that creates complexity out of simplicity that we don't quite understand.

02:02:40.960 | Uh, and that's the thing that created the first organism living organism on earth

02:02:46.760 | that like leap from no life to life on earth as a weird one.

02:02:52.720 | That's a weird one.

02:02:53.600 | Cause you can imagine, I think that what the earth is for 4.5 billion years old.

02:02:59.440 | And you can imagine just this, this rock of a planet with like rain and storms and

02:03:07.200 | elements and iron and granite, and like just random stuff.

02:03:12.680 | It's pretty easy to imagine that.

02:03:15.000 | But then I remember that book there.

02:03:17.800 | We think we all have the same book when we were kids.

02:03:19.720 | And then like, they show this like fish, like animal crawling out of a, out of the

02:03:23.640 | primordial soup.

02:03:24.800 | And it's like, bro, you just missed the most important part author of that book,

02:03:29.800 | bro.

02:03:30.240 | And, and I think the first bacteria came in around three, three, 3.7 billion years

02:03:38.480 | ago.

02:03:38.680 | So there's like, at least like, you know, a bunch of billion years where there was

02:03:42.600 | just nothing, it was just a planet.

02:03:43.960 | And then we start seeing fossils of the first bacteria.

02:03:46.840 | And the bacteria stuck around for a long time, a billion, 2 billion years.

02:03:51.960 | It's just very, very long.

02:03:53.040 | Just bacteria.

02:03:54.520 | Just bacteria.

02:03:55.360 | But a lot of them, a lot of them, there's probably a lot of innovation, a lot of

02:04:00.480 | murder, a lot of interaction.

02:04:03.080 | Yeah.

02:04:03.480 | Yeah.

02:04:04.520 | And then, I mean, there's, there's a bit, a few big leaps along the history of life

02:04:08.320 | on earth.

02:04:08.800 | Yeah.

02:04:09.080 | You know, the predator prey dynamic, that was a really cool innovation.

02:04:12.320 | It's almost like innovations like features on iPhone.

02:04:14.520 | It's like, it's nice.

02:04:16.640 | Like a predator prey, uh, eukaryotes, so complex multicellular organisms, uh,

02:04:25.200 | emerging from the water to land.

02:04:27.600 | That was weird.

02:04:28.920 | That was a, that was an interesting innovation.

02:04:31.960 | There's whatever led to humans that there's a lot of interesting stuff there.

02:04:39.200 | I see.

02:04:39.640 | I can't even get that far.

02:04:40.680 | I can't get from rock and sand to cells.

02:04:45.080 | Yeah.

02:04:45.720 | That's, that's a huge, I mean, I mean, everything around us that has cells,

02:04:53.560 | it's just, it's, it's wild.

02:04:55.560 | Even again, and I could imagine being on another planet and how incredibly

02:05:00.560 | valuable this thing would be this, this it's impossible to replicate it.

02:05:05.440 | I'm looking at it through the candlelight right now, and I can see all of the

02:05:08.280 | structures in this leaf, the incredible structures in this leaf that look exactly

02:05:12.600 | like the veins in my arm, which look exactly like the rivers that are

02:05:15.680 | flowing across this landscape.

02:05:17.000 | And it's like, life has this, this overwhelming pattern that

02:05:20.360 | it uses and it's so beautiful.

02:05:22.080 | I just, I just think it's yeah.

02:05:26.600 | When you imagine the, the, the, the days of the lightning and the volcanoes

02:05:29.960 | and the primordial soup, it's, it's, there's a, there's a big gap there.

02:05:35.080 | And it's, it's fascinating to think about, and it's fascinating to see how

02:05:37.840 | different people's belief systems, uh, lead them to different answers there.

02:05:43.000 | Not to give any spoilers, but postcards from earth or Darren Aronofsky's film.

02:05:48.240 | The idea there is there's probes that are sent out from earth to all these

02:05:55.280 | other planets and each probe contains two humans, a man and a woman.

02:06:00.240 | And those two humans are in love.

02:06:04.520 | So think of a couple in love, they're sent there with all the information,

02:06:08.760 | basically a leaf that holds the information of what it takes to create

02:06:13.880 | life on other planets to recreate on earth and other planets.

02:06:19.360 | And the two humans hold all the information for the things that make

02:06:24.360 | life on earth special, especially in human civilization is love, consciousness,

02:06:29.200 | the, the, the social connection.

02:06:31.280 | So all that information is in the probe and the postcard from earth is, uh,

02:06:35.920 | those humans waking up, remembering all the information that is earth, that

02:06:41.080 | like a celebration of all the things that make earth magical throughout its

02:06:47.640 | history, all the diversity of organisms, all of that, you're loading all that

02:06:51.400 | in to create life on that new planet, which is something I think alien

02:06:55.160 | civilizations are doing.

02:06:56.160 | They're sending probes all throughout the galaxy and

02:06:58.120 | they just haven't arrived yet.

02:06:59.280 | But anyway, that's another, uh, that's so beautiful.

02:07:02.480 | And one of the things that I think I, I want to see that so much.

02:07:05.840 | And one of the things that I.

02:07:06.720 | Love about Aronofsky's work is, is the fountain.

02:07:10.400 | And what I find so beautiful about that is that now here he's saying, okay,

02:07:14.880 | we're sending probes out to other worlds, alien civilizations.

02:07:19.040 | And in the fountain, it was sort of what I thought he did so beautifully

02:07:22.040 | was braid together those three stories where in one, I don't remember if he's

02:07:26.520 | in a spaceship or if that's supposed to be like his soul.

02:07:29.400 | The other one, he's a scientist in sort of like comparable times to

02:07:32.440 | hours, and then he's the, the, the Spanish explorer, but either way,

02:07:35.200 | there's the tree of life and it's sort of braids together all of the major

02:07:40.880 | religions.

02:07:41.520 | And it made me think of that quote that you hear where it says, you

02:07:43.680 | know, Oh God, what was it?

02:07:45.120 | Um, Christ wasn't a Christian and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist

02:07:49.040 | and Muhammad wasn't a Muslim.

02:07:50.280 | They were all just teachers who were teaching love.

02:07:52.560 | And it's like the fountain.

02:07:54.680 | The fountain sort of says nature is the, that driving force.

02:07:59.640 | And it's our job to understand that the game is love.

02:08:02.160 | And that's what, that's what the main character in the fountain needs to

02:08:04.880 | learn is that it's, that it's nature.

02:08:06.880 | That's going to just, that's going to carry your soul through this, this,

02:08:10.400 | this thing, and that there's so much you don't understand.

02:08:12.400 | And the epiphany at the end, God, I love that movie.

02:08:14.960 | God, I love that.

02:08:15.840 | Among many things.

02:08:16.800 | You're also an artist is trying to convert the thing that is nature into

02:08:21.720 | the thing that we humans can understand the complexity of the beauty of it.

02:08:25.400 | That's what Darren Aronofsky tried to do with those couple of films.

02:08:28.360 | That's something that I hope you do actually in the medium of film too.

02:08:32.920 | That'd be very interesting.

02:08:33.840 | And you do that in the medium of books currently.

02:08:36.640 | Um, how much do you think we understand about the history of life on earth?

02:08:41.200 | I think we got it all wrong.

02:08:43.400 | No, I don't know.

02:08:45.480 | It seems like they change it all the time.

02:08:47.000 | You know, they say, they say that Easter Island, you know, when I was in

02:08:51.360 | college, they were big on telling you that Easter Island, they ruined their

02:08:53.920 | environment and, uh, they had environmental collapse.

02:08:58.080 | And that's why there was nobody on Easter Island.

02:09:00.840 | It was a cautionary tale.

02:09:01.960 | We could ruin our environment.

02:09:03.040 | And now it seems like they've changed their mind on that.

02:09:04.880 | And then when humans entered North America seems to be hugely up to

02:09:09.280 | speculation and you know, the, the Africa spreading that we all spread out of

02:09:13.960 | Africa and then the, the Pleistocene overkill extinction theory.

02:09:17.240 | And it's like, it seems like every few years they update it and they

02:09:21.040 | change it and they say, Oh, the guys, no, no, no, no, no.

02:09:22.920 | The guys from 10 years ago, actually, my new theory is the best theory.

02:09:26.040 | Let's write some books and get me on Letterman.

02:09:27.880 | And it seems like there's a new prevailing theory.

02:09:30.520 | That's really always exciting and edgy about how, how we got here and where

02:09:35.840 | we came from and how we dispersed and maybe even has some political

02:09:39.000 | implications, like how we should use the Amazon moving forward.

02:09:41.960 | Like the Amazon was engineered by people, so fuck it.

02:09:45.400 | Let's just cut it down.

02:09:46.640 | Yeah.

02:09:47.760 | I tend to believe that we mostly don't understand anything, but there is an

02:09:51.880 | optimism in continuously figuring out the puzzle.

02:09:55.360 | We offline talked about the, the Graham Hancock, Flynn Dibble debate on, on Rogan.

02:10:02.080 | I like debates personally.

02:10:03.240 | So Flint represents mainstream archeology.

02:10:06.240 | And I actually like the whole science, the whole field of archeology.

02:10:11.320 | You're trying to figure out history was so little information.

02:10:15.480 | You're trying to put together this, this, this puzzle when you have so

02:10:18.840 | little and you're desperately clinging onto little clues and from those

02:10:22.880 | clues, using the simple possible explanation to understand, and now

02:10:27.120 | with modern technology, as Flint was trying to express that you can use

02:10:31.960 | large amounts of data that's like imperfect, but just the scale and using

02:10:38.480 | that to reconstruct civilizations.

02:10:40.480 | There are different practices from the little details of, uh, what kind of

02:10:44.120 | things they eat, how they interact with each other, what kind of art they

02:10:46.520 | create to when they existed, what are the timeframes, all that kind of stuff.

02:10:50.200 | And that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding.

02:10:53.400 | But still the error bars are large in terms of what really happened.

02:11:00.680 | And that leaves room for things like Graham Hancock talks about

02:11:04.120 | like lost civilizations, which I like also because it gives you have, um,

02:11:10.760 | a kind of humility about maybe there's giant things we don't know about,

02:11:15.360 | or we got completely wrong.

02:11:17.240 | And that's always good to like, remember.

02:11:19.080 | It's confusing to me to imagine like what, I don't even know what, like

02:11:24.200 | what ended the, where'd the Egyptians go?

02:11:26.240 | Like what happened to, it seemed like they were doing so good.

02:11:28.920 | They had so much cool shit.

02:11:29.920 | Um, but I mean, I was reading anthropological stuff in the Amazon

02:11:34.440 | about, about tribes that, you know, just through, through their societal

02:11:38.680 | structures and through their hunting practices that, that didn't really

02:11:44.520 | develop practices that worked and kind of bands of people that went extinct

02:11:50.600 | before they could turn into larger societies.

02:11:52.920 | And, and there's, there's a lot of people that got it wrong.

02:11:55.800 | You know, for every explorer that, that, that, that leaves Borneo

02:12:01.080 | and arrives in South America, there's probably a hundred, hundreds more

02:12:05.200 | that just die at sea, get eaten by sharks, you know, avalanche.

02:12:08.720 | And it's just, it's so fascinating to me that we, all of us really past

02:12:13.480 | our grandparents don't really even know where we came from.

02:12:15.920 | Like, do you know who your great, great, great grandparents are?

02:12:20.080 | Like, no.

02:12:20.440 | I mean, there's methods of trying to figure that out, but really, again,

02:12:23.920 | the error bars are so large.

02:12:25.120 | It's almost like we trying to create a narrative that makes sense for us.

02:12:28.360 | You know, that I'm, I'm 10% Neanderthal.

02:12:31.840 | Therefore I can bench press this much and, uh, therefore my aggressive

02:12:36.360 | tendencies have a explanation when in reality, there's so much diversity

02:12:40.000 | of personalities that they, they, uh, far overshadow any possible

02:12:46.880 | histories we might have.

02:12:48.040 | Your aggressive tendencies don't have any explanation.

02:12:51.160 | You're not, you need to, you listen to me right now.

02:12:54.560 | I'm sorry.

02:12:55.240 | Don't hit me again, don't choke me out again.

02:12:57.760 | Yeah, man.

02:12:59.200 | One of the things you and I talk a lot about is different explorers.

02:13:02.160 | Yeah.

02:13:02.480 | Um, who do you think is, I'm just throwing ridiculous question

02:13:08.520 | one after the other.

02:13:09.320 | Who do you think is the greatest explorer of all time?

02:13:11.240 | Oh God.

02:13:11.960 | I love Shackleton, but I hate the cold.

02:13:14.400 | So I can't, I don't really, I can't even read about it.

02:13:16.400 | I hate the cold so much.

02:13:17.320 | Um, I can't, I can't even go there for fun.

02:13:19.840 | Um, I think Percy Fawcett in the Amazon was, was, was, was the

02:13:25.600 | GOAT in terms of just sheer the last of the Victorian era, you know,

02:13:30.720 | march forward, go deeper, just stop at nothing.

02:13:34.280 | And then eventually take such big risks that you never come back.

02:13:38.200 | It's, it's hard for me to relate to that kind of exploration, because

02:13:44.160 | to me, I'm such a softie, I wouldn't want to like leave my family behind.

02:13:47.720 | I wouldn't want to like, even if you told me that I could leave

02:13:50.480 | earth and go exploring and I could go touch the moon, I'd be like, Nope.

02:13:53.080 | Absolutely not.

02:13:54.800 | Like the highway is dangerous enough.

02:13:56.000 | Like I would never risk dying in space.

02:13:59.560 | This guy left his home, went out into the jungle out there with

02:14:05.160 | horrendous gear compared to the camping gear we have today.

02:14:08.320 | No headlamp and just explored for years on end.

02:14:13.360 | Well, let me actually push back.

02:14:14.880 | Like you have that explore.

02:14:16.600 | There's definitely a thing in you, just me having observed you

02:14:20.600 | behave in the jungle and in the world.

02:14:23.280 | You're pulled towards exploration, towards adventure, towards the

02:14:28.160 | possibility of discovering something beautiful, including like a small

02:14:31.560 | little creature or like a whole new part of the rainforest, a part of

02:14:35.040 | the world that like, it's like, Holy shit, this is beautiful.

02:14:37.680 | I think that's the same kind of imperative.

02:14:39.240 | So maybe not going out to the stars, but like, I can see you

02:14:42.640 | doing exactly the same thing.

02:14:43.880 | So he disappeared in 1925 during an expedition to find an ancient

02:14:49.080 | lost city, which he and other people believed existed in the Amazon rainforest.

02:14:54.360 | So there's that pull, like I'm going to go into there with shitty

02:14:58.520 | equipment, with the possibility of finding something.

02:15:02.360 | And they said he ran into uncontacted tribes and started goofing off.

02:15:07.440 | I think he started, I think he started dancing and singing.

02:15:10.720 | Like the tribes were ready to kill him and he started goofing and

02:15:13.520 | like doing a song and a dance and just being ridiculous.

02:15:16.280 | And the tribes were like, what now?

02:15:18.600 | And they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, don't shoot him yet.

02:15:21.200 | That's a funny one.

02:15:22.080 | Yeah.

02:15:22.640 | And they, they actually, he kind of like on a human level used, used humor to

02:15:27.120 | save his own life on multiple occasions to the point where he deescalated the

02:15:31.600 | situation was like, look, we're not here to fight.

02:15:33.520 | We're here to, we have a pile of maps.

02:15:35.640 | You know, all my guys have beriberi, dengue, malaria.

02:15:39.040 | Like we're dying out here.

02:15:40.000 | If you guys just go on your merry way, we'll go on our merry way.

02:15:42.440 | And like, incredible.

02:15:44.440 | He was so tough.

02:15:45.800 | And then that guy from Shackleton's expedition ended up on one of

02:15:49.000 | Fawcett's expeditions and you go, Oh yeah, he's a, he's a proven explorer.

02:15:52.640 | He's been through the Antarctic.

02:15:53.760 | And the guy was like, fuck the jungle.

02:15:55.320 | Absolutely.

02:15:57.080 | Fuck the jungle.

02:15:57.640 | He was like, and, and there's a great quote where he says without a machete and

02:16:01.280 | something, you know, I don't remember exactly the words he used, but he said

02:16:03.600 | without a machete in this environment, you don't last.

02:16:07.320 | Yeah.

02:16:07.800 | And you know that now, like you, you in that tangle to just take three steps that

02:16:12.600 | way would, I would immediately be taking on, I mean, I'm not wearing shoes right

02:16:16.720 | now.

02:16:17.000 | Yeah.

02:16:17.440 | Bullet ants, venomous snakes, spikes through my feet, tripping over myself.

02:16:21.360 | I don't have a headlamp.

02:16:22.240 | Unbelievable risk right there.

02:16:25.000 | We're sitting on the edge of tragedy.

02:16:28.000 | Can you explain what the purpose of the machete in this situation is?

02:16:32.280 | Like what is a machete?

02:16:33.680 | How does it work?

02:16:34.440 | How does it allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense environment?

02:16:39.360 | So this is the tool that I spend most of my life carrying.

02:16:43.520 | This is in my hand for 90% of my time.

02:16:46.920 | And in the jungle, you really need a machete.

02:16:50.960 | There's so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through.

02:16:55.440 | And like a jaguar and ocelot, a lot of these other animals that are more

02:17:00.360 | horizontally based and low to the ground, they can make it like when we got stuck

02:17:03.560 | in those bamboo patches and we were just hacking through them and it's dangerous.

02:17:07.680 | And there's, as you hit the bamboo, it ricochets and there's spikes and then

02:17:11.280 | one piece falls and it pulls a, a train, a vine that has spikes on it.

02:17:15.480 | And that hits you in the neck.

02:17:16.560 | And it just, the jungle is savage to humans, but if you are an agouti, a

02:17:22.880 | little rodent or a jaguar or deer, you can kind of slip through this stuff.

02:17:26.600 | And the deer have developed really small antlers.

02:17:28.280 | They can just kind of weave through low to the ground.

02:17:30.720 | And so, and so for us being these vertical beings walking through the

02:17:36.120 | jungle, it, it really helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonally

02:17:40.200 | opposing your movement at all times.

02:17:41.640 | So machete is just a very, very useful tool.

02:17:43.600 | Um, it could help you pull thorns out of your body.

02:17:46.400 | As you saw last night, we can use it to find food.

02:17:49.120 | You want machete fishing, you cut a fish head off with a machete by like it was

02:17:57.240 | swimming and then you basically, you know, uh, macheted the water and the

02:18:06.000 | other fascinating thing about that fish without his head, it kept moving.

02:18:09.080 | So it was just using, I guess, this nervous system to, uh, to swim beautifully.

02:18:13.920 | I mean, I did, there's so many questions there about how nature works.

02:18:16.880 | You can, well, let's explain it.

02:18:18.400 | Cause he, the way the machete hit this fish, it kind of, kind of took

02:18:21.240 | his justice, his eyes off of, and his lower jaw was still there.

02:18:25.360 | So it was really just like the brain and the top jaw that came off.

02:18:29.120 | And this fish, as the dust cleared in the stream, this fish was, I found

02:18:33.560 | it very haunting in a very like interstellar way, like it was just,

02:18:36.520 | the programming was still there, but the brain was gone and the fish was

02:18:40.120 | just still moving and it was going to die, but it was still swimming.

02:18:43.240 | And it looks like, like, like a live fish.

02:18:45.120 | It was, it was, and you're still trying to catch it, which is interesting.

02:18:48.320 | And I still had to work to catch it.

02:18:49.320 | Cause every time I caught it, it would, it would freak out and

02:18:51.360 | then it would jump back in the water.

02:18:52.480 | And I'm programmed here from years and years of living in the Amazon

02:18:55.000 | that everything can hurt you.

02:18:56.600 | So you actually become quite, you know, if a moth lands on you, you flick

02:19:01.440 | it because it could be a bullet ant.

02:19:02.600 | And so even the fish here, a lot of the fish here have spikes coming out of them.

02:19:05.520 | And so even though I know that fish, I know its name, I've eaten them many

02:19:09.240 | times as I was holding it when it would twitch with that explosive power, just

02:19:13.560 | like the caiman, I would, I would, I would get that fear response and release it.

02:19:17.520 | And so that happened three or four times before I finally said, this is stupid.

02:19:20.520 | Even though he's slippery, he hasn't got a head.

02:19:23.560 | I can hold on to him.

02:19:24.720 | I put them in my pocket.

02:19:25.560 | Yeah.

02:19:25.880 | Put them in my pocket.

02:19:26.960 | And then we fried them up.

02:19:28.520 | And he was delicious.

02:19:30.360 | So, and I'm grateful for his existence and for his role and for my existence on

02:19:35.280 | this planet, this brief existence that I was able to enjoy that delicious, delicious fish.

02:19:40.480 | So the machete is used to cut through this extremely dense jungle.

02:19:43.800 | This is vines, by the way, this is rope like things that are extremely strong and

02:19:48.760 | they go all kinds of directions to go horizontal and all of this.

02:19:51.280 | I don't even, how tree, we have a tree right above us.

02:19:55.760 | That makes no sense.

02:19:57.120 | There's like a tree that kind of failed and then a new tree was created on top of it.

02:20:04.040 | That makes, it just makes no sense.

02:20:06.960 | It feels like sometimes trees come from the, uh, from the sky.

02:20:10.680 | Sometimes they come from the ground.

02:20:12.160 | I don't, I don't really quite understand the, how that works.

02:20:16.640 | Cause there's new trees that grow on old trees and the old trees rot away and

02:20:20.880 | the new trees come up, that whole mechanism.

02:20:23.720 | Strangler figs.

02:20:24.640 | And so strangler figs, as you go across the world's ecosystems, that whole

02:20:28.200 | belt of, you know, whether you're in rainforests in the Amazon, the Congo,

02:20:32.560 | Indonesia, all across the tropics, you have strangler figs and the amazing

02:20:36.920 | thing that this, that this species does, it's become a keystone species across

02:20:41.480 | the planet with a hyper influence on its ecosystem, wherever it is, because

02:20:46.240 | they produce fruit in the dry season when the rest of the forest is making

02:20:50.800 | it hard for animals to find fruit, to find food.

02:20:53.120 | And so the bats, the birds, the monkeys, they all go to the strangler fig.

02:20:56.560 | They eat the fruit.

02:20:57.720 | And the fruit of course, is just tricking the animals.

02:21:00.360 | The, the, the plants are tricking the animals into carrying

02:21:02.960 | their seeds to another tree.

02:21:04.200 | And so they're getting free transportation.

02:21:06.800 | Monkey takes a poop on another tree after eating strangler figs.

02:21:09.800 | And then that strangler fig sends out its vines, gets to the ground.

02:21:13.920 | And then as soon as it begins sucking up nutrients out, competes that tree for

02:21:18.840 | a light, grows hyper drive around the trunk of that tree, and then eventually

02:21:26.160 | that tree will die and the strangler fig will win because it got a, it

02:21:29.960 | got a boost up to the top.

02:21:31.200 | Whereas these little trees down here, they're going to have to wait their turn.

02:21:33.840 | They have to wait until a tree falls until there's a light gap and then

02:21:36.440 | they have enough food to grow quick.

02:21:38.440 | And so this whole thing is an energy economy.

02:21:40.960 | Everything is just trying to get sunlight.

02:21:42.800 | And so strangler figs, yeah, top-down trees growing or parasitic top-down

02:21:48.880 | octopus trees growing over other giant trees.

02:21:51.280 | And you've seen the size of some of the trees here.

02:21:53.280 | So, uh, you know, back to Percy Fawcett and exploration, what do you think it

02:21:57.200 | was like for him back then, a hundred years ago, God damn, going to the jungle.

02:22:02.600 | See, the thing is, those guys didn't go with the locals.

02:22:06.120 | They came down here with like mules and they tried to do it their way.

02:22:10.760 | And so he's one of the people that wrote about the green hell, the jungle as the

02:22:16.520 | oppressive, uh, war zone where there's nothing to eat and everything is killing

02:22:21.800 | you.

02:22:22.000 | And it's, I think, I think that that image is so wrong.

02:22:28.160 | Cause as you saw last night, we could go, if we went out with JJ right now, we

02:22:32.880 | would machete, fish some fish.

02:22:34.880 | We could start a little fire.

02:22:36.440 | We do it all in shorts.

02:22:38.120 | Like to JJ it's green paradise and it's intense.

02:22:41.840 | But, but if you know what you're doing, which the local people surely do, well,

02:22:46.520 | then just beneath the sand, there's turtle eggs that you can eat.

02:22:49.320 | And inside the nuts on the ground, there's grubs that you can eat.

02:22:53.040 | And if you really needed to, you could just jump on a came in and eat that.

02:22:57.320 | Cause their tails are pretty full of meat.

02:22:59.880 | And it's like, there's actually unending amount amounts of food here.

02:23:04.360 | And so it's, it's, they were pretty, you know, they were strange.

02:23:07.880 | If you're able to tune into the, that frequency, I feel like you're you and JJ

02:23:12.520 | are able to tune to the, to the frequency of the jungle.

02:23:18.840 | That is a provider, not a destroyer of human life.

02:23:22.200 | Right.

02:23:23.040 | Like, uh, I think to be, uh, collaborated with not fought against.

02:23:29.800 | Yes.

02:23:30.440 | But we're coming at that with, with our modern lens, cause we're coming down

02:23:33.640 | here with, I've survived how many infections in the jungle where those

02:23:36.520 | probably would have killed me before.

02:23:37.960 | So my dead ass opinion of the jungle would have been overwhelming and

02:23:43.080 | collective murder as Herzog says.

02:23:45.520 | Um, and so Percy Fawcett was coming down here with this view of it's

02:23:49.880 | trying to kill us at all times where we are flying down here and coming out

02:23:54.040 | here with our superior medicines and our ability to survive infections.

02:23:57.280 | And, and so it's, it is different for us.

02:24:00.080 | It is different.

02:24:00.560 | We're, we're, we're, we're coming at this very, very different, but Fawcett

02:24:04.840 | to me was like the last of like the real swashbucklers, like the really

02:24:10.000 | batshit crazy explorers that just went out into the, into the dark spaces on the map.

02:24:16.120 | And it's very hard for me to identify with him, but with, for instance,

02:24:20.480 | Richard Evans Schultes from Harvard, that's someone where you go, okay, now

02:24:26.960 | we're getting to the point where I can start to understand, to me, just like

02:24:31.280 | the conquistadors and they tell you the conquistadors showed up and you know,

02:24:33.800 | they killed the, the Spanish killed 2000 Inca on the first day.

02:24:38.360 | And then they, they marched to this city.

02:24:39.840 | And they're like, when I hear about that, can you imagine yourself just

02:24:42.520 | like slaughtering a bunch of women and children and soldiers, and then just

02:24:46.880 | like drinking some wine and doing it again tomorrow, I can't actually.

02:24:49.800 | Wrap my head around that.

02:24:51.200 | Yeah.

02:24:52.400 | It just seems like an entire different world.

02:24:55.320 | No, like different world, different value system, different value system,

02:25:00.360 | a different relationship with violence and life and death.

02:25:02.600 | I think we value life more.

02:25:04.320 | We value, we resist violence more.

02:25:08.200 | Yeah.

02:25:09.120 | Like, I just, I can't, like, if we saw a car accident, I feel like if I saw a

02:25:13.240 | car accident, like, you know, or if you see a little bit of war, some violence,

02:25:16.960 | like it affects you, these people were so comfortable with those things.

02:25:21.080 | It was such a normal part of their, the Spartans, the, the Comanches, like

02:25:26.120 | they became so comfortable with war to the point that it became what they did.

02:25:32.240 | And they celebrated it.

02:25:34.000 | They celebrated it.

02:25:35.120 | And direct violence too, like taking that machete and murdering me on the, or

02:25:40.000 | if I got to the machete first, me murdering you.

02:25:42.160 | Not a chance, bitch.

02:25:43.000 | And then I would put it on Instagram and show off.

02:25:47.040 | And the number of DMs I would get for murdering you with a machete.

02:25:52.600 | Meanwhile, half the world right now is messaging me saying my DMs are filled

02:25:56.760 | with take care of Lex, don't lose Lex.

02:25:58.840 | Make sure Lex comes back safe.

02:26:00.240 | Lex is a national treasure.

02:26:01.720 | We love Lex.

02:26:02.560 | Make sure he holds a snake, the amount of love that is out there.

02:26:06.000 | Meanwhile, I emerged from the jungle of blood around me with a machete and I'd

02:26:10.520 | take over your Instagram account.

02:26:11.760 | He's very humble.

02:26:12.480 | He doesn't want to hear about the love.

02:26:13.520 | All right.

02:26:15.920 | So, uh, what do you think makes a great explorer?

02:26:18.040 | Whether it's a Percy Fawcett, Richard Evans, Schultes, by the way, say

02:26:22.240 | who Richard Evans Schultes is.

02:26:23.960 | He's a biologist.

02:26:24.920 | So that's another lens to wish to be an explorer is to study the, the biology,

02:26:30.680 | the, the, the, the immense diversity of biological life all around us.

02:26:36.280 | Richard Evans Schultes.

02:26:37.720 | Um, I know about him from reading Wade Davis's book one river, which is this

02:26:41.360 | big, hefty, you know, five or 600 page tome about the Amazon and it covers two

02:26:47.160 | stories.

02:26:47.640 | It's Richard Evans Schultes.

02:26:49.080 | And I think it's in the forties.

02:26:50.320 | I think it's like pre world war two era where he's in the Amazon looking for the

02:26:55.560 | blue orchid and the cure for this and that.

02:26:57.680 | And he's pressing plants and he's going to these indigenous communities where they

02:27:01.320 | still live completely with the forest and they, and they drink ayahuasca and they,

02:27:05.800 | they talk to the gods and they, he learns about how they believe that the Anaconda

02:27:09.960 | came down from the Milky way and swam across the land and created the rivers

02:27:13.640 | and sort of, he came down and, and, and even though he was a Western scientist

02:27:18.600 | from Harvard, he embraced the indigenous perspective on the world, on creation,

02:27:25.760 | on spirituality, and, and he, he sort of resigned himself and gave himself fully

02:27:31.440 | to that and spent years and years traveling around parts of the Amazon that

02:27:35.480 | had hardly been explored and certainly never been explored in the way he was

02:27:40.400 | doing it in the ethno botanical spiritual way of, of what medicinal compounds are

02:27:45.680 | contained in these plants and how do the local indigenous people use and understand

02:27:51.520 | them, for example, you know, if 80,000 species of plants in the Amazon rainforest

02:27:56.520 | and 400 billion trees in the Amazon rainforest, the statistics of likelihood

02:28:03.320 | that through trial and error that humans could discover ayahuasca it's, it's

02:28:10.280 | astronomical that one of these trees and a root when put together, allow you to go

02:28:15.360 | access the spirit realm and see hallucinogenic shapes and, and talk to the

02:28:20.840 | gods.

02:28:21.200 | That's, that's, that's almost, almost enough to inspire spiritual thought

02:28:26.800 | itself.

02:28:27.200 | The fact that trial and error, it would take like millions of years or something.

02:28:31.000 | It's, it's, it's, I forget what the figure is.

02:28:32.800 | It's incredible.

02:28:33.440 | But Richard Evans Schultes was one of the first people that came down and saw that.

02:28:36.440 | And then one river is where Wade Davis comes back, I believe in the seventies

02:28:41.200 | and the, the heartbreak of the book is that all of these incredibly wild places

02:28:46.800 | with, with naked native tribes and these, these intact belief systems, Wade Davis

02:28:53.840 | comes back and a lot of the same places that Schultes went, now there's missionary

02:29:00.160 | schools and they're wearing discarded Nikes and you know, whatever.

02:29:05.320 | I don't know if there's Nikes in the seventies, but like Western stuff has made

02:29:08.440 | it in, they've been contacted, domesticated, forced into Western society.

02:29:14.480 | And, you know, a lot of them then forget the thousands and thousands of years

02:29:20.520 | that, that have gone into creating the medicinal botanical knowledge that the

02:29:26.000 | indigenous possess about how to cure ear infections and how to treat illnesses

02:29:30.480 | from the medicinal compounds flowing through these trees is lost in a single

02:29:35.040 | generation with, with the modernization.

02:29:37.720 | Yeah.

02:29:38.800 | He, uh, he wrote the plants of the gods, their sacred healing

02:29:42.520 | and the hallucinogenic powers.

02:29:44.600 | That is interesting.

02:29:46.040 | You mentioned like how to discover that, like, how do you find those incredible

02:29:51.160 | plants, those incredible things that can warp your mind in all kinds of ways.

02:29:56.520 | Of course, physically heal, but also like take you on a mental journey.

02:30:02.480 | That's interesting.

02:30:03.480 | So you don't think trial and error is possible.

02:30:05.440 | I was reading about, uh, ayahuasca and they're saying, they're saying

02:30:08.600 | statistically, if, if, you know, if a bunch, if you put a thousand humans in

02:30:13.720 | the Amazon and gave them villages to live in, cause humans are communalist

02:30:17.400 | species, it would take tens and tens of thousands of years or perhaps even

02:30:22.440 | centuries before even the possibility.

02:30:25.120 | It's like that thing, you know, a bunch of chips on a keyboard.

02:30:27.120 | How could they write Hamlet?

02:30:28.360 | It's like astronomical odds to get to, Oh wait, this and this dose together.

02:30:35.840 | And so what the local people believe is that the gods revealed this secret

02:30:40.880 | through the jungle to us as a link to the spirit world and that that's how we know

02:30:47.880 | this, because if they didn't remember it from their ancestors, we would have no

02:30:52.400 | idea how to get this information from the wild.

02:30:55.480 | So I will likely do ayahuasca.

02:30:59.440 | What do you think exists in the spirit world that could be

02:31:07.520 | found by taking that journey?

02:31:09.400 | I think that ayahuasca is, I can only speak from personal experience.

02:31:15.840 | And for me, it was as if your brain is a house you've lived in your entire life.

02:31:24.040 | And it's a big house.

02:31:24.960 | It's a mansion.

02:31:25.760 | And there's many, many rooms that you didn't even know exist.

02:31:28.840 | Hidden rooms behind the bookshelves, under the floorboards, rooms that you

02:31:32.760 | had no idea were there, and some of them are fantastic and some of them are

02:31:37.800 | terrifying basements and ayahuasca takes you on a journey through that.

02:31:43.560 | At it's most effective.

02:31:46.880 | You sit in front of the shaman with the candlelight, with the sounds of the

02:31:51.520 | jungle, and you drink the substance.

02:31:55.160 | And after that, what happens is the journey is all inside and, and that the

02:32:02.160 | shaman is supposed to be able to guide you through that, but in my experience,

02:32:05.480 | you're, you're so deep inside, like falling through nebulas out in space,

02:32:12.880 | no physical form or crawling through the jungle.

02:32:15.400 | Like, it's like, it's really, really powerful.

02:32:18.320 | Like, it's not like a, it's not like the recreational drugs that, that, that

02:32:22.320 | everyone does, like where you go, I did mushrooms and I could see, so I could

02:32:25.600 | see music, like, and I was talking to my friends, but no, no, no, like you're

02:32:29.320 | face down on the floor, usually vomiting, sometimes shitting, um, you know, having

02:32:34.640 | dialogues with, with the creator and that, that, that can be, that can be

02:32:39.440 | traumatizing as well as amazing.

02:32:41.280 | It's a really good way of looking at it.

02:32:44.280 | It's a big house and you get to open doors.

02:32:46.760 | So you've never had before and discover what rooms are there inside you.

02:32:50.240 | You ever think about that?

02:32:51.480 | Like that there's parts of yourself you haven't discovered yet, or

02:32:54.920 | maybe you've been suppressing how much, uh, are you exploring the shadow?

02:32:59.560 | Oh boy.

02:33:00.680 | So say you, me, Carl Young and Jordan Peterson are in a deserted island together.

02:33:05.480 | Fuck.

02:33:05.840 | I didn't even make my bed today.

02:33:07.120 | There's no bed on an Island.

02:33:09.760 | Great.

02:33:14.480 | I want to see you and Jordan Peterson do ayahuasca together.

02:33:16.880 | Um, I think, I think I that's, that's the thing.

02:33:22.400 | Ayahuasca to me, you know, I've, I've kind of told you about, like, I've, I've

02:33:25.960 | experienced some things that really made me believe that, that there's, that

02:33:29.040 | there's a benevolent force around us.

02:33:31.280 | But to me, ayahuasca was like a, was a ride through the scariest parts of the

02:33:40.240 | universe to sort of be like, here's, here's what it could be like, you know,

02:33:43.880 | the that's where I came up with my idea that, you know, like deep space or just

02:33:48.880 | space, outer space is just the outside of the video game.

02:33:51.520 | And this is it.

02:33:52.120 | Because when I was on ayahuasca, I was, I was one of the jungle creatures and I

02:33:56.760 | wasn't Paul and I didn't have a name.

02:33:58.520 | And for a long time, I saw many things and I was, I arrived at this spot in the

02:34:03.640 | jungle where there was a big tree and all the animals were there and they were

02:34:06.120 | all not in words, not in, not in any language that we can understand, but they

02:34:09.520 | were all discussing what to do about the threat and the, and it was all, it was

02:34:14.000 | all leaving, it was all flying up and it was fire and the jungle was being

02:34:18.280 | destroyed.

02:34:18.800 | And it was like, and then after that, it was just space and stars and silence,

02:34:23.120 | like crushing vacuum silence for years.

02:34:27.680 | And that was terrifying.

02:34:29.480 | That was fucking terrifying.

02:34:30.800 | When I came back and I had hands, man, I can remember my own name.

02:34:37.800 | You grounded, things are simpler.

02:34:40.080 | You're back inside the video game.

02:34:41.800 | What are the chances you think we're actually living in a video game?

02:34:45.280 | When you say a video game, it implies that there's a player.

02:34:48.720 | Who's the player?

02:34:49.320 | Is God?

02:34:49.880 | No, there's a main player.

02:34:51.240 | Usually that's not going to be God.

02:34:52.520 | God is the thing that creates the video game.

02:34:54.320 | Oh, so then we're just.

02:34:55.440 | And there's somebody who's our NPCs.

02:34:57.120 | Like I'm an NPC.

02:34:58.120 | You're an NPC, Jesus Christ.

02:34:59.840 | I'm the main character.

02:35:00.680 | You, yeah, yeah.

02:35:01.560 | You created me.

02:35:02.400 | Is this like Halo where you can kind of kill the NPCs?

02:35:05.360 | Cause I see how you put the machete behind you.

02:35:08.840 | Okay.

02:35:09.520 | I think I'm just going to take a stand here.

02:35:12.120 | I think that because I'm just sick of fucking playing it halfway.

02:35:15.280 | I think that because people live indoors in climate controlled boxes in cities,

02:35:21.080 | far away from nature, they've completely lost track of everything that's real.

02:35:24.480 | And they've started to think that we're living side of assimilation.

02:35:26.800 | Notice that nobody carrying an alpaca up a mountain thinks that we're

02:35:29.920 | living inside of a video game.

02:35:31.000 | They all know that it's real because they've had babies on the floor of a cold

02:35:34.760 | hut. Yeah.

02:35:35.600 | They understand the consequences of life.

02:35:37.760 | They understand the fish and how hard it is to get them and the basic rules of

02:35:41.600 | the wind and the rain and the river.

02:35:43.040 | And that we all have to play by those and that it's, and, and you talk to a,

02:35:47.640 | talk to a grieving mother and ask her if she's living inside a video game.

02:35:51.120 | And it's like the people to me, this, this whole thing of, Oh,

02:35:55.040 | are we living in a simulation?

02:35:56.760 | To me, that's a, that's, that's the, that's the infirmary of, of society

02:36:02.080 | starting to that to starting to, to, to, to, to, to, to parody itself.

02:36:06.960 | It's people going, I have no meaning in my life anymore.

02:36:09.760 | So is this even real? And again, go ask the Sherpa, go ask the Eskimo.

02:36:14.960 | They're not, they're not worried.

02:36:16.640 | You forget what fundamentally matters in life.

02:36:18.520 | What is the source of meaning in a human life? Uh,

02:36:21.920 | if you talk about the such subjects, nevertheless,

02:36:25.560 | you could for a time stroll in the big philosophical questions.

02:36:31.320 | And, uh, if you do it for short enough time,

02:36:34.320 | you won't forget about the things that matter, that there is human suffering,

02:36:37.320 | that there is real human joy. That is real.

02:36:41.040 | That, that, that, that our time in the jungle was very hard.

02:36:47.080 | Did you suffer enough to know that it's real?

02:36:52.160 | Yeah, man, I was hoping we're in a video game that whole time.

02:36:56.080 | So that's actually, that's actually a really good way to,

02:36:59.320 | there was this moment that I watched where you were washing a shirt in this

02:37:04.320 | pathetic puddle. Cause we had no water.

02:37:06.880 | And cause we had walked all day and tripped all day and gotten thorns in our

02:37:10.800 | hands and our feet and our legs.

02:37:12.640 | And we were lost in the jungle and it was nighttime and we didn't know if a big

02:37:16.920 | tree was going to just fall on us and mousetrap kill us.

02:37:20.000 | And there's a lot of uncertainty,

02:37:22.040 | but I watched something very special happen to you. And that was,

02:37:26.080 | I saw you crouching by the side of this puddle.

02:37:29.720 | It wasn't even a flowing stream, so we couldn't drink it.

02:37:31.760 | And you were just trying to wash the sweat off of your shirt.

02:37:37.240 | And you, you looked at me and you just said,

02:37:39.080 | the only thing that I care about right now is water.

02:37:41.880 | And I feel like in that moment we were united in the,

02:37:46.120 | in the simple reality of the fact that we were so thirsty that it hurt and that

02:37:51.160 | it was a little scary.

02:37:55.080 | Yeah. Uh, it was scary, but also there's like a,

02:38:00.040 | a joy in the interaction with the water because it cools your body temperature

02:38:09.600 | down.

02:38:10.680 | And there's like a faith in that interaction that eventually we'll find clean

02:38:15.920 | water because, uh, water's plentiful on earth.

02:38:19.720 | It's kind of like a delusional faith that eventually we'll find.

02:38:24.240 | And it was just like a little celebration.

02:38:26.000 | I think the cooling aspect of the water, because, uh,

02:38:33.000 | the body temperature is really high from traversing the really dense jungle and

02:38:38.280 | just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing else really is.

02:38:43.320 | Now it was a little celebration of life, of life on earth, of earth,

02:38:48.360 | of the jungle, of everything. It was a nice, it was a nice moment.

02:38:52.760 | I think about that. Had a couple of those.

02:38:54.760 | There's one in the puddle and one in the river.

02:38:56.800 | One was, uh, full of delusion and fear.

02:39:01.760 | And the other one was full of relief and celebration.

02:39:05.280 | Yeah. I've, I've, you know, there's this thing that they, they say where the,

02:39:11.120 | the, the, all the pleasure in life is derived from the transitions.

02:39:14.960 | When you're cold, warm feels good. When you're hot, cold feels good.

02:39:19.520 | When you're hungry, food feels good.

02:39:22.080 | And when you're that thirsty water becomes God and it's all you want.

02:39:27.080 | And also, and also the other thing is that when you're, when we're out there,

02:39:31.560 | it felt so good to be so lost and so tired. And so like we're doing level two,

02:39:36.720 | like, like how would you,

02:39:37.560 | how would you describe the physicality of what we were doing?

02:39:41.440 | The level of physical like exertion?

02:39:44.000 | Well, it's something that I've haven't trained.

02:39:48.600 | I don't even know how you would train for that kind of thing,

02:39:50.800 | but it's extremely dense jungle.

02:39:52.320 | So every single step is like completely unpredictable in terms of the terrain

02:39:57.800 | your foot interacts with.

02:40:00.320 | So the different variety of slippery that is in the jungle floor is fascinating

02:40:05.600 | because some things, I mean, the slope matters,

02:40:08.680 | but some roots of trees are slippery. Some are not.

02:40:12.240 | Some trees in the ground already rotted through. So if you step through,

02:40:16.720 | you're going to potentially fall through. So it could be a,

02:40:20.360 | a shallow hole or it could be a very deep hole with some leaves and vegetation

02:40:26.040 | covering up a hole where if you fall through,

02:40:28.960 | you could break a leg and completely lose your footing or fall rolling down

02:40:32.840 | hill. And if you roll downhill,

02:40:34.800 | I'm pretty sure there's a 99% probability that you'll hit a thing with spikes on

02:40:39.800 | it.

02:40:42.000 | So there's so many layers of avoiding dangers of small dangers and big dangers

02:40:47.000 | all around you with every single step.

02:40:50.040 | So there's like a mental exhaustion that sets in like the,

02:40:53.400 | just the perception and you're just observing you.

02:40:56.640 | You're extremely good at perceiving,

02:40:59.760 | having situational awareness of taking the information in that's really

02:41:03.800 | important and filtering out the stuff that's not important.

02:41:06.200 | But even for you, that's exhausting. And for me,

02:41:08.360 | it was completely exhausting. Just paying attention,

02:41:11.280 | paying attention to everything around you.

02:41:12.920 | So that exhaustion was surprising because it's like there's moments when you're

02:41:17.680 | like, I don't give a damn anymore. I'm just going to step,

02:41:20.280 | I'm just going to like,

02:41:21.680 | And so that's it. You go, I don't care anymore. And you reach out and you,

02:41:24.760 | I'm just going to lean against this tree. And then what happened?

02:41:27.320 | Every time. Yeah. And then you have to care. Yeah.

02:41:31.520 | And then there's just bad luck because there is wasp nests there. There's,

02:41:35.400 | there's just like a million things.

02:41:36.720 | And that is physically is mentally psychologically exhausting because there's the

02:41:40.680 | uncertainty. When is this going to end? It's up, uh,

02:41:44.160 | in our particular situation, up and down Hills, up and down Hills,

02:41:47.440 | very steep downward, very steep upward, no water, all this kind of stuff.

02:41:51.760 | It's the most difficult thing I've ever done,

02:41:55.280 | but it's very difficult to describe what are the parameters that make it

02:41:58.560 | difficult because I run long distances very regularly.

02:42:01.840 | I do extremely difficult physical things regularly that on some

02:42:06.720 | surface level could seem much more challenging than what we did.

02:42:10.600 | But no, this was another beast. This is something else,

02:42:14.000 | but it was also raw and real and beautiful. Cause it's like,

02:42:18.200 | it's what the explorers did. Yeah. It's what earth is without humans.

02:42:23.920 | And it, and also just like the massive scale of the trees around us

02:42:29.160 | was, uh,

02:42:32.680 | the humbling size difference between human and tree

02:42:38.440 | is both humbling in that, like that tree is really old.

02:42:41.440 | It's a time difference, a lifetime difference.

02:42:46.320 | And just the scale, it's like, Holy shit,

02:42:50.040 | we live on an earth that can create those things.

02:42:54.040 | It makes me feel small in every way that life is short,

02:42:58.280 | that my physical presence on this earth is tiny, how vulnerable I am.

02:43:04.000 | All of those feelings are there. And in that, the physical, uh,

02:43:08.360 | endurance of traversing the jungle. Yeah.

02:43:12.920 | It was the hardest journey that I remember ever taking

02:43:17.360 | every step.

02:43:21.080 | And then that made making it out of the jungle and then made

02:43:27.800 | it

02:43:28.640 | the swim in the water that we could drink.

02:43:35.760 | I was just pure joy.

02:43:36.960 | It was probably one of the happiest moments in my life.

02:43:44.000 | Just sitting there with you, Paul,

02:43:48.720 | and with JJ in the water, full darkness,

02:43:53.560 | the rain coming down and all just us all just laughing,

02:43:58.640 | having made it through that,

02:44:03.280 | having eaten a bit of food before and the absurdity of the timing of all of it,

02:44:07.600 | that it somehow worked out

02:44:09.360 | and

02:44:12.720 | how we're just three little humans

02:44:17.720 | sitting in a river,

02:44:21.120 | just our heads emerged barely above water with

02:44:27.160 | jungle all around us. What a life.

02:44:30.600 | That was a real adventure.

02:44:31.720 | That was a real adventure.

02:44:32.880 | That was a real one.

02:44:33.720 | Yeah. I'll never forget that. So, um,

02:44:38.000 | it's a real honor to have shared that.

02:44:40.120 | Of course we had very different experiences.

02:44:44.200 | When you saw a caiman in that situation, you're like,

02:44:47.360 | I have to go meet that guy. It's a friend of mine.

02:44:50.160 | Well, I mean, we were in the, in the river, in a thunderstorm,

02:44:52.720 | just our necks above, we're all laughing our asses off. And I mean,

02:44:56.440 | we're in the river with the stingrays and the black caiman and the piranha and

02:44:59.520 | all the electric eels and everything. And it's pitch black out.

02:45:02.840 | And then what were we doing?

02:45:04.640 | We were holding our headlamps up and there was a swirling moths,

02:45:07.600 | the infinity moths all making those geometric patterns. And it's like,

02:45:11.080 | we were just three ridiculous primates,

02:45:14.240 | three friends in a river just laughing because we were safer in that river than

02:45:19.720 | we had been in there. And we were rejoicing that, that,

02:45:23.520 | that the thunderstorm was,

02:45:26.080 | was compared to the war zone that we'd been living in.

02:45:29.040 | The thunderstorm was safe and it was, it really was a beautiful moment.

02:45:31.880 | And also that like very different life trajectories have taken these three

02:45:36.120 | humans into this one place. Yeah. It's like,

02:45:39.600 | what is this universe that would like, uh,

02:45:44.280 | cause we were kind of like those moths, you know what I mean? Like we're,

02:45:48.040 | we're, we would come from some weird place on this earth and we'd have all kinds

02:45:51.960 | of shit happened to us and we're all pursuing some shit and some light.

02:45:55.480 | And we ended up here together enjoying this moment or something else.

02:46:00.080 | It just felt absurd. And in that absurdity was this like real human joy

02:46:04.760 | and damn water tasted good.

02:46:07.160 | Oh, water's good man. Water. And those, those little oranges, those things.

02:46:12.400 | And then I would just say like, do you feel like, I feel like running,

02:46:16.520 | like no matter how much I run, I feel like the, like you run,

02:46:20.160 | you do a workout and then you stop like maybe people who do ultras feel this,

02:46:24.000 | but like, I felt like the, we would wait, we woke up, it was like, you know,

02:46:27.760 | wake up at dawn, 6:00 AM. Let's start walking, you know,

02:46:32.440 | break camp go. And it's like, pretty much you just don't stop all day.

02:46:35.880 | And it's level 10 cardio all day long.

02:46:39.680 | And you're sweating buckets and there's no water.

02:46:42.120 | It's like you would never put yourself through that voluntarily. You couldn't,

02:46:45.520 | you'd never, you would never have the resolve to,

02:46:47.800 | to continue torturing yourself except for that.

02:46:51.120 | We were trying to make it to the, to freedom, to get out.

02:46:54.680 | And it's like the obsession of that with the compass and the machete and the

02:46:59.240 | navigating. Fuck.

02:47:00.920 | I think there's something to be said about like the fact that we didn't think

02:47:03.920 | through much of that and we just dived into it. I think there was like,

02:47:07.840 | we're like laughing, enjoying ourselves moments before. And once you go in,

02:47:11.800 | you're like, Oh shit. Oh shit. And you just come face to face with it. Yeah.

02:47:16.160 | I think that's what, you know, whatever that is in humans,

02:47:21.080 | that goes to that, that's what the explorers do. The, you know,

02:47:24.680 | and the best of them do it to the extreme levels.

02:47:27.840 | Well, I think that what we did was to,

02:47:29.520 | to a pretty extreme level because we,

02:47:31.080 | we left the safety of a river of knowing where we were and voluntarily got lost

02:47:37.000 | in the Amazon with very little provisions on an, on a very,

02:47:42.920 | now that we're back, now that we experienced what we experienced,

02:47:46.000 | I really can't stop thinking about how fucking stupid it was that we did that.

02:47:50.240 | Because if we had gotten lost, Pico was saying to me,

02:47:53.360 | even if you guys had, if one of you had broken your leg,

02:47:56.760 | it's, you know, days in either direction,

02:48:01.640 | even if they'd sent help for us,

02:48:04.320 | help would take how long to scour all that jungle sound doesn't travel.

02:48:09.840 | Even, even a helicopter, even if they looked for us,

02:48:12.680 | they wouldn't be able to see us. How would we signal for help?

02:48:15.080 | Can't really build a fire. And so it's like, if anything had gone wrong,

02:48:19.720 | if we'd gone a few degrees different,

02:48:21.360 | different to the West would have taken us two more days. If we'd,

02:48:25.240 | if we'd gotten injured, it'd be, it'd be Carrie through that. Yeah.

02:48:29.920 | And so it somehow only afterwards am I really going, wow, thank God we got out of

02:48:34.320 | this. Thank God. After I see so many people going, make sure nothing happens to Lex

02:48:38.920 | Friedman. I'd be the deadest motherfucker on earth.

02:48:41.680 | It somehow works out. It does seem to somehow work out.

02:48:48.160 | Let me ask you about Jane Goodall, another explorer of a different kind.

02:48:51.600 | What do you think about her,

02:48:53.840 | about her role in understanding this natural world of ours?

02:48:58.680 | I think that Jane is like a living historical

02:49:04.240 | treasure. Like I think somehow she's alive, but she's,

02:49:07.040 | she's already reached that level where it's like Einstein, Jane Goodall.

02:49:11.640 | Like there's these, these, these incredible minds and, you know,

02:49:15.600 | growing up as a child, my parents would read to me because I was so dyslexic.

02:49:19.640 | I didn't learn to read until I was quite old.

02:49:21.520 | And my mom was a big Jane Goodall fan.

02:49:24.680 | And all I wanted to hear about was animals.

02:49:26.760 | And so I would, I would get read to about this lady named Jane Goodall,

02:49:30.720 | this girl who went to Africa and studied chimps and who broke all the rules and

02:49:34.400 | named her study subjects,

02:49:36.880 | even though that wasn't what she was supposed to do.

02:49:38.760 | And she became this incredible advocate for earth and for

02:49:43.720 | ecosystems and for, and she seemed to realize as her career went on that,

02:49:48.120 | that teaching children to appreciate nature was the key

02:49:52.400 | because they're going with that thing where she says, we don't so much

02:49:57.280 | inherit the earth from our ancestors, but borrow it from our children.

02:50:02.120 | We're just here. We're just passing through. And so if we destroy it, we're,

02:50:05.240 | we're, we're, we're dimming the lights on the lives of future generations.

02:50:10.240 | And so she's been really, really cognizant of that.

02:50:12.800 | And she's been a light in the darkness.

02:50:14.240 | She's sort of in terms of saying that animals have

02:50:18.440 | personalities and culture and,

02:50:20.560 | and their own inalienable rights and reasons for existing and,

02:50:24.440 | and that human life is valuable. She's very big on that every day.

02:50:28.160 | We influence the people around us and, and the events of the earth.

02:50:31.880 | Even if you feel like your life is small and insignificant, that, that,

02:50:34.560 | that you do have an impact.

02:50:36.920 | And I think that's a really powerful little candle out there in the darkness

02:50:41.000 | that Jane carries.

02:50:42.280 | What do you think about her field work with the chimps?

02:50:46.960 | Bad-ass. The fact that she did what she did at the age that she did at the time

02:50:52.800 | that she did is, is incredible. It's actually incredible.

02:50:57.120 | She has that explorer gene and she also has that relentless,

02:51:00.400 | relentlessness is like this incredible quality. She just, you know,

02:51:05.480 | she travels 300 days a year, educating people, talking around the world,

02:51:09.280 | trying to help bolster conservation now before it's too late.

02:51:13.200 | And traveling 300 days a year is not fun. Traveling at all can be not fun.

02:51:19.080 | So I started reading the River of Doubt book you recommended to me.

02:51:23.440 | So that guy's bad-ass on many levels,

02:51:27.560 | but I didn't realize how much of a naturalist he was,

02:51:30.840 | how much of a scholar of the natural world he was.

02:51:34.400 | So that book details his journey into the Amazon jungle.

02:51:40.240 | Um, what do you find inspiring about Teddy Roosevelt?

02:51:43.560 | And that whole journey of just saying, fuck it,

02:51:46.440 | of going to the Amazon jungle of taking on that expedition?

02:51:50.080 | Well, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt,

02:51:52.320 | you could write volumes on what's inspiring about him. I think that, you know,

02:51:55.320 | he was, he was a weak, asthmatic, little rich kid that,

02:51:58.960 | that wasn't physically able, that had no self-confidence. And he was very,

02:52:03.600 | and he, and, and he had pretty severe depression.

02:52:06.920 | He had tragedy in his life and he was very, um,

02:52:11.400 | at least for me, he's been one of the people like in the,

02:52:14.520 | one of the first historical figures who, where,

02:52:17.800 | where he wrote about the struggle to overcome those things and,

02:52:21.640 | and to make himself from being a weak,

02:52:26.120 | asthmatic little teenager to, to,

02:52:27.960 | to sort of strengthening himself and building muscle and becoming this barrel

02:52:31.440 | chested lion of a guy who could be the president, who could be an explorer.

02:52:35.600 | And, uh, one of the rough riders and he's, he's just,

02:52:39.480 | everything he does is so, is so hyperbolically, you know,

02:52:44.040 | incredible to come out of war and have the other people you fought with go, he,

02:52:48.160 | this guy has no fear. I mean,

02:52:50.960 | he must've just been a psychopath and had no fear.

02:52:53.640 | And then proving it further was that thing where he was going to give a speech

02:52:57.520 | to a bunch of people and he got shot in the chest and it went through his

02:53:01.800 | spectacle case and through his speech.

02:53:04.120 | And even though the bullet was lodged in his chest, this man said,

02:53:09.800 | don't hurt the guy that shot me. I believe he asked him, why'd you do it?

02:53:13.280 | And then as he's bleeding and in the rain said, no, no, no,

02:53:16.960 | I'm not going to the hospital. I'm going to keep going with the speech.

02:53:20.000 | What a badass. That's incredible.

02:53:23.560 | But going to the jungle on many levels is really,

02:53:27.160 | is really difficult for him at that time.

02:53:30.800 | There are so many things that can, so many more things,

02:53:33.320 | even then now that can kill you, all the different infections, everything.

02:53:36.640 | And the, and the lack of knowledge, just the sheer lack of knowledge.

02:53:39.480 | So that truly is an expedition,

02:53:43.200 | a really, really challenging expedition.

02:53:46.440 | So there's lessons about what it takes to be a great explorer from that.

02:53:50.120 | The perseverance, how important do you think is perseverance and exploration,

02:53:54.960 | especially through the jungle?

02:53:56.440 | I think it's all there is. If you hear about the people,

02:53:59.320 | and I think that that is a tremendous metaphor for life,

02:54:02.640 | because whether you hear about that plane that crashed in the Andes and the

02:54:06.240 | people were alone and freezing and they had to eat each other and some of them

02:54:11.120 | made it out, some of them kept the fire burning.

02:54:13.920 | And Teddy Roosevelt voluntarily after being president threw himself into the

02:54:19.760 | Amazon rainforest and survived,

02:54:23.280 | came so close to dying, but survived.

02:54:27.040 | And so perseverance is all of it. I mean, that's, that's,

02:54:30.440 | I think that's our quality as a human.

02:54:32.120 | So they also mapped. So on the biology side is interesting,

02:54:36.360 | but they mapped and documented a lot of the unknown geography and biodiversity.

02:54:40.720 | What does it take to do that? So when I, when I see you move about the jungle,

02:54:43.960 | you're always like, you capture a creature, take a picture, write down, like,

02:54:47.520 | so you can find new creatures, find new things about the jungle,

02:54:52.400 | document them, sort of a scientific perspective on the jungle.

02:54:56.560 | But back then there's even less known, much less known about the jungle.

02:55:01.240 | So what, what do you think it takes to document,

02:55:03.560 | to map that world and new unexplored wilderness?

02:55:07.160 | I mean, they're, they're clearly pressing botanical specimens.

02:55:12.080 | They're probably shooting birds and, and, and Roosevelt knew how to,

02:55:16.000 | knew how to preserve those specimens. I mean, he really was a naturalist,

02:55:21.240 | so he knew exactly. So if he's seeing these animals to them,

02:55:24.200 | whereas we'll take a picture and identify it,

02:55:25.960 | they were harvesting specimens, taking them with them, drying them out.

02:55:29.320 | For them, it was totally different. And it could be the first, you know,

02:55:34.280 | there's, I don't know, I forget what JJ said.

02:55:36.840 | There's something like 70 species of ant birds here. And it's like,

02:55:39.640 | so how likely are you to be the first person to ever see this one species of

02:55:44.440 | bird? And so for them,

02:55:45.640 | it's you have this bird and so perfectly preserving that specimen.

02:55:51.880 | And I think a lot of non-scientific people don't realize that every species from

02:55:55.720 | blue whale to elephant to blue jay to sparrow, whatever, whatever it is,

02:56:00.080 | whatever species we have on record,

02:56:01.800 | there are scientific specimens and the first people to see them shot them.

02:56:05.560 | And that's, there's museums are filled with these catalogs,

02:56:11.040 | preserved birds that these explorers brought back from New Guinea and South

02:56:15.560 | America and Africa, and then put into these drawers. And,

02:56:19.560 | and now we, we labeled them and we, so this is, you know,

02:56:22.760 | this is red and green, this is scarlet macaw. This is

02:56:25.960 | brown crested ant bird. And this is, and it's just, they're just categorized.

02:56:30.360 | That book of birds you have like encyclopedia of birds.

02:56:34.840 | Yo.

02:56:35.320 | What?

02:56:35.960 | The human achievement in these pages.

02:56:39.400 | For people listening, Paul just flipping through a huge number of pages. These are

02:56:45.160 | just, is this in the Amazon or is this in Peru?

02:56:47.320 | This is just here. This is birds of Peru.

02:56:49.560 | Dude, pages on pages of toucans and orasaris and hummingbirds and ant birds and,

02:56:57.480 | and smoky brown woodpecker and, and tropical screech owl,

02:57:02.040 | which we just heard by the way. It's just, it's endless.

02:57:05.160 | Who knew there were so many birds? I had no idea there was so many birds.

02:57:07.400 | Documenting all of that. And a lot, I mean, there's also,

02:57:11.800 | which we've got to experience and you're, you're,

02:57:13.800 | you're pretty good at also is, is actually making,

02:57:16.280 | understanding and making the sounds of the different birds.

02:57:19.320 | Yeah.

02:57:19.800 | What's your favorite bird sound to make?

02:57:21.320 | Uh, undulated tinamou, because in the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk,

02:57:27.160 | uh, they're usually the ones that make up what is considered by many to be

02:57:32.120 | the anthem of the Amazon.

02:57:33.480 | Can you do a little bird for us?

02:57:36.120 | That's what a undulated tinamou sounds like. And it's usually like,

02:57:43.480 | oh, it is getting to be afternoon. It's kinda,

02:57:46.120 | it's almost like hearing church bells on a Sunday. It's like, you just,

02:57:49.560 | there's something about it. You go, ah, there he is.

02:57:52.040 | And like you were saying, it's a reminder. Oh, that's a friend of mine.

02:57:56.200 | Yeah.

02:57:56.700 | Surrounded by friends.

02:57:58.280 | I have so many friends here.

02:57:59.240 | What does it take to survive out here?

02:58:02.120 | What are some basic principles of survival in the jungle?

02:58:07.720 | Cleanliness. I mean, really, we talked about this, but like,

02:58:12.760 | you know, keeping, I have so many holes in my skin right now, like I have a mosquito.

02:58:17.400 | There we go. Um, I have so many spots that I've scratched off of my skin because

02:58:23.640 | the mosquito bites me and then I scratch it. Or the other big one is that I, I,

02:58:28.120 | I worry that I have a tick, not, uh, deliberately, not with my thinking brain,

02:58:34.360 | but my, my, my simian brain just wants to find and remove ticks.

02:58:38.840 | And so I scratch and then if my fingernails get too long, I remove my skin.

02:58:42.600 | And then those be get, those get infected in the jungle. And so staying hyper clean,

02:58:47.560 | using soap, like basic stuff, keeping order to your bags, um, order to your gear,

02:58:55.480 | things in dry bags, make sure, you know, we did, we, we explained that we got in the river during

02:59:01.320 | a thunderstorm. We didn't explain why we did that because the thunderstorm came when we had

02:59:05.880 | eaten dinner, but we hadn't set up our tents. And so we decided to cover our bags with our boats

02:59:11.640 | that we had been carrying our pack rafts that we'd been carrying in our backpacks.

02:59:14.760 | So all of our gear would stay dry. So the only thing we could do is either sit in the rain and

02:59:19.800 | be cold or sit in the river and be warm. And so keeping our gear dry, momentary discomfort for

02:59:27.400 | future, you know, that, that, that to me was an incredibly smart calculation to make is you

02:59:34.200 | really just, you gotta be smart out here. You can't, you know, not running out of a headlamp

02:59:39.000 | while you're out on the trail and being stuck in that darkness. Yeah. It really takes just being

02:59:45.080 | a little bit on your toes. And I find that that, that necessity of being on your toes is a place

02:59:51.000 | that I like to live in. It's just the right amount of challenge here. So keeping the gear organized

02:59:55.000 | and all of that, but also being willing to sort of improvise. I've seen you improvise very well,

02:59:59.640 | cause there's so much unknowns. There's so many, so much chaos and dynamic aspects that like

03:00:05.880 | planning is not going to prevent you from having to face that in the end of the day.

03:00:10.040 | No, it's been really funny watching you sort of shed your planning brain. Like day, like day one,

03:00:20.120 | it was very much like, so are we gonna, and then I could tell, I could see your, I could see your

03:00:25.160 | brow sort of furrow when you, I would go, I don't know what time we're going to get there. And you'd

03:00:28.600 | go, well, we'll just tell me. And I'd be like, I don't know what the jungle is going to let us do.

03:00:32.040 | You know, let's do, let's record the podcast tomorrow. Okay. But we, if it, if it, you know,

03:00:36.840 | if it rains, if it gets windy, if a Friaje comes, if there's a, a Jaguar with rabies,

03:00:41.320 | like anything could happen. Landslide, like anything literally.

03:00:47.800 | I mean, the thing you mentioned, trees falling, that's a thing in the jungle.

03:00:51.880 | That's a major thing in the jungle.

03:00:53.160 | Holy shit. First of all, a lot of trees fall and they fall quickly and they could just kill you.

03:00:58.600 | They fall quickly. They're huge. We're talking about trees that are like the size of school

03:01:04.360 | buses stacked and connected to other trees with vines so that when they fall this millennium tree,

03:01:12.120 | this thousand year old tree, boom, it shakes the ground, pulls down other trees with it.

03:01:17.720 | So if you're anywhere near that for a few acres, you're getting smashed. That's the end of you.

03:01:23.320 | And so the jungle at any moment that you're out there could just decide to delete you.

03:01:27.640 | And then the leafcutter ants and the army ants and the flies and everything,

03:01:30.280 | you'll be digested in three days. You'll be gone, gone, no bones, nothing.

03:01:33.720 | Who do you think would eat most of you?

03:01:35.240 | I would hope that, that like a King vulture with a colorful face would just.

03:01:41.640 | Dramatically.

03:01:42.280 | Just get in there, like right in the ass, just like nature's metal. Just like when they like

03:01:46.120 | walk in through the elephant's ass, I'd want that on camera trap. I think that would be a great way

03:01:50.200 | to go.

03:01:50.520 | And we'll slowly look up and just kind of smile.

03:01:52.760 | Yeah. Just rip out your intestines and just shake it. Victorious over your dead body.

03:01:58.600 | Well, but also honor a friend. That's another.

03:02:01.000 | Yeah, sure. But you know, you just, you'd look so, you know,

03:02:03.320 | your white naked ass laying there in the jungle, you'd be like face down and shit.

03:02:06.280 | That's why you always have to look good. Any moment a tree can fall on you and a vulture

03:02:11.960 | just swoops in and eats your heart.

03:02:13.720 | That's right.

03:02:14.220 | Uh, we talked about alone this show a bit.

03:02:18.200 | Yo, rock house.

03:02:20.600 | Yeah. Who is, what do you think about that guy? Rock house, Roland Welker from season seven. He

03:02:24.760 | built the rock house. He killed the Musk ox, uh, with bow and arrow and finished it with a knife.

03:02:32.040 | And had the GoPro to mount to, you know, to document it. That's a really mind blowing.

03:02:40.040 | I mean, so for people who don't know that show is you're supposed to survive as long as possible

03:02:44.120 | on season seven of the show, they literally said, you can only win it if, uh, you survive a hundred

03:02:51.880 | days. And that's, there's a lot of aspects of that show. That's difficult. One of which is it's in

03:02:58.680 | the cold. The others, they get just a handful of supplies, no food, nothing, none of that.

03:03:04.760 | So they have to figure all of that out. And, um, this is probably one of the greatest performers

03:03:11.720 | on the show, Roland Welker. He built a rock house shelter. So what, I mean, what does survival

03:03:17.080 | entail? It's building a shelter, fire, catching food, sustained warm, getting enough energy to

03:03:25.080 | sort of keep doing the work. It takes a lot of work, like building the rock house. I read that

03:03:29.720 | it took 500 calories an hour from him. So he had to feed himself, right? Quite a lot. You're lifting

03:03:37.800 | a 200 pound boulders and still the guy lost, uh, I read 44 pounds, which is 20% of his body weight.

03:03:47.000 | So that's survival. What, uh, lessons, what inspiration do you draw from him?

03:03:53.480 | I think he was fun to watch because he had this indomitable spirit. He was just, he wasn't there

03:04:03.080 | to commune with nature. He was there to win. And he was like, to me, that's the pioneer mentality.

03:04:08.600 | He just, he was just, he goes, I'm a hunting guide. I'm out here. I'm going to win that money.

03:04:13.320 | I'm going to survive through the winter. He wasn't worried. I feel like so many people are like,

03:04:17.480 | they worry second guessing themselves. Am I in a video game? I don't know. What's my, you know,

03:04:21.960 | just questioning their entire existential identity. And this guy was like, you know what,

03:04:26.360 | there's a muskox over there. I'm going to shoot it. I'm going to stab it. Now I'm going to make

03:04:30.600 | a pouch out of its ball sack. And I'm going to live off that for the next few months and win a

03:04:34.680 | half million dollars. And that's an amazing amount of pragmatic optimism that I just enjoyed. And

03:04:40.200 | every time he would go, we got to get back to rock house. And it became, even though he's all alone,

03:04:45.400 | it was, he had a big smile on his face. And what made that season so great was that it was him.

03:04:50.440 | And then it was Callie and, and Roland had, you know, the muscle and could make rock house.

03:04:57.800 | And then Callie was, was the opposite. She was this girl who, yeah, she could hunt with her bow

03:05:03.000 | and she knew how to fish and, and she wasn't using raw power, but what was so endearing about her

03:05:09.160 | was that how much she loved being out there as hard as it was. And as isolation, isolationist

03:05:14.360 | as it was, she was smiling every time, every time the show cut to her, she was like, Hey, everybody,

03:05:21.640 | it's morning. Can you believe the frost? Like you've been out there for a hundred days.

03:05:28.280 | Amazing opt. I think it was really an amazing show of that, that the game is all here.

03:05:33.080 | The game of life, the game of alone and the game of life. Cause it's the same thing.

03:05:37.560 | Yeah. She maintained that sort of silliness, the goofiness all through it when the condition got

03:05:42.840 | really tough and she had a very different perspective is, you know, Roland didn't want

03:05:47.800 | any of the spirituality. It's very pragmatic. And from Callie is very, very spiritual collection,

03:05:53.720 | connection to the land. She said something like she wanted not only to take from the land,

03:06:00.280 | but to give back. I mean, there's this kind of poetic, spiritual connection to the land. It's

03:06:05.240 | such a dire contrast to Roland and, but she's still a badass. I mean, to survive, no matter

03:06:11.480 | what, no matter the kind of personality you have, you have to be a badass. I think she, uh, took a

03:06:18.680 | porcupine quill from her shoulder. That was crazy. Cause I think it went in somewhere completely

03:06:25.720 | different and it migrated to her shoulder. And the way that I understood that is because they

03:06:29.720 | have, I said, that's impossible. Cause I remember that she's like pulling off her shirt and she,

03:06:33.880 | she's like, there's something, and then she like pushes it out. And I remember like, I was like,

03:06:37.800 | hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. How? Yeah. And it was because the barbs, once it goes in,

03:06:43.800 | as you move and flex your body, it moves a little bit each time and it gets migrate. Like

03:06:49.080 | I didn't even think of that shit. Plus, if I remember correctly, uh, I think she caught two

03:06:54.840 | porcupines. The second one was like rotting or something, or if it infected, it had an affected

03:06:59.480 | body, whatever. The spots on it. Yeah. She chose not to eat it. No. And then she chose not to eat

03:07:05.320 | it at first. And then she decided to eat it eventually. Yeah. I forgot that. Yeah. And she,

03:07:09.720 | that was, that was an insane sort of really thoughtful, uh, focused, collected decision,

03:07:17.240 | waiting a day and then saying, fuck it. I need, I need this fat. And that was the other thing is

03:07:22.600 | like fat is important. Oh yeah. It's like meat is not enough. You learn about like, what are the

03:07:28.280 | different food sources there? Apparently there's like, uh, rabbit starvation is a thing because

03:07:35.400 | we have too much lean meat and it doesn't nourish the body. Fat is the thing that nurses the body,

03:07:40.520 | especially in, uh, in cold conditions. So that's the thing. She, yeah, she,

03:07:47.560 | she was, she was incredible. And I thought as, as, as, as brash and sort of fun as Roland was,

03:07:55.320 | she represented, um, a much more beautiful take on, on it. And it was really heartbreaking when

03:08:02.120 | she lost. Cause I mean, and like you said, still a badass. Yeah. It's kind of like Forrest Griffin

03:08:07.080 | versus Stefan, Stefan Bonner. Like it was like, it doesn't matter who won. Yeah. You guys beat

03:08:11.640 | the shit out of each other. Like, and she didn't really lose. Right. So she got, she got evac'd

03:08:17.400 | because her toe was, uh, going. Frostbite. Frostbite. A hundred days. You think you can

03:08:24.040 | do a hundred days? Honestly, I've done, uh, I've 18 years in the Amazon, man. I just, at this point

03:08:34.440 | it's, uh, I could, I wouldn't sign up for another a hundred days, you know, at this point, I don't,

03:08:42.200 | I don't have that to prove I've survived in the wild and, uh, I wouldn't want to voluntarily take

03:08:47.640 | a hundred days away from everyone I know. Yeah. The loneliness aspect is, is tough. We're not

03:08:54.600 | meant for that. I really love the people I have in my life and I wouldn't, I wouldn't, and you

03:08:59.320 | see it on the show. A lot of the people, big, tough ex Navy SEALs who are survival experts,

03:09:04.440 | who know what they're doing. They get out there and they go, you know what? I miss my family.

03:09:09.480 | Yeah. And they go, it's not worth it. They have this existential realization. They go,

03:09:13.400 | we're only got, I only got so many years here. Like let's, let's, this is crazy. It's just some

03:09:18.760 | money. Fuck it. And they go home. You know, it's funny cause you sometimes

03:09:22.840 | film yourself in the jungle and you're alone. And there's a, another guy, uh, Jordan, uh, Jonas,

03:09:28.920 | Hobo Joto. Uh, he's the season six winner. And he said that the camera made him feel less lonely.

03:09:37.400 | I I've heard of him from multiple channels. Uh, one of the things is he spent all of his twenties

03:09:44.360 | in, um, living in Siberia with the, with the tribes out there, uh, Herzog, happy people.

03:09:53.480 | And so he actually talked about that. It's one of the loneliest time of his life because

03:10:02.520 | when he went up there, he didn't speak Russian and he needed to learn the language. And even

03:10:07.000 | though you have people around you, when you don't speak their language, it feels really,

03:10:09.960 | really lonely. And he felt less lonely on the show because he had the camera and he felt like he could

03:10:15.560 | talk to the camera. There is an element when you have in these harsh conditions, if you like record

03:10:21.160 | something, you feel like you're talking to another human through it. Even if it's just a recording,

03:10:27.400 | I sometimes feel that like maybe cause I imagine a specific person that will watch it. And I feel

03:10:34.040 | like I'm talking to that person. Well, I noticed that when things got especially hard and they did

03:10:40.440 | get especially hard when we were out in the wilderness, that you would begin filming to

03:10:50.600 | share that struggle. But I also think that I've used that at times where, yeah, you go,

03:10:57.720 | well, maybe if I, cause if you can tell someone else about it, then you're on the hero's journey.

03:11:03.320 | And then it sort of has to make you braver and it changes how you, cause you, I'm cold and I'm

03:11:08.840 | tired and I'm, I'm hungry and this hurts and that hurts. And I don't know when we're going to make

03:11:12.920 | it and how is this going to go? And, and all of a sudden you go, well, guys, we're, we're here.

03:11:17.400 | We're going that way. And, and, uh, and then you're like, well, I got to keep going. Cause

03:11:22.600 | cause you're like, they're, they're still out there. If you forget.

03:11:24.840 | You have to step up. That's one of the reasons I want a family. I think when you have kids,

03:11:28.600 | yeah, you have to be like, you have to be the best version of yourself. Like for them.

03:11:32.600 | All my friends with kids that I've seen them go through where until you have a family, you're

03:11:38.760 | just, you're just playing around, man. I mean, you could do important work. You can, you can

03:11:44.200 | have skin in the, in other games, but it's once you have a little tribe of humans that depends on

03:11:49.880 | you. Yeah. If you take that seriously, if you want to do that, right. It's one of the hardest

03:11:55.480 | things you could do. And it, it just, it just changes everything.

03:11:59.720 | How has your life changed since we last met? Speak about changing everything.

03:12:07.320 | You've been for people don't know, pushing jungle keepers forward into uncharted territories,

03:12:16.520 | saving more and more and more and more rainforests. There's a lot I could ask you about that. There's

03:12:21.960 | a lot of stories to be told there. It's a fight. It's a battle. It's a battle to protect this,

03:12:26.520 | this, uh, beautiful area of rainforest of nature. Um, but since we last met, you've made,

03:12:35.720 | you've continued to make a lot of progress. Uh, so what, what's, what's the story of jungle keepers

03:12:41.320 | leading up to the moment we met and after and everything you're doing right now.

03:12:46.120 | 18 years ago, when I first came to the jungle, I was a kid from New York who always dreamed since

03:12:55.800 | I was six years old, maybe even younger of going to a place where animals were everywhere. And

03:13:01.160 | there's big trees and skyscrapers of life. And so being dyslexic and not fitting in, in school and,

03:13:08.120 | and reading about Jane Goodall and having Lord of the Rings be one of the things I grew up on.

03:13:12.200 | I just chose to come to the Amazon. And the first person I met was this local indigenous

03:13:17.960 | conservationist named Juan Julio Duran, who was trying to protect this remote river, the Las

03:13:24.840 | Piedras river, which in history, apparently Fawcett referenced either the Las Piedras,

03:13:30.440 | but he called it Tahuamanu and said, don't go there. You'll surely die from tribes. And so

03:13:37.560 | there's very few references to this, this river in history. It's stayed very wild because it's

03:13:42.600 | been a place that the law hasn't made it, that the government hasn't really extended to like,

03:13:47.560 | you know, we're sort of past the police limit. And so JJ was out here ages ago, trying to protect

03:13:53.480 | this river before it was too late. And when I met him, I was just a barely out of high school kid

03:13:58.760 | with a dream of just seeing the rainforest, let alone seeing a giant Anaconda or having any sort

03:14:05.720 | of meaningful experience or contribution to the narrative. And somehow over all the years that we

03:14:13.080 | began working together and sparked a friendship and began exploring and going on expeditions and

03:14:18.600 | bringing people to the rainforest and, and asking them for help and manifesting the hell out of this

03:14:24.840 | insane dream that we had. I mean, we didn't even have a boat. We would take logs down the river.

03:14:29.960 | We would have to cut a tree down every time we wanted to return to civilization. We'd have to

03:14:34.360 | cut down a balsa tree and float down the river on it. Yeah, it was, it was, it's madness. Like

03:14:39.960 | it's madness. It's pure madness. And I don't know what made us keep going, but along the way,

03:14:45.000 | people showed up who cared and who wanted to help. And if it was a movie, it wouldn't even

03:14:50.120 | necessarily be a good movie. Cause you'd go, Oh, please, you're just telling me that you just kept

03:14:55.000 | doing the thing and just magically people showed up, but yeah, that's what happened. That's exactly

03:14:59.960 | the way it went. We kept doing the thing that we loved. We said, it doesn't matter if we don't have

03:15:04.920 | funding or a boat or gasoline or friends or anything. We just kept going. And along the way,

03:15:12.840 | we found someone who could help us start a ranger program. And then we found Daxa Silva,

03:15:18.680 | who helped us fund the beginning of jungle keepers. And then people like Mohsen and Stefan,

03:15:24.600 | who were there making sure that this thing actually took flight off the ground. And then

03:15:29.160 | right around the time that we were wondering what was going to happen and if we're all going to have

03:15:33.320 | to quit and get real jobs. And if we could actually save the rain forest from the destruction that was

03:15:38.200 | coming. Lex Friedman sends me a DM and honestly changed the entire narrative because up until

03:15:47.000 | then we had been, we'd been playing in the minor leagues, pretending, trying real, real hard.

03:15:54.440 | And the listeners of your show in the moments after you published your episode with our

03:16:02.200 | conversation began showing up in droves and supporting jungle keepers, putting in five,

03:16:07.960 | 10, a hundred, a thousand. We started getting these donations and the incredible team that

03:16:13.000 | I work with. We all went into hyperdrive, everybody, everybody started going nuts.

03:16:17.640 | We all started spending 16 hour days working to try and deal with the tidal wave that Lex

03:16:23.800 | sent towards us. Just because so many people knew that we were doing this,

03:16:28.040 | that it was an indigenous led fight to protect this incredibly ancient virgin rainforest before

03:16:34.440 | it was cut. And people resonated with that. And so we, we, we got this, this, this huge swell of

03:16:39.960 | support. And this year we've, we've protected thousands and thousands of more acres of rain

03:16:45.000 | forest because of that swell of support. So current 50,000 acres, what's the goal?

03:16:50.520 | What's the approach to saving this rain forest? Since we printed this, it's gone up to 66,000

03:16:56.680 | acres. It's, and as you know, in each of those little acres are millions and millions of animal

03:17:05.640 | heartbeats and societies of animals. And the goal here is that we're between Manu national park,

03:17:13.880 | Altapurus national park, the Tambopara reserve. We're in a region that's known as the biodiversity

03:17:18.440 | capital of Peru, one of the most biodiverse parts of the Western Amazon. And we're fighting along

03:17:25.960 | the edge of the trans Amazon highway. And so it's, it's just a small group of local people

03:17:31.960 | and some international experts who have come together and use these incredibly out of side

03:17:37.400 | of the box strategies to sort of crowdfund conservation to go, look, we know that this

03:17:43.560 | incredible life is here. We have the scientific evidence. We have the national park system.

03:17:48.520 | If we can protect this before they cut it down, we could do something of global significance.

03:17:54.120 | All these jaguars, all these monkeys, all these undescribed medicines,

03:17:57.880 | the uncontacted tribes that we share this forest with could all be protected. And people have

03:18:03.720 | stepped up and begun to make that happen. And as people from all over the world, and it's incredible.

03:18:10.200 | But what's the approach? So trying to, with donations to buy out more and more of the land

03:18:16.440 | and then protect it. So the approach is that currently the government favors extractors.

03:18:21.320 | So if you're a gold miner or a log, an illegal logger, or you just want to cut down and burn a

03:18:28.520 | bunch of rainforest and set up a cacao farm, the government's fine with that. It doesn't matter.

03:18:33.800 | You're not really breaking the law if you're destroying nature. So as long as you're producing

03:18:38.520 | something from the land, I don't see it as a loss that the nature was destroyed permanently.

03:18:43.560 | Yeah. It's just wilderness. It's sort of just beyond the scope of it's not, it doesn't,

03:18:47.560 | or the local people that technically own the land out here, the local indigenous people. For

03:18:52.520 | instance, we fought this year to help the community of Puerto Nuevo, who's been fighting for 20 years

03:18:58.040 | to have government recognized land. These are indigenous people in the Amazon fighting to

03:19:03.400 | protect their own land. And you know what it was that was holding them back? They didn't understand

03:19:08.680 | how the, the system of, of, of legal documents worked to certify that titled land. They didn't

03:19:15.880 | really have the funding to go from their very, very remote community into the offices. And so

03:19:20.840 | jungle keepers helped them with that. And so really all we're doing is helping local people protect

03:19:26.040 | the forest that is their world. That's it. If people donate, how will that help?

03:19:33.480 | If people donate to jungle keepers, what, what you're doing is you're helping

03:19:38.360 | someone like JJ, who's an indigenous naturalists who has the vision,

03:19:44.920 | who has seen forest be destroyed. He's trying to protect it before it's too late. You're saving

03:19:50.840 | mahogany trees, ironwood trees, Kapok trees, skyscrapers of life.

03:19:55.000 | Just monkeys, birds, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, this entire avatar on earth world of

03:20:02.120 | rainforest that produces a fifth of the oxygen we breathe in the water. We drink this incredible

03:20:08.760 | thing. As far as I know, it's the most direct way to protect that. And so the fact that the fact

03:20:13.160 | that we've, you know, we have large funders who give us, you know, a hundred thousand dollars

03:20:18.040 | to protect this huge swath of land. And that goes through, through things like this and through

03:20:22.520 | Instagram, you know, it goes directly to the local conservationists who, who work with the loggers

03:20:28.440 | to protect that land before it's cut. But one of the most impactful things that has happened this

03:20:33.720 | year in the wake of our last conversation was that I got an email from a mother and she said,

03:20:40.040 | you know, I'm a single mom and I work a few jobs and I can't afford to give you a ton of money, but

03:20:46.040 | me and my kids look at your Instagram often after dinner and they really want to protect the

03:20:51.400 | heartbeats. They really want to protect the animals and the rainforest. And so we do, we give

03:20:55.720 | $5 a month to jungle keepers. And it was to me, that was so impactful because I used to be that

03:21:00.920 | little kid worried about the animals. And I saw how a few million raindrops can create a flood.

03:21:07.320 | Yeah. I ask that people donate to jungle keepers. You guys are legit. That money is going to go a

03:21:17.560 | long way. Junglekeepers.org. If you somehow were able to raise very large, so the, the raindrops

03:21:26.360 | would make a waterfall a very large amount of money. I don't know what that number is. Maybe

03:21:32.680 | $10 million, $20 million, $30 million. What are the different milestones along the way that could

03:21:41.160 | really help, help you on the journey of saving the rainforest? If we did, if let's just say some

03:21:50.440 | company organization or, or if enough people donated it, let's just say we got that 30 million,

03:21:55.880 | that money would go directly into stopping logging roads, into creating a corridor,

03:22:01.960 | a biological corridor that connects the uncontacted indigenous reserves with other

03:22:07.560 | tribal lands, with Manu national park, with the Tambo Pata, which establishes essentially

03:22:12.760 | the largest protected area in the Amazon rainforest. And what makes this groundbreaking

03:22:17.400 | is that we're not doing this in the traditional way we're doing this, take it to the people.

03:22:22.600 | And that's, what's been so exciting is that, you know, when he started this, when JJ started this

03:22:26.360 | 30 years ago, he had no idea. His father wanted him to be a logger. He didn't have shoes until

03:22:31.160 | he was 13 years old. He grew up bathing in the river. He had no idea that a bunch of crazy

03:22:38.840 | foreigner scientists were going to show up and some guy in a James Bond suit was going to come

03:22:44.280 | down here with microphones. And, and that all of a sudden the world would know that he was on this

03:22:49.240 | quest to protect this, this incredible ecosystem and all those little aliens.

03:22:53.400 | Well, that's an important thing to remember that the people that are cutting down the forest,

03:22:57.320 | the loggers are also human beings, their families, they're, they're, they're basically trying to

03:23:02.120 | survive and they're desperate and they're doing the thing that will bring them money.

03:23:06.200 | And so they're just human beings at the core of it. If they have other options,

03:23:09.400 | if they have other options, they will probably choose to, uh, give their life to saving the

03:23:17.560 | community to first and foremost, providing for their family. And after that, saving the community,

03:23:26.840 | helping the community flourish. And I think probably a lot of them love the rainforest.

03:23:32.920 | They grew up in the rainforest.

03:23:34.600 | Yeah. I mean, look at Pico.

03:23:36.120 | Yeah.

03:23:36.520 | Pico used to be a logger, full-time logger, long-time logger. Now he loves conservation.

03:23:41.880 | He goes, "Yo soy muy conservacionista."

03:23:45.960 | Yeah. It's all about just providing people, people options. There's some dark stuff on the,

03:23:51.560 | on the gold mine stuff you've talked about. You showed me parts of the rainforest where

03:23:56.680 | the gold mines are, and they're just kind of erasing the rainforest.

03:24:02.040 | Yeah.

03:24:02.840 | Sort of at the edges, that's when the mining happens. And it's this ugly,

03:24:09.640 | it's ugly process of they're just destroying the jungle just for the surface layer of the sand or

03:24:16.760 | whatever that they process to, to collect just little bits of gold. And there's also very dark

03:24:24.360 | things that happen along the way as the communities around the gold mines are created. So the entirety

03:24:30.760 | of the moral system that emerges from that has things like prostitution, where one third of the,

03:24:38.040 | of the women that are drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution are minors under,

03:24:45.640 | you know, under 17 years old, 13 to 17 year old. There's just a lot of really, really dark stuff.

03:24:51.400 | I think that we have a rare chance to do something against that darkness.

03:25:02.600 | I think that this is an example of local people who have

03:25:05.960 | taken action, done good work, been good to the people that have visited,

03:25:12.600 | harnessed a certain amount of international momentum. And now we're on the cusp of doing

03:25:19.720 | something historic. And so for the children in the communities along this river,

03:25:28.040 | it won't be being a prostitute in a gold mine. It'll be becoming a trained ranger. Like last

03:25:35.400 | month, our ranger coordinator and one of our, one of our female rangers went to Africa for a ranger

03:25:42.440 | conference. And it's like, we're beginning to, this is someone from a little tiny village with

03:25:47.080 | thatched huts up river. She went to Africa to talk about being a professional conservation ranger.

03:25:52.360 | And it's like, that's, that's changing lives. And her, her daughters, then she's married to Ignacio,

03:25:58.600 | the guy, like her, her, their kids are going to grow up seeing their parents walking around with

03:26:04.200 | the emblem on and go, Oh, I want to. And then, and then people like Pico and Pedro and all these guys

03:26:09.480 | that work here are going to go, well, we have to, we have to protect this forest. And then they start

03:26:13.560 | getting fascinated about the snakes and then they start caring about the turtle eggs. And then all

03:26:18.280 | of a sudden they have a way of life and nobody needs to go be, nobody can, nobody needs to go

03:26:22.440 | steal anybody's kids to be a prostitute in a gold mine. That's horrible. And so it's really a, it's

03:26:27.720 | a win-win for the, for the animals, for the river, for the rain forest, for people were improved.

03:26:32.520 | It's biocentric conservation. It's, it's just making everything better.

03:26:35.640 | Yeah. I've read an article that said an estimated 1200 girls between ages of 12 and 17 are forcibly

03:26:45.800 | drafted into child prostitution around the communities in the gold mines. At least one

03:26:51.320 | third of the prostitutes in the camp are under age. The girls had ended up in the camp after

03:26:56.680 | receiving a tip that there were restaurants looking for waitresses and willing to pay top

03:27:01.480 | dollar. They jumped on a bus together and came down to the rain forest. What they found was not

03:27:06.920 | what they were expecting. The mining camp restaurant served food for only a few hours a day.

03:27:12.040 | The rest of the time, it was the girls themselves who are on the menu literally at the end of the

03:27:17.640 | road and without the money to return home, the girls would soon become trapped in prostitution.

03:27:22.600 | It's interesting to me that the most devastating destruction of nature, the complete erasure of

03:27:34.760 | the rain forest burned to the ground, sucked through a hose, spit out into a disgusting

03:27:42.120 | mercury puddle. Like the complete annihilation of life on earth goes hand in hand with the

03:27:47.960 | complete annihilation of a young life. It's like, it's all based around the same thing. It's,

03:27:54.440 | it's the light versus the dark. That's that's it's, it's the destruction and the chaos

03:27:58.760 | versus a move towards order and hope. And, and, and it is incredibly dark and this region

03:28:06.680 | is heavy with it. Well, I'm glad you're fighting for the light.

03:28:13.000 | Is there like a milestone in your future that you're working towards like financially in

03:28:19.960 | terms of donations? There is in, in the next year and a half, as you saw in your time here,

03:28:27.800 | there's, there's roads working around the jungle keepers concessions. All the work that the local

03:28:34.280 | people are doing to protect this land is trying to be dismantled by international corporations

03:28:39.720 | that are subcontracting logging companies here. And really what we need is $30 million in the

03:28:46.600 | next two years to protect the whole thing. You've seen the ancient mahogany trees. You've seen the

03:28:53.800 | families of monkeys. You've seen the Cayman and the river. All of this is standing in the pathway

03:28:59.560 | of destruction, that road, they're going to come down that road. And men with chainsaws are going

03:29:03.240 | to dismantle a forest that has been growing since the beginning. This is so magical. Do you see the

03:29:09.160 | snake over there? Yeah. Do you? There's a snake. Okay. I'm just going to don't move. I don't want

03:29:14.760 | you to move. I'm going to just, this is one of the most beautiful snakes in the Amazon rainforest.

03:29:19.400 | This is the blunt headed tree snake. Snakes. I've been hoping that you would get to see this snake.

03:29:25.960 | I have been praying. Oh boy. Okay. Okay. Let's just, let's just, let's just go right back into

03:29:34.680 | this. Okay. Look at this little beauty creation. Let's keep you away from the fire. Look at this

03:29:44.040 | little blunt headed tree snake. Wow. Such an incredible. So tell me about the snake.

03:29:51.800 | Harmless little snake. Um, if you put your hand out, he'll probably just crawl onto your hand.

03:29:57.080 | Just be real careful with the fire. So look, I'm just going to put them like this. We're going to,

03:30:01.400 | yeah, let's just snake safety. So he's a tree snake. Yep. Nice and slow. Nice and slow. Nice

03:30:11.080 | and slow. So you nice and slow, just really. So just be the tree, be the tree that he climbs on.

03:30:16.360 | And this is like, again, this is a snake that's so thin and so small.

03:30:22.760 | There you go. There you go. Nice and slow. Just, just be the tree. Let him crawl around. So he's

03:30:29.480 | going to try and do all this stuff. Let me see if I can just calm him down for a sec. Let me just

03:30:37.000 | see. He's very active little snake. So see like the snake the other night. Okay. Just calm. Look

03:30:43.320 | at this. I can see the light through his body. To me, this is an alien. This is this strange

03:30:50.440 | little life form. His eyes are two thirds of his head. I'm not joking. You look at their skull.

03:31:00.120 | He's so tiny.

03:31:01.240 | He's so tiny.

03:31:02.360 | For people listening, there's a snake in Paul's hands right now. It's very,

03:31:06.280 | it's long of course, but very skinny.

03:31:11.000 | Very, very light.

03:31:11.880 | And also for everyone listening, the odds of that as we're sitting here doing this podcast,

03:31:20.520 | that a snake would just be crawling by in the jungle might sound like something that would

03:31:25.640 | happen, but the density of snakes in the Amazon rainforest makes this a very unique experience.

03:31:33.320 | Can you tell me a little bit about the coloration scheme?

03:31:37.000 | Yeah.

03:31:37.240 | It's a little bit brown.

03:31:39.000 | Yeah. Just to describe this as we're, as we were talking here, it's just a

03:31:42.520 | sort of banded white and brown snake with this tiny little head about the size of my pinky nail.

03:31:51.400 | Two thirds of this snake's head is made up of its gigantic eyes. It's got a small mouth

03:31:58.200 | and it's about a third as thick as a pencil. It's basically a moving shoestring. It's incredibly,

03:32:06.600 | incredibly thin. The only thing I am thinking like so is that if we have

03:32:13.880 | Dan come and just do some shots of...

03:32:15.800 | Yeah, that's true.

03:32:19.080 | Dan!

03:32:19.480 | So what are we looking at here?

03:32:23.800 | The snake that was crawling behind us in the jungle that I, we were talking about

03:32:30.120 | jungle keepers and what we could do. And the snake just showed up at that moment.

03:32:35.160 | And this is a very active little snake who's out for a hunt tonight and wants to find something

03:32:40.680 | to eat. So this is a blunt headed tree snake, totally harmless little, literally a moving

03:32:48.360 | shoestring, super beautiful little animal. When you talk about aliens to me, this is,

03:32:53.480 | this is an alien. Like, what are you thinking? What are you doing right now? What do you think

03:32:58.920 | about the fact that we were handled, being handled by these giant humans?

03:33:04.360 | And as you were saying, it reaches up to the leaves.

03:33:07.720 | Yeah, the snake just naturally knows to go, look, you just put them anywhere near leaves. And he's

03:33:12.040 | like, I got this. He just wants to go right up into that tree. I just want you to try holding

03:33:17.320 | him and a real gentle, just be the tree. Yeah. And just, just kind of do the same thing you learned

03:33:24.280 | last night. Just nice and gentle. Yup. And see, he's holding onto my finger right now. He's just

03:33:30.120 | going up. There you go. Perfect. Nice and easy. He's a little erratic. He's a little goofy.

03:33:35.240 | Maybe he's camera shy.

03:33:45.400 | Maybe a fan of the podcast

03:33:48.280 | and gigantic eyes relative to his body size.

03:33:54.680 | Huge.

03:33:55.740 | Oh, hello, moth. Traffic, traffic in the jungle.

03:34:01.800 | And then for everyone listening, as we're, as we're, as we're handling the snake that we found

03:34:05.960 | that was crawling by us, like literally by our shoulders, as we're talking,

03:34:11.880 | a bat flies through, no joke, eight inches from Lex's ear. Like just zips past his head as he's

03:34:19.560 | holding a snake while we're sitting here in the jungle. It's just, we're just in it now. Now he's

03:34:24.040 | going to try and back up.

03:34:25.000 | And how do you.

03:34:27.400 | Yeah. Why don't you, why don't you.

03:34:28.680 | Let's encourage him to come back this way.

03:34:30.440 | He's, he's weaved this way.

03:34:32.680 | He's okay. He's okay. He's just, he's just trying to back up. Yeah. Release.

03:34:36.040 | Oh.

03:34:36.600 | Release. Okay. I'm going to, this is what I'm going to do.

03:34:40.520 | We're going to say, thank you, Mr. Snake.

03:34:42.520 | Thank you, Mr. Snake.

03:34:43.560 | Thank you, Mr. Snake. Go back up into the tree. Here we go. There you go. There you go.

03:34:49.640 | There you go. And then, uh, we can resort, resume normal podcasting now.

03:34:54.760 | Cause we really are in the jungle.

03:34:57.560 | We really are in the jungle.

03:34:58.760 | That's one of my favorite snakes. That's one of my favorite little aliens on this planet.

03:35:03.880 | Look at that.

03:35:09.640 | And it's going on some long journey.

03:35:12.360 | It's going to the canopy.

03:35:14.520 | Carry the rest of the night.

03:35:16.920 | So that little snake is one of the millions of life forms,

03:35:24.600 | heartbeats that you're trying to protect.

03:35:26.200 | Exactly. Um, to me, I, after almost 20 years down here, the people here have become my friends,

03:35:37.400 | the Cayman on the river, the monkeys. I, when I fall asleep at night,

03:35:41.480 | I think about all the different heartbeats, all the different little creatures here that,

03:35:45.880 | that when they bulldoze this forest, when they, when they chop down these trees,

03:35:50.920 | that they, that they vanished, that we, we, we take away their world.

03:35:53.800 | And in that very evolutionary historical sense of remembering the,

03:35:59.400 | the primordial soup, it's like this, these,

03:36:03.240 | this little creature is surviving out here somehow, and we have the chance to save it.

03:36:07.960 | And even if you don't care about the little creature on the pale blue dot,

03:36:10.920 | each of these little creatures contributes to this massive orchestral hole that creates

03:36:17.400 | climactic stability on this planet. And the Amazon is one of the most important

03:36:22.360 | parts of that. And each of these little guys is playing a role in there.

03:36:25.080 | So one of the other fascinating life forms is other humans,

03:36:30.200 | but living a very different kind of life. So uncontacted tribes,

03:36:35.160 | what do you find most fascinating about them?

03:36:37.240 | What I find most fascinating about the uncontacted tribes is that while

03:36:42.280 | me and you are sitting here with microphones and a light somewhere out there in that darkness,

03:36:48.360 | in that direction, not so far away as the crow flies,

03:36:51.640 | there are people sitting around a fire in the dark,

03:36:57.320 | probably with little more than a few leaves over their heads,

03:37:00.120 | who don't even have the use of stone tools, who only have metal objects that they've stolen from

03:37:10.440 | nearby communities. They're, they're, they're living such primitive,

03:37:17.960 | isolated nomadic lives in the modern world, and they're still living naked out in the jungle.

03:37:24.520 | It's truly incredible. It's truly remarkable. And I think that

03:37:28.120 | it's because they can't advocate for themselves, they can't protect themselves. It's sort of like,

03:37:34.200 | well, we can let them get shot up by loggers and get their, get, let their land get bulldozed

03:37:40.600 | while they hide. They have no idea that their world is being destroyed.

03:37:43.640 | But they're, they're, they're sort of the scariest and most fascinating thing out there right now

03:37:49.800 | in the jungle.

03:37:50.520 | What do you think they're, cause you've spoken about them being dangerous. What do you think

03:37:53.880 | their relationship with violence is? Why is violence part of their approach to the external

03:38:01.480 | world?

03:38:02.280 | So from the best I understand it, that at the turn of the century, industrial revolution,

03:38:08.040 | we had sudden immense need for rubber, for hoses and gaskets and wires and tires and,

03:38:16.840 | and the war machine. And the only way to get rubber was to come down to the Amazon rainforest

03:38:23.080 | and get the local people who knew the jungle to go out into the jungle and, and cut rubber

03:38:28.600 | trees and collect the latex. And Henry Ford tried doing Fordlandia, tried having rubber

03:38:34.040 | plantations, but leaf blight killed it. And so you had this period of horrendous extraction

03:38:39.800 | in the Amazon where the rubber barons were coming down and just raping and pillaging

03:38:44.600 | the tribes and making them go out to tap these trees. And the uncontacted tribe said, no,

03:38:51.160 | they had their six foot long, long bows, seven foot long arrows with giant bamboo tips.

03:38:57.480 | And they moved further back into the forest and they said, we will not be conquered.

03:39:01.960 | And since that time they've been out there and it's, it's confusing because in a way,

03:39:08.200 | they're still running scared a century later. And their grandparents would have told them,

03:39:12.360 | you know, the outside world, everyone you see in the outside world is trying to kill

03:39:16.360 | you. So kill them first. So can you blame them for being violent? No. Is this river still wild

03:39:23.160 | because loggers were scared to go here for a long time for almost a century late? That's why this

03:39:29.560 | forest is still here. Yes. And so is it a human rights issue that we protect the last people on

03:39:36.680 | earth that have no government, no, no affiliation, no language that we can explain. We don't know

03:39:43.320 | what their medicinal plant knowledge is. We don't know their creation myths. We know nothing about

03:39:47.560 | them. And they're just out there right now with bows and arrows, living in the dark, surviving

03:39:52.680 | in the jungle, naked without even spoons. Forget about the wheel, forget about iPhones. They got

03:39:59.160 | nothing and they're making it work. We don't know their creation myths.

03:40:03.240 | So they have a very primitive existence, but do you think their values

03:40:10.680 | or do you think their nature is similar to ours? And how do their values differ from ours?

03:40:17.400 | This is complicated because the, the anthropologist in me wants to say that they have a historical

03:40:28.840 | reason for the violent life that they have. You know, they experienced incredible generational

03:40:35.240 | trauma sometime ago and that, and because they've been living isolated in the jungle that has

03:40:40.040 | permeated to become their culture, they've become a culture of violence. But yet the, the, the

03:40:46.600 | contacted modern indigenous communities that we work with that are my friends that work here, just

03:40:53.560 | the other day, we were speaking to one of them who was pulling spikes out of your hand while he was

03:40:58.920 | explaining that he tried to help them, the brothers, Los Hermanos. He tried to help them. He

03:41:05.640 | tried to give them a gift. And what did they do? They shot him in the head.

03:41:09.480 | Yeah. He said there are brothers and he tried to give them a bananas.

03:41:15.880 | Plantains.

03:41:16.680 | Plantains, boat full of plantains. And they shot at him.

03:41:19.880 | They shot three arrows at him and one of them actually hit him in the skull and put him in

03:41:23.000 | the hospital and he got helicoptered.

03:41:24.520 | Evacuated from his community. And so he's brave for surviving, but he's a, he's a lucky survivor.

03:41:33.160 | They, they are incredibly accurate with those bamboo tipped arrows and those arrows are seven

03:41:37.880 | feet long. So when you get hit by one, they come at a velocity that can rip through you. And the

03:41:43.800 | range on a shotgun is way shorter than the range on a long bow. You're talking about a couple

03:41:59.000 | hundred meters on a long bow and they're deadly accurate. They can take spider monkeys out of a

03:42:04.760 | tree. And so there's stories of loggers and I've seen the photos of the bodies of loggers who

03:42:11.720 | attract, who attacked one of the tribes and the tribes hadn't done anything, but these loggers

03:42:16.200 | came around a bend, they started shooting shotguns at the tribe and the tribe scattered into the

03:42:20.360 | forest. And as the loggers boat went around a bend, they just started flying arrows, took out

03:42:25.240 | the boat driver, boat skidded to the side. And then everybody was standing in the river and you

03:42:29.240 | can't run. And the tribe just descended on them and just porcupined them full of arrows.

03:42:33.960 | Shotgun versus bow. There's a shotgun shell here, by the way.

03:42:38.840 | Yeah.

03:42:39.320 | From the loggers.

03:42:40.760 | Mm-hmm. Yeah, we picked that up yesterday. Was that yesterday?

03:42:45.320 | That was, I don't know.

03:42:46.680 | I don't know.

03:42:47.480 | One of the things that happens here is time loses meaning in some kind of deep way that

03:42:56.040 | it does when you're in a big city in the United States, for example, and their schedules and

03:43:02.680 | meetings and all this kind of stuff. It transforms the meaning, your experience of time, your

03:43:08.040 | interaction with time, the role of time, all of this. I've forgotten time and I've forgotten the

03:43:17.880 | existence of the outside world.

03:43:19.320 | And how does that feel?

03:43:21.160 | It feels more honest. It also puts in perspective, like all the busyness, all the...

03:43:33.320 | It kind of takes the ant out of the ant colony and says, "Hey, you're just an ant. This is

03:43:40.440 | just an ant colony and there's a big world out there." Yeah. It's a chance to be grateful,

03:43:48.920 | to celebrate this earth of ours and the things that make it worth living on, including the

03:43:56.200 | simple things that make the individual life worth living, which is water and then food.

03:44:01.720 | And the rest is just details. Of course, the friendships and social interaction, that's a

03:44:06.680 | really big one, actually. That one I'm taking for granted because I didn't get a chance yet to

03:44:12.040 | really spend time alone. And when I came here, I've gotten a chance to hang out with you and

03:44:19.640 | there's a kind of camaraderie, there's a friendship there that if that's broken, that's a tough one

03:44:27.080 | too. You spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle. You ever get alone out here?

03:44:32.520 | Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the first 15 years we were doing this, there would be times that JJ would be

03:44:41.080 | busy in town with his family and I would, for sheer love of the rainforest, I would have to

03:44:46.840 | come alone out here. And we didn't have running water, I didn't have running water, I didn't have

03:44:52.120 | lights. All I had was a couple of candles in the darkness and a tent and I was 20 something years

03:44:56.840 | old living in the Amazon by myself. Your boat sunk. And yeah, it's incredibly lonely. I had to

03:45:04.760 | learn through experience because I thought there was a period, I think when you're young, as a

03:45:11.080 | young man, I had this thing, like I wanted to prove that I could be like the explorers. I wanted to

03:45:15.480 | prove that I could handle the elements, that I could go out alone, that I could have these deep

03:45:21.960 | connective moments with the jungle. And it's like, I did that and that's great. And you know what the

03:45:28.040 | kid from into the wild learned right before he died in that bus? That if you don't have somebody

03:45:32.680 | to share it with, it doesn't matter. But some kind of like, even just

03:45:47.000 | deep human level, like even if you have somebody to share it with,

03:45:51.240 | you ever just get alone out here? Just like this sense of like,

03:45:59.160 | existential dread of like what, you know, the jungle has a way of

03:46:03.960 | not caring about any individual organism. It just kind of churns. It's like, it makes you realize

03:46:15.000 | that life is finite quite intensely.

03:46:18.040 | For me, it's comforting being out here because I find the rat race, the national narrative,

03:46:29.400 | the need to make money, to worry about war, to be outraged about the newest thing that that

03:46:36.920 | politician said and what that actor did. And it just, there's always just this unending

03:46:43.560 | sort of media storm and, and, and, and everyone's worried and everyone's trying to optimize their

03:46:49.000 | sunlight exposure and find the solution and buy the right new thing. And to me coming out here,

03:46:56.200 | first of all, I mean something out here because I can help someone, I can help people,

03:47:01.240 | I can help these animals. And so I find my meaning out here, but also, you know, there's the

03:47:09.240 | losing the madness over the mountains. It's, it's nature has always, and for many people been

03:47:13.800 | where things make sense. And to me, I think I'm a simple analog type of person that

03:47:19.720 | it makes sense that when it rains, you get in the river to stay warm and, and you, you know,

03:47:26.520 | you wait for the dawn and you see a little tree snake and, and you say, it just, it just,

03:47:31.640 | it makes, it makes more sense. And I think that the, the, the overwhelming teeming complexity

03:47:37.240 | that is inside the, the ant mound of society can be dizzying for some people. And I think

03:47:42.200 | that maybe it's the dyslexia. Maybe it's just that I love nature, but, um, now if I, when I land in

03:47:50.440 | JFK, I, I feel like a frightened animal on, like it's, it's as if you, as if you released like a,

03:47:59.480 | like a, some animal that had never seen it onto like, and it's a time square.

03:48:05.400 | And you can just imagine this dog with its ears back running away from taxis and just,

03:48:09.080 | just cowering from the noise. And it's just hustle and bustle and people are brutal and

03:48:13.640 | how much you want it for getting the car. Yes. Screaming over the intercom and just everything,

03:48:18.840 | everything sensory changes and let's get home. Okay. Let's go. You got a meeting. You got to

03:48:23.640 | get to the next place. You got to give a talk. You got to sign out, out here. When we finish

03:48:28.600 | up here, what are we going to do? We're going to eat some food, maybe go catch a crocodile,

03:48:32.840 | go walk around the jungle. And I like, it's slower. It makes sense. And, and there's that,

03:48:38.360 | again, there's that deep meaning of, of, of that here where we can be the guardians for good. We

03:48:43.560 | can, we can be, we can hold that candle up and, and know for sure that we're protecting the trees

03:48:48.760 | from being destroyed. And it's that simple thing of just, this is good. There you go.

03:48:56.040 | It's simple.

03:48:56.920 | In society. I feel like everyone's always losing their minds and forgetting the most

03:49:00.360 | basic of fundamental truths. And out here, you can't really argue with them. You know,

03:49:06.680 | when we needed water, it was like, shit, if we don't get water, we're fucked. And that,

03:49:11.800 | and that's, to me, that's where the camaraderie comes from because no matter what we'll be,

03:49:16.520 | we could go to the most fancy ass restaurant through the biggest, most famous people in the

03:49:20.840 | world. It doesn't matter. We still remember what it was like standing around in the jungle going,

03:49:25.560 | fuck, we're scared and we don't have water. We got reduced to the simplest form of humans.

03:49:32.520 | And that's, and that's something, and we survived and that's, and that's cool.

03:49:35.400 | And you take all the, all those people in their nice dresses in those fancy restaurants and you

03:49:41.720 | put them in those conditions, they're all going to want the same thing, this water.

03:49:44.680 | Yes.

03:49:45.180 | It's all the same thing.

03:49:47.080 | All the beautiful people.

03:49:48.200 | How has your view of your own mortality evolved over your interaction with the jungle? How often

03:49:54.280 | do you think about your death?

03:49:57.640 | Well, I don't anymore because the, I've come to believe that there is a benevolent

03:50:04.760 | God, spirit, creator taking care of us. And I don't, I don't think about my own death. We have

03:50:14.360 | a little bit of time here and we clearly know nothing about what we're doing here. And it seems

03:50:20.840 | like we just have to do the best we can. And so I just, it doesn't, it doesn't scare me. I've come

03:50:27.880 | close to dying a lot of times. And, uh, I just don't think you don't want to have a bad death.

03:50:34.360 | First of all, you don't want to, you don't want to, you don't want to be a statistic. You don't

03:50:39.080 | want to find out, you don't want to like try out a, be the first to try out a new product and oops,

03:50:44.040 | it crushed you. You know, that that's, that's a terrible way to go. Or the people that used to,

03:50:47.960 | you know, in the gold rush, they were using mercury and they were all getting, uh, or lead,

03:50:51.640 | it was lead poisoning. And it's like, oh, you know, a few million people died that way. And

03:50:55.960 | it's like, you want to, you want a good death. You know, you want to staring down the eyes of a

03:51:00.920 | tiger or hanging off the edge of a cliff, saving somebody's life. Something, something, something

03:51:05.080 | worthy. Warrior's death. But if-

03:51:07.640 | Riding a 16 foot black Cayman, just-

03:51:11.560 | Boots on, screaming. Yeah. Um, that'd be fun. That'd be a good one.

03:51:17.880 | Uh, a lot of people say that you carry the spirit of Steve Irwin in your heart,

03:51:24.120 | in the way you carry yourself in this world. I mean, that guy was full of joy.

03:51:29.480 | If I have a percentage of Steve Irwin, I would be honored. But that guy, I think, I think there's

03:51:36.120 | only one Steve. I think that he was, he occupied his own strata of just shining light. Every,

03:51:43.960 | everything was positive enthusiasm, love and happiness and save the animals and do better

03:51:50.440 | and let's make it fun. And, and, and that was so infectious that, that it sort of transcended

03:51:56.360 | his TV show. It transcended his conservation work. It transcended business and entrepreneurship.

03:52:03.480 | It just through sheer magnetism and enthusiasm. He just, I mean, everyone knew who Steve was.

03:52:09.880 | Everyone loved Steve. We still all love Steve. And so it's, uh, it's just, it's just amazing

03:52:17.000 | what one spirit can do. So if anybody, you know, makes that comparison, I get, I get really

03:52:23.160 | uncomfortable because to me, Steve Irwin is like, just, just the goat. And so I'm okay with that.

03:52:29.560 | Well, I at least agree with that comparison. Uh, having spent time with you,

03:52:35.400 | there's just an eternal flame of joy and adventure to just pulling you, uh, a dark question,

03:52:46.200 | but do you think you might meet the same end giving your life in some way to something you love?

03:52:51.400 | That is a dark question, but I, I think most likely I'll get whacked by loggers.

03:52:57.320 | I think that loggers or gold miners will take me out. I don't, I don't picture myself going

03:53:02.760 | from animals, but, um. That'd be heartbreaking too.

03:53:07.400 | Yeah, it would. But yeah, at the same time though, like the Kurt Cobain value of that,

03:53:11.960 | if I died doing what I love to protect the river, I'd be so worth so much more a lot. Like

03:53:15.800 | we'd get the 30 million if I died tomorrow for sure. So we've already, we've already talked

03:53:19.720 | about this with my friends. I'm like, if I get whacked, do the foundation, make the documentary,

03:53:24.760 | protect the river, protect the heartbeats, call it the heartbeats, jungle keepers, the heartbeats,

03:53:29.480 | you know, be ready for it because these, these things do happen. People get pissed

03:53:34.040 | if you get in their way. And as many happy people as, and who, whose lives were changing,

03:53:38.440 | there's also going to be some jealous, shitty, upset people who are mad that they can't make

03:53:42.760 | prostitutes out of young girls and keep destroying the planet. And so they might just, uh, erase you.

03:53:48.600 | Me.

03:53:50.380 | Well, I hope you, um, like a Clint Eastwood character, just, just impossible to kill.

03:53:58.680 | I like how you squinted your eyes

03:54:00.360 | on cue. Uh, who do you think will play you in a movie?

03:54:08.600 | God, somebody with the right nose. Somebody who can live up to this schnozzle.

03:54:14.920 | Yeah. Italian.

03:54:16.760 | Yeah.

03:54:17.260 | It's funny. Do you think of yourself as Italian or human American?

03:54:23.480 | That's the thing. I don't, you know,

03:54:26.840 | my life has been the United nations of, of whatever. Like I just, every, to me, I just,

03:54:32.840 | I don't, that's the other thing. You go back to society and everyone's obsessed with,

03:54:36.040 | with race to me. I'm like, look, leopards have black babies and yellow babies, one mother,

03:54:41.640 | like they're all leopards. And, and I'm, I'm so colorblind and race blind and everything else.

03:54:48.600 | I've lived in India. My friends are Peruvian, my family, we got Italian, Filipino, just everything.

03:54:55.240 | And so I've, I'm so immersed in it that, that when I find it very jarring and, um,

03:55:00.760 | disconcerting how much time we spend talking about, uh, different religions and just the

03:55:07.480 | differences in humans. I'm like, dude, we're, we're talking about whether or not our ecosystems

03:55:12.120 | are going to be able to provide for us. We're talking about nuclear, what we're talking about.

03:55:16.680 | There's some pretty serious shit on the table. And we're over here arguing over like shades of

03:55:21.400 | gray of it's, it's so trivial. And that shit drives me crazy. And, and as does the outrage

03:55:27.000 | where it's like, no, you, you, you have to care more. I've been, I've been criticized for not

03:55:30.360 | caring enough about that. And I'm like, I'm going to, I'm going to, who cares what the hell I am?

03:55:36.840 | Who gives a shit? What the hell? I'm a human. We're all human. Yeah. It's not that easy,

03:55:41.640 | but it's kind of fun sometimes. And, and we're at a better time. And like, when you think about

03:55:47.560 | like the middle ages, like even if you were a King, you still didn't have it that good. You

03:55:51.400 | didn't have pineapples in the winter. You didn't even know what the fuck a pineapple was. We have

03:55:56.040 | pineapples whenever we want them. We can fly on planes to other countries.

03:56:02.280 | Let's clarify. We, you mean a large fraction of the world, you know, what I mentioned to you,

03:56:09.080 | one of the biggest things I've noticed when I immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United

03:56:15.720 | States is the how plentiful bananas and pineapples were the fruit section of the produce section of

03:56:22.600 | the didn't have to wait in line at the grocery store. I could just eat as many bananas and

03:56:27.880 | pineapples and cherries and watermelon as you want. That's not, everybody has that.

03:56:33.640 | No, that's true. Not everybody has that, but, but, but everybody could be that King.

03:56:39.640 | No, but a growing number of people today can feast on pineapple, can feast on pineapple and

03:56:46.440 | have toasters and new distracting apps all the way until the grave. That's the thing that I also

03:56:52.920 | noticed is I don't think so much about politics when I'm here or we haven't even talked about it.

03:56:58.120 | Don't talk about the stupid differences between humans, except to just kind of laugh at the

03:57:06.600 | absurdity of it on occasion, trying to survive glaciers and jungles and avalanches and all kinds

03:57:12.520 | of shit. Do you think nature is brutal as Werner Herzog showed it, or is it beautiful?

03:57:18.520 | I think the brutality of nature is the chaos. And I think that we are the only ones in it

03:57:30.440 | that are capable of organizing in the direction of order and light. So yes, there are going to

03:57:37.480 | be hyenas tearing each other apart. Yes, there's going to be war torn nations and poor starving

03:57:44.280 | children, but we as humans have the power to work towards something more organized than that.

03:57:54.600 | So there is a force within nature that's always searching for order, for good.

03:58:01.480 | It's kind of a unifying theory, if you think about it. I mean, all of the chaos of history

03:58:05.480 | and the wars and the chaos of nature, through technology and organization, there's so many

03:58:12.440 | people, more people today than ever before, I think, who are so concerned, who realize that

03:58:16.840 | the incredible power, like what Jane Goodall says about how you can affect the people around you,

03:58:22.760 | how you can do good in the world, how you can change the narrative of conservation from one

03:58:27.160 | of loss and darkness to one of innovation and light. We can do incredible things. We are the

03:58:33.160 | masters as humans. And I think that we're on the cusp of sort of understanding the true potential

03:58:41.400 | of that. I just think that more than ever, people have harnessed this ability to do good in the

03:58:48.360 | world and be proud of it and just change the darkness into something else.

03:58:55.880 | When you have lived here and taken in the ways of the Amazon jungle,

03:59:02.600 | how have your views of God, you mentioned, how have your views of God changed? Who is God?

03:59:11.080 | I've come to believe that, again, back to that Christ wasn't a Christian,

03:59:16.360 | Muhammad wasn't a Muslim, and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist, that the game is love

03:59:23.240 | and compassion. And the universe is chaotic and dangerous, and nature is chaotic and dangerous.

03:59:31.960 | But if this is some sort of a biological video game, our reality,

03:59:36.600 | that the test is, can we be good? And we go through it every day. Can you be good to your

03:59:45.160 | parent? Can you be good to your partner? Can you be good to your coworkers? It's so difficult.

03:59:49.800 | And we see how people can cheat and steal and hurt and destroy, and

03:59:54.840 | the incredible impact that it has on the world, the returning exponential

04:00:04.120 | impact that one act of kindness, one act of good can do. And so,

04:00:13.800 | I see nature as God. I see the religions as different cultural manifestations of the same

04:00:21.000 | truth, the same creative force. Maybe me and you have the same beliefs, and your aliens are my

04:00:32.280 | angels. Well, thank you for being one of the humans trying to do good in this world.

04:00:41.000 | And thank you for bringing me along for some adventure. And I believe more adventure awaits.

04:00:49.160 | Thank you for being enough of a psychopath to actually just sign on to come into the Amazon

04:00:57.560 | rainforest in a suit. And a year ago, when you told me that you were going to do this,

04:01:03.400 | I truly didn't believe you. So, for being a man of your word and for the incredible work you do

04:01:07.960 | to connect humans and to create dialogue and to do good in the world, and for all the adventures

04:01:13.240 | that we've had, thank you so much. Thank you, brother. Lex, thanks, man.

04:01:17.000 | Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosalie. To support this podcast,

04:01:23.960 | please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from

04:01:29.160 | Joseph Campbell. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes

04:01:36.360 | to your adventure. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

04:01:44.280 | you

04:01:45.320 | you

04:01:45.400 | you

04:01:46.860 | you

04:01:46.940 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #429

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