Paul Rosolie: Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon Jungle | Lex Fridman Podcast #489

- ... were standing there. Everyone is waiting, 'cause at any moment an arrow could just

fly through your neck, and there's people holding shotguns. And the

anthropologist, this little guy, is standing there in the front, and he's going,

"Enimole." He's going, "Brothers." And then it happened. Then you

start hearing people screaming,

"Mashco! Mashco!" And people are screaming and women are

lifting children and running into the huts and the dogs and chickens are going

nuts and—

- So fear, fear.

- Fear. He's going, "Look there. He has a bow. He has a bow." And we're looking

up the beach and there's just this clan walking down the beach with

these seven-foot bows and they're hunched over and they're pointing at us. They're going,

"Look at that one. Look, there's a gun there." And you can see them communicating

to each other and the butterflies are swirling off the beach and they can hit a spider

monkey out of the treetops at 40 meters. They can sneak

up and you will never know they're there. And so when that arrow passes through your

body, you'll only have a moment to realize it before you fall over.

In order for any of this to make sense, I have to show you this footage.

- And this has not been shown ever before.

- This is a world first.

- The following is a conversation with Paul Rosolie, his third time on the podcast.

Paul is a naturalist, explorer, writer and is someone who has

dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest and celebrating

the beauty of the natural world.

He has a new book coming out in a few days titled Jungle Keeper

that you should definitely go pre-order now.

It tells some intense stories about his time in the jungle over the

past several years, building up to a few epic recent events, including a new

extended encounter with a non-contacted tribe that we discuss in this podcast.

Both the book and audiobook are great.

I highly recommend it. If you would like to support Paul and his team

in their mission to protect the jungle, go to junglekeepers.org.

You can help with donations or

by spreading the word or checking out the gala that Paul is hosting in New York

on January 22nd in a few days.

They are doing all they can to help raise funds for the mission of

safeguarding as much of the rainforest as possible,

and I think it's a mission worth fighting for.

The Amazon jungle is one of the most special and beautiful places on Earth.

As an aside, allow me to look back

briefly and mention something that I've been struggling with a bit.

For context, I traveled to the Amazon rainforest with Paul a while back.

It was an adventure of a lifetime, with lots of crazy twists and turns.

We did record a podcast out there, literally in the jungle.

Episode 429, if you want to go check it out. It was awesome.

And we also recorded a bunch of disparate footage of the journey just for fun.

And I would still love to somehow

put all that together into a cohesive video in case it's interesting to someone.

But I've learned just how difficult it is

to organize and edit a pile of chaotically recorded footage like that.

So, let's see if I can pull it off. But in any case, this kind of raw

vlog-style video is something that I would love to be able to do more of

as a way to celebrate amazing human beings like Paul and others,

including everyday people who I meet on my travels. So, I'll keep trying,

tinkering, learning, and I ask for your patience and support along the way.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you

can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give

feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosolie.

We've survived a challenging time out in the jungle about a year and a

half ago, and since then, your life has

increasingly gotten more intense. So, you've achieved

the incredible feat of saving now more than 130,000 acres of rainforest.

And the goal that you're working towards is protecting 200,000 acres more.

And doing so while facing extreme danger from narcos,

narco-traffickers, so-called Cocaine Mafia in an escalating

drug war. This is insane. These are new developments.

Illegal loggers, as we've talked about before. Gold miners, and the

incredible recent encounter with an uncontacted

tribe. And we'll talk about all of this. So your new

book, Jungle Keeper, opens with the killing of two loggers

by the warriors of an uncontacted tribe, the Mashco Piro, in August 2024.

And then you reveal that you had your own dramatic encounter with the tribe two

months later in October 2024. So if I may, let me read the opening of the book.

"Far out on the western edge of the Amazon rainforest, deep

in the Peruvian jungle, a pair of loggers plunged their

chainsaws into the buttressed roots of an ancient ironwood. An ironwood, or

shihuahuaco, of this size is a giant among giants, an

emergent sentinel that reaches heights of 160 feet,

towering over the rest of the canopy." I've read that many are

over 1,000 years old, by the way, as an aside. And you've found

ones that are 1,200 years old.

- Incredibly old.

- Anyway, you continue. "This particular tree had started its life as a

tiny sapling in the great jungle, a story that began before the

Spanish reached Peru, long before the United States was even a

dream. At a time when Leonardo da Vinci was still

honing his talents in a far away part of the world, through the

Renaissance, the First and Second World Wars, and the birth of our

grandparents." This tree was out there slowly

charging upward, anonymous, just one pillar among the billions

of others. But on this day, in August 2024, when the two loggers worked, this

witness of the centuries came crashing down to the canopy

with such cataclysmic power that it shook the earth.

And then you go on to talk about how the shaking of the earth was

felt and heard by the uncontacted tribe.

You go on to describe how these particular loggers were killed

by the uncontacted tribe of

Mashco Piro. What do we know about these warriors of the uncontacted tribe?

- We know that across the Amazon basin there's still perhaps thousands of clans of

uncontacted peoples, people that are living in

nomadic isolation in what remains of the intact Amazon basin and want to remain that way.

And so, what happened with these loggers was that

local people told them, "Don't go out there. Don't go

into these territories." And what happens is that people that aren't from... There's this thing with

the jungle, people don't believe that

it's as wild as the legends say. And so when they say there's

calatos out there, there's wild people out there,

these loggers from another region go, "Yeah, that's just some story.

We're fine. We'll go. We have shotguns." They don't realize

you're dealing with a civilization of people that is

still nomadic, still uses bamboo-tipped arrows, still

lives naked in the Amazon rainforest, has knowledge of medicines that we've

yet to encounter or may never discover, and that they can

hit a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 meters. And so

while you're using a chainsaw, they can sneak up and you will never know

they're there. And so when that arrow passes through your body,

you'll only have a moment to realize it before you fall over.

- And we're looking at something you posted on your Instagram-

... which are the arrows that they use, which are bigger than you.

So they're like six or seven feet.

- Six, seven feet. More like seven feet. And that's-

- Look how sharp that is.

- ... incredibly sharp. They cure it over the fire and they have a way of sharpening it.

That edge of bamboo becomes incredibly knife-sharp. You can cut meat with it

easily; I've done it. These arrows... Look at that. I mean, I'm

5'9". That's easily a seven-foot arrow.

- Yeah, so for people who are just listening, this "arrow" is really a spear.

Some people would think it was a spear, but they're shooting this thing with a gigantic bow.

That's crazy.

- Yeah, and so to be holding that... Look at that, they even twist the

fletching so the arrow spins in the air. They have incredible

craftsmanship, and then you see all the little string on there is plant fibers they've

woven, and then this is them.

- Yeah, the warriors of the tribe.

- The warriors of the tribe. And so the fact that we're sitting here talking

on microphones, and that we have airplanes and cell phones and all the things we have in

the modern world, and there's still... We still live in this age where there's,

right now at this moment, people living out in the jungle who have been

there since before history, is an incredible thing.

- Let me look this up on Perplexity: what are the technologies

we modern humans have that the Mashco Piro do

not? It's just interesting to think about the kind of

technologies we take for granted. Energy and power,

obviously all the electricity generation, grids, batteries, solar panels, and

electric motors, metals and materials, mass-produced steel,

aluminum, advanced alloys, plastics, composites, glass,

concrete, all of those things.

- All of those things.

- Tools, of course, and machinery. The infrastructure of

roads and bridges and buildings, and the

weapons of war—everything but the spears and arrows that they have—and the

medicine and biology. Of course they probably have complicated medicines

that they've developed for their own— ...that are available within the jungle.

- I mean, that entire list is no.

- No.

- I mean, metal, I think you have to be able to excavate into the earth

and forge metal.

These people don't even... As one of the local anthropologists said to me, a

Peruvian anthropologist, he said, "You know, people think of them as

Stone Age tribes." And he was like, "They don't have stones." He's like, "They don't..."

So they don't know that water... They see water that they drink. They don't

know that water freezes, because they've never seen it. They don't know that water boils,

because they don't even make clay pots. They just have their bamboo and their string.

And so they're living an incredibly simple life. So all of

that, I mean, even a camera is a miracle

to them. You have to bend your mind to even understand how far back they are.

It's like looking into thousands of years ago, like the Stone Age.

- When they hear the sounds of the chainsaws, the sounds of machinery in the distance-

...I wonder how they can possibly comprehend what that is.

- I think they view it as a demonic destructive force. And when I show you the

encounter that we had, we got a few takeaways.

We left with more questions than answers, but one of the things they were

able to communicate across the language barrier was, "Why are you

cutting down the trees?" They don't like it.

- Yeah. That represents to them the

danger and destruction that the outside world brings.

- They see us as the destroyers of worlds.

- So tell me about this encounter in October of 2024.

- So, in order to tell you about that encounter I think we need to

orient people into where we're talking about. We're talking about this river that

runs through the western edge of the Amazon rainforest that you know

well now, after spending time there with me. It's a high

tributary of the Amazon where you have the main river channel and

then smaller and smaller and smaller tributaries. And the smaller

you get, the less trafficked they are. And so this river has

remained wild through the centuries. And

even during the '90s when there was a mahogany boom where people went out for it,

trees, there were very few people going up this river.

20 years ago when I first got to the region and people told me there were uncontacted tribes

out there, it was always in the realm of something...

You know, it's like people say, "There's Bigfoot," or, "Don't go there,

it's haunted." It was like a tall tale almost.

And even the Peruvian government at the time I first went to Peru, which was

2006, their official position was that the tribes are a

myth. There's no such thing as the tribes. That was the official

position. And you just... You would hear these stories of people that got

shot. You'd meet someone high up a river, four days upriver, deep in the

Amazon, that had an arrow. And you'd look at this thing and it had this,

you know, mega gravity. And so as we've created Jungle Keepers and now we're protecting

130,000 acres of this river, we're protecting the plants and the animals and the

ancient trees, and trying to preserve the ecosystem, and counting the butterflies and conducting

ecological surveys, and what we've inadvertently found ourselves

the caretakers of, is the fact that these people, in order to continue

living, have to remain isolated, want to remain

isolated. That's their one mandate as a civilization: the tribes

of the Mashco Piro. And so, in October, as Jungle Keepers now, we're

working with the indigenous people. What we do is we take loggers and gold miners and make

them into rangers and give them better jobs, and we try to protect the forest.

And those people who live up in the remote indigenous

community, they called us on a satellite phone and they said, "Directors,

you've been working with us and telling us you wanna help us. The tribes are coming out.

What do we do?"

- So, even they don't really know, when the tribes emerge from the deep jungle-

... what to do?

- They were terrified.

- What was your thinking when you got the phone call?

- When we got the phone call, it was a mix of... because we're over here trying

to get land concessions and doing all this important work, and part of me was like,

"That can't be real, so we're gonna keep our heads down."

- Bigfoot is emerging- ... from the forest.

- Like, yeah, sure. And then we hung up and we said, "Okay, maybe

tomorrow if they're still there or something." And then it was crazy because

it was probably about noon and we had an important day of meetings. We had a meeting with the

police, we had a meeting with the landowner, we were trying to do all this stuff for the conservation work.

And then I got together with the core team of directors, JJ, Mohsin, Stéphane, and

we said, "Wait, if this is real, we have to get

there now. Like now, now." And so we dropped what we were

doing, canceled the meetings, and put other people on them. We

got a boat and we called Ignacio, our most hardcore ranger.

- Who has been shot.

- Who in 2019 was shot in the head by an arrow

and still bears the scar, and he barely survived. And we

said, "Look, this is going down." He said, "I already know because the whole river knows."

We said, "Can you get us there by tomorrow morning?" And he said, "Look,

it's a two-day journey by boat. So, no." And we said, "Is there any way you

can you get us there?" And he went, "I'll get you there." And so we got a

couple of sacks of rice, a couple of cans of tuna, our dry bags, our

tents. We got on a boat by 6:00 PM and we started riding up the river

- Through the night?

- ...through the night. And so a two-day boat journey that we're trying to flex into one

night. And so I was at the front with the headlamp—

...with the torch. And so the first few hours it was clear, and that

comet... Remember that comet—

...that was going? There was that comet in the sky. I remember looking at it and going, "This is

it." I knew this was it. And the first few hours were clear and the

stars were out and it was beautiful, and then it clouded over and the lightning

started, and then it just apocalypse downpoured. And from midnight

until 8:00 AM it was just the front of the boat with the light, and it was just

a Star Wars vision of raindrops and

galaxies and moths flying in my eye. People don't

realize you can get hypothermia in the tropics, but as you're going at night, even if it's

80 degrees outside, in the rain, in the wind at night, in a lightning

storm, you're freezing. And so by 2:00 AM I'm convulsively shivering, and

we're using the caiman eyes on the side of the river because it was

so dark we couldn't see where we were going, so those shine back at you. So I'm

finding the caiman eyes and then motioning with the light to Ignacio

where to go, and he knew how to find the channel and we had to jump the

waterfalls. We did the two-day boat ride in one night.

And we arrive at this community where... And it's morning now

and the howler monkeys are calling over the jungle, and the little naked

children are all by the side and everyone's scared. And we get a

hug from this guy, Bacho, who we know, and they're like, "Come in, come in, come in."

And they're like, "The tribe came out yesterday. We saw a few of them on the beach and

they're gone now."

And so we collapsed, we fell asleep. Rained the whole day. That night we went

out and we looked for them and there was this crazy moment where

we're standing on this beach and their footprints were there.

And the local indigenous anthropologist was standing there, looking out into the

Amazon beyond, and there's just all this wreckage. It looked like something very

Cormac McCarthy: just dark sky, iron clouds, and

we're standing there. Everyone is waiting, 'cause at any moment an arrow could

just fly through your neck. And there's people holding shotguns, and the

anthropologist, this little guy, is standing there in the front and he's going, "No

mole." He's going, "Brothers." There's only a few words that intersect

between the languages and he's going, "Brothers, we're here. We don't want to hurt

you." He's speaking in the Yine language. And he's saying, "Come out." And you can

tell by their footprints—the trackers explained this—that you could see...

it was just the balls of their feet. So right as we pulled up to the beach, they ran.

So they were there listening to us, and he's going, "Nomole, come

out. It's okay. Lay down your arms. We'll lay down ours. Nomole."

He just kept saying, "Nomole." And nothing happened. And we went back to the village and went

to sleep. We wake up the next morning, and it's 5:00 AM. And

again, we're trying to save the jungle. We're in a race against time to get these land

concessions. And so my team, like Mohsin and JJ—Stefan couldn't

come because he was in town signing paperwork and interviewing loggers

and landowners. And also, he didn't think there was any chance this

was gonna be real because in his entire 50-something years in the Amazon, he's

never seen them. And so

we're getting ready to leave in the morning. We had tents on the boat, and Ignacio comes up to

me and he goes, "You're my director, right? You're my boss?" And I went,

"Yeah." He goes, "I need to talk to you like a friend." I was like,

"Yeah, shoot. Go." And he goes, "You'd be an idiot to leave right now."

He goes, "They're coming." And so he convinced us to stay. We pull

our tents off the boat. Stefan and Mohsin go off with their cameras. They start shooting,

you know, people. These are monkey eaters and fishermen—the

community that we're in. And everything's quiet. And I opened my

laptop, and I was working, just writing my book. And then it

happened. Then you start hearing people screaming,

"Mashco, Mashco!" And people are screaming and women are

lifting children and running into the huts, and the dogs and chickens are going

nuts. And I mean—

- So fear. Fear.

- Fear.

- Because we should say, the obvious thing is, as far as

anyone remembers, any minimal, small encounters with these tribes—

... have been violent.

- Extremely violent. These tribes have remained alive

because of their violence. Like the Spartans or the Comanches, they seem to have

adopted violence as a first response to contact.

- Maybe you can correct me on this, but I read that in the late 19th

century, early 20th century, there was documentation of encounters with these tribes

by the private armies of the rubber barons.

And those encounters were, from the rubber barons' armies' perspective, violent.

And so maybe the lesson the uncontacted tribes learned

is that any interaction with the outside world is gonna have to be

violent because they have to defend themselves.

- Yeah. You had colonial missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s. Then you

had the rubber barons, late 1800s into the 1900s, just periods of

extraction and domination and cruelty. And these tribes—their

grandparents must have told them, "When the outside world comes, you shoot

first. That's the only thing that's gonna keep you alive."

- Do you think the memory of those violent encounters is defining

to how they think about the world?

- Yeah. Because even in my lifetime there, in the 20 years I've spent in the

Amazon, Ignacio was shot in the head. My friend

Victor survived a violent encounter where they murdered somebody on a

beach. They've shot numerous people. They've even shot people who were trying

to help them, people who were trying to give them clothing and bananas.

They call it porcupining them, where they find a body on the beach with so many

arrows that when they fall over, all the arrows are sticking up.

And they'll do it out of curiosity too. It's like, "Hey, you're wearing a

suit. That's weird. We've never seen anybody in a black and white suit."

The way Teddy Roosevelt would shoot a bird for science.

They just want to look at you. And so they're operating

on a different... They don't have the moral system that we have or understand.

They're truly wild.

- How does Ignacio think about them? Because they almost killed him.

- Yes. It depends on the mood you get him in, because if you ask

him... One day I asked him, "If you could see the people who shot you

in the head, what would you say to them?" And he looked at me with that Ignacio look

and said, "I wouldn't say anything. I would kill as many of them as I could."

He also had a time where he was in a really remote guard

station working for the Ministry of Culture, and they showed up and he knew that

they were going to kill him. So he climbed into the peak of

the little structure there. And just like a dog in a car, that

greenhouse effect in the top at midday with the sun beating down, he was

huddled over a mattress while they were walking on the deck—

...moving pots and pans and looking at our items and artifacts.

And he knew that if he was found, they'd kill him. But

if he stayed up there, he was literally frying. He said he was soaking the mattress.

He could feel himself dying. For two hours he had to stay there.

And he was constantly making this decision: "If I come out, I die. If I stay,

I probably die." He's like, "Probably die is better than definitely die."

So he was terrified. And as they're screaming, "Mashko," everybody's running,

Ignacio comes and finds me. You can see in his eyes, you can see

when somebody has that PTSD response,

he's breathing heavy. He's moving behind trees.

He's keeping me close to him and going, "Look there. He has a bow."

"He has a bow." And we're looking up the beach, and there's just this

clan of naked men walking down the beach with these seven-foot bows,

and they're hunched over, pointing at us. They're going, "Look at that one."

"Look, there's a gun there." You can see them communicating to each other.

The butterflies are swirling off the beach. In these moments you go,

"Am I entering a moment that is— is this a one-way door?"

"Is this an irreversible situation?" Because there's an unfolding situation

where they're coming towards us. Are they going to attack? What do they want?

Is there going to be a... I mean, I am

soaked in chills right now talking about it, because I remember standing there,

going, "There's no way this is real life." It's burned into my memory, them

walking down the beach with the bows. And of course, you know,

Stefan is up there firing off pictures and Mohsin is down getting video.

And the community that we're with, people had...

You hear shotgun shells loading home.

They're getting ready. And there's this one guy, this anthropologist named Romel,

who has been the only person who has communicated with them peacefully. He did it

in 2013, where he stood on the beach and spoke to them. He knows enough

of the local dialect that overlaps with theirs that he can

speak to them. And as they're coming down the beach, the butterflies are flying up,

and we're all waiting. And again, shotgun, you're talking, you

know, how many meters? 30, 40 meters? I don't know accurate. For an

arrow, you loose a seven-foot arrow that weighs nothing, you're talking about

300 meters easy. They can shoot you from across the river. So

Ignacio was pulling me and he was like, "Down. You go down."

"You stay behind this tree. Watch them from there. Watch out, he has an arrow."

He was watching everyone because you could see, he's like, "This is how it happens."

- Did you think this might be the last day you have on this earth? Were you afraid?

- I was, yeah, of course I was afraid. You're with-

I'm with my two best friends and people that I work very closely

with. You're in the middle of nowhere, there's no help coming, and you're with-

...26 people and there's 50 of the tribe that you

can see, and you know they're surrounding us. There are men on the other side

of the river. And then we had guns looking back towards the

jungle because we knew we were being surrounded. And so, again, this is

always the story of someone's uncle, brother, or cousin

telling a story that happened, and now it's happening. Not in the shadows,

not in the middle of the night. It's happening in broad daylight.

They're walking out onto the beach. It's like the first time they saw the

dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. You're going, "There's no way."

- And you are walking on the knife's edge. And it's funny you say this,

about taking pictures. Because there's two ways to think of this situation. This is

fascinating, or this is extremely dangerous. It's both. It's a knife's edge.

So you could approach it one of two ways.

"If I die, I die. I'm going to take some good pictures."

- But that was also our mission. As the directors of

Jungle Keepers, we work with this community to ensure their lifestyle can

continue, and they're saying, "Hey, that's great, but as an

indigenous community, we're dealing with people that raid our stuff, try and

steal our women, and kill our hunters. Now they're coming out. We want you to see

it." Documenting it is part of our job. We have to

show what happened that day. And so those guys were

shooting. And very seriously, it's actually...

Mohsin's wife and I always joked, "If the tribe ever comes out,

you stand in front of him, you take the arrow. He has kids."

And that day, we were strategically positioning

ourselves, being like, "You, down. You cannot

get killed." In those moments, you start to go, "Okay, where

will I be safe from arrows? Where can I run to the

river if they come over?" And you start planning, "Okay, if I jump

into the river..." I was going, "Okay, I got my bag. I have a can of tuna. I have a flashlight."

I was like, "If I jump into the river and float down and I live, I'm still

days upriver." And so you start going through all these things.

- And of course, the Mashco Piro people are thinking exactly the same thing,

probably.

- Well, the interesting thing is that they're initiating the contact, right?

They are the ones coming out of the jungle and confronting us.

- And fundamentally, that contact is- they're at least giving peace a chance. They're

trying the peaceful contact first, correct? Or was there

a violent element? Like, what did you sense in the

caution of them emerging to the beach?

- Fear. As they came out, you could see fear on them because the way

they were hunched over, the way they had their bows ready,

they were worried. And so they came and Romel is standing there

closer than any of us at the edge, on one side of the river. And it was like

shirts versus skins. It was two tribes looking at each other

with a thousand years of civilization between them. And Romel's

going, "Put down your bows.

Put down your bows and we can talk." And he's saying, "Namole, Namole."

He kept saying, "Brothers, brothers, please put down your..."

- So Namole means brother in a language that they might be able to understand?

- Namole means brother in a language that they do understand, and

it seems like they refer to themselves as the Namoles. The brothers.

- So potentially, that's what they call themselves as a tribe, Namoles?

- Exactly. And actually, the anthropologists that we've been speaking to post-event

have been explaining to us that- you know, Piro is the

group that they're from, these various nomadic tribes.

And Mashco basically means "wild Piros." One thing we know they call themselves is Namoles.

- So we might converge towards the name of this tribe being Namole

versus Mashco Piro?

- The Namoles, yeah. It seems like the most current self-appointed

identity is the brothers, Namole.

- Anyway, there's these shredded warriors on the beach. They're gigantic.

- With seven-foot arrows, and we're all standing there. And so

the first thing, again, you just think of like the

peace pipe in the old stories. And the first thing is,

"Let's make them an offering of peace." So they got a canoe with no

motor, and we piled it with plantains, just

full of plantains, 16 feet of endless green bananas.

And then, I mean, the balls on this guy, the anthropologist-

he gets into the river, takes the canoe, and it's the

dry season, so the river's only about three or four feet deep at the

channel. And so he walks this thing out, this one man

walking in the face of all these warriors. He takes the boat and he

pushes it towards them. And they rush out, and they start

grabbing the bananas, and they're not going, "Okay, we will unload

these bananas and use them later." They're my bananas.

And they're fighting, yelling, and they're all grabbing 'em,

and then they push the boat back

and he talks to them a little bit. It's not a perfect translation,

so he's saying, "Where have you come from? What do you want? Who's your leader?"

And he's trying to establish these things, and they all sort of talk at the same

time, like a flock of birds. It wasn't like one man speaks.

And there were no women. The women were nowhere

to be seen. And actually, at one point as we were

preparing, I think it was while we were preparing the second canoe of bananas,

there was a moment of absolute panic.

It happened when there was a noise behind us and you just hear shotguns

swing behind us. And, you know, Mohsin goes down. I go

running away from the river because I want to see if there's an attack coming.

And I'm standing, me and this guy were sharing a tree as cover,

and he's got a shotgun and he's looking back into the forest.

And what was happening was the women of the tribe had come

silently, and they were just pulling yucca out of the ground and taking the

banana plants and ruining the farm completely. They were raiding the farm

behind us while the men were talking up here. So again,

were they peacefully contacting us or were they like, "Hey, go make a diversion and

take the food out the back"?

- So I mean, you really were surrounded.

- We were completely surrounded.

- So they could have murdered all of you, probably.

- Easily. We were outnumbered five to one at the least.

- Yeah. And maybe they wanted peace, but part of the reason is they

didn't know how deep this goes. They didn't know if you had backup.

- They don't know if we have backup. They also had questions. Some of

their questions were incredible: "How do we tell the difference between,

how do we know who the good guys and the bad guys are?"

Because to them, all you outsiders are the same.

So why, who were the ones cutting down the trees?

- And those are the ones they know are the bad guys.

- Well, the big trees seemed to have incredible significance to them.

They're significant to us in a different way, but to them, it's

offensive on an almost religious

level to cut a big tree, as if you're killing their gods.

- So there's a spirituality to the trees to them.

- It seems like that.

- And so whoever's cutting them down is a source of destruction on a

spiritual, existential level.

- spiritual, existential level. They ask, "Why would you destroy our home?"

- In a deep sense, the uncontacted tribes

represent the deep jungle. And so if they're

threatened, that means the jungle, the deep jungle is threatened.

- They are the human voice of the jungle and

they're asking questions and they're also demanding. You know, they're clapping at

us and they're waving and they're saying, "Send more bananas." And so they loaded up

another boat and they pushed another boat out, and this time they gave them some rope.

They all had rope tied around their waists, penises tied up.

But they love rope and some of them were wearing rope that they had

made, which is brown or reddish. And then some of them were wearing rope

that they had clearly pillaged from logging camps or the communities because it was

modern nylon paracord. And they had this wound around their waists like

a thick belt. And they took the second boat and they had

some rope and they had some plantains on there.

- So, some of these guys might have been the ones that murdered the loggers.

- Could be.

- From a couple of months before that.

- Absolutely, could be. But what Ramal said as he was talking to them,

he turned to us and he said, "The other groups call me the

Grandfather." He said, "This group, I don't know any of these." He said, "This is first

contact." He said, "This is the first time this group is talking to

us." And you saw people from maybe 12 years old to

what looks like 40-something, like a banged-up 40.

And no really old people and no women.

- So this is a particular clan of the uncontacted-

- It's a particular clan,

- a tribe who they've never contacted.

Is there, just from your memory, interesting aspects about the way they were

trying to communicate? Like you said, clapping. I think it's,

from an anthropology perspective, from a human perspective, fascinating. How do you talk to

people from an uncontacted tribe like this?

So clapping, yelling. It's interesting to know that there's not a hierarchy

where there's a leader that represents. Or is that something we know for sure?

- Before even coming to talk to you about this, we passed this through

anthropologists and ethicists and we said, "Look, is it

even okay? Can we talk about this?" Because if you talk about this,

and you tell people there's these uncontacted tribes, people have misconceptions.

They go, "They're the last free people on Earth. We need to go

join them. We want to see them." There's all this bad stuff that happens,

and all these people want to be left alone. So the last thing we want to do is

kill the thing we're trying to protect and tell the world. But at the same

time, they're speaking out. They're saying, "Stop cutting our trees. Leave

us alone." And so if we're not successful in the greater

Jungle Keepers' mission of protecting this river, they cease to

exist. And so advocating for these people requires

us to have this conversation. It requires us to have this footage and to show the

world, and then leave them alone.

In order for any of this to make sense, I have to show you this footage.

- And this has not been shown ever before.

- This is a world first. I mean, up until now... You know, we're sitting there this day and-

the only thing you've ever seen are these blurry images of them from someone's

cellphone from 100 meters away of the uncontacted tribes. And we're sitting there with

800 millimeters with a 2X teleconverter and, you know, R5s.

And so, this is as we're looking through the vines,

anticipating the tribe coming. I'll put a little bit of volume so you can hear it.

And then you can see, this is the moment. This is us running when they're like, "They're

out. They're coming down the beach."

- Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

- You see how many thousands of

butterflies? But look at the way they move. Look at the

way they point. Look at him with his bow.

- Wow.

- There it is.

- They're trying to figure out what they're looking at.

- And they didn't know the cameras were there. So this was the guys looking out the back.

So he's going, "There's something back here." He could-

hear the women in the farm. And I'm looking in every direction because I'm

going, "Which way is the arrow coming from?"

But see, he has his shotgun. This is just like a farm shotgun. Even if he shot it, you have to use a

stick to bang out the shell. But see, as they come closer, they start

laying down their... See, he's laying down his bow and arrow. They understand.

- So these are warriors, and the way they were at first moving, it really

looked like they're ready for violence. And now they're all standing in a relaxed-

And they're smiling? Are they smiling?

- Smiles come at some point. I would say that one of these guys seemed like

he was in a leadership position. He did most of the talking.

- What's with the different hand gestures? This,

the holding your hand up to the face. All of this means something.

- All of this means something. Some had red smeared on their faces. Some had yellow.

- Did you have a sense of hierarchy at all, like the boss?

- Again, there were just these two dominant guys. And, like, this guy and one other guy who

looked almost like him, like his brother. A lot of gesturing.

- Wow. This is incredible, Paul.

- Yeah. You see the rope? Some of that rope is...

- Yeah, I can kind of tell who the bosses are.

- Right? All right, so a few of But see, even that, as he's pointing-

what are you pointing at?

- You guys are nuts. You guys are nuts.

- You see, though, they're rushing in. There's this desperation. They're

hungry. They also—

- Is that in the water, or is that Ramo in the water in that case?

- The, in this particular video, it's a guy named Liner.

But see these guys? They're fighting over it. It's not that we're all going to share it later.

It's, "I get mine, you get yours." And so what does that mean?

- Yeah. But here, they're in peaceful mode, for sure.

- Now, after we'd given them,

after we'd given them several boatloads of bananas, things did calm down.

Ramo said to them, "Look, we've given you what we can give you. We gave

you sugarcane. We gave you boatloads of plantains."

And so then there came a time where things were a little more relaxed. They were walking

around. We had a great moment

where we'd given them the plantains. We'd given them the

bananas. And he'd said, "Look, that's it." He said, "We've given

you what you asked for. You asked for bananas. We don't—

we don't cut the trees here. All of us here are not tree-cutters. We're indigenous

people." And he couldn't explain who the hell we were, but they were

like, "We don't cut the trees. We're not the loggers." And they're like, "Okay." So then

at some point, Ignacio went out and sort of like

started, you know, he'd go like this and they'd go like this. And he'd dance

a little bit, they'd dance a little bit. And then there was this human moment of

just joking.

- So even Ignacio warmed up.

- Even Ignacio warmed up. Once he realized no one was going to die that day,

things did calm down. It was a false sense of

security. Here, I'll show you. There's a couple more things that

are relevant here, though. Yeah, this is just them interacting with the boat.

- This is truly incredible, man.

- But then they don't have boats. They don't have stone tools. They don't...

Imagine if you showed them ice. You know, they wouldn't...

- This is historic.

- I mean, it's the... you hear of Percy Fawcett

encountering the tribes. We've heard of anecdotal accounts. This is the first

time that the tribes have been filmed, that we can hear their voices—

...that there's a documented interaction happening. I mean, look how

comfortable he's getting. He's so close. They asked him for his

shirt. He gave his shirt.

- This is incredible.

- They asked him for his pants. He gave his pants. He was in his underwear.

You see this? The shirt that's over his

shoulder? Ignacio took off his JungleKeeper shirt and threw it

to the anthropologist, and then the anthropologist walked off and threw it to them.

So over the shoulder of that uncontacted naked warrior

is a JungleKeeper shirt with the logo showing.

- That's great.

- So their, like, their second shirt and they're...

- You just upgraded that guy's status in the tribe. He's going to be the new

boss with that shirt.

- He's got a dope polo. And he didn't even have to order it. But yeah, this is

in the aftermath when things were calm. And then my

moment with this that really stuck with me was when

Ramo said to me, "You know, they're asking about

you." And I said, "What are they asking?"

He goes, "Yeah, they're asking about you." And again, I'm not tall but

compared to the people in the village, I was a little bit taller and had big

shoulders. And he said, "They said you look like a warrior. Could you come

forward? Show them that you don't mean any harm. Show them your

palms." And so he pulled me up onto the beach, right before they left.

I hold up my hands. Listen. And they sang back. They're singing.

They raised their hands. I raised my hands.

- Wow.

- And then we were left watching them walk off the beach

into the jungle with everything that we'd given them,

and they were gone. And so we went downriver the next

day and the community said to us, "Okay, now you understand this is real. This is

terrifying. You felt that fear. You have a duty, if you're gonna protect this river,

to protect us from them and to help us

figure out what future they want. If they want to come to us, if they want to learn

farming, if they... whatever it is,

that's fine." But they were like, "We need protection from you

guys." And then in this video in the

beginning, I'm narrating to the camera and walking around

right as they're coming up the beach. But you see this guy,

right there in the blue shirt?

That's George. And he was very friendly, very confident with this. He said, "Don't be

scared. They're not going to hurt us." And the next day, we went back to

town—long journey back to town. We go to sleep, we wake up in the

morning, and we find out that the following early

morning, our friends in the community had said, "Okay, the tribe is

gone. We gave them sugarcane, bananas, and said, 'Please

come back, you're welcome here anytime.'" And George was driving a boat

with people on board, and as they were going upriver, 200 of the

tribe ran out, surrounded the boat, and they started firing arrows. Everybody else hit

the deck and got under the benches and hid behind

bags of rice. George was driving as fast as he could, leaning back

while driving. And one arrow came in just above his scapula and came

out by his belly button. And so he had that seven-foot arrow tip

through him. They pulled him out, and I saw the boat

afterward, and there's just horrific amounts of blood all over the

boat. He had to be medevacked out, and somehow he lived.

And we were able to help getting him a helicopter, getting him

evaced, all this. But again, you just go,

"What..." you know, these people came out of the

jungle and they asked for bananas. We gave them bananas and

we, in every way possible said, "We mean peace. We want

friendship with you." And then the next day, they attacked.

- What do you think happened? Why do you think their mind turned? Or

maybe this has to do with the role of violence in their society. Maybe it's so

integrated into how they interact with the world that they don't even see that as a

fundamental shift in the interaction.

- I don't know. I don't know what to make of it. And the only thing I can think is that the

way they hid the women from us, you don't know for them, maybe we're not allowed to see their

women, you know? Because the one thing that we got was that as George—

George's boat and this other boat were going upriver, which is how they

live—it's not like they were doing anything wrong. These people live in a community days

into the Amazon, they were going fishing. And so they came around

a bend and I think they spooked the tribe. The tribe might have just acted

defensively and said, "We don't know who this is." The motors could have set them off, we don't

know. But they shot him. And then the other thing is the thing with the necklace.

I've asked anthropologists about this, and their answer was that at

this point they said, "You know more than we do."

Because two of them had the exact same item around their

necks, and it seems to be a Brazil nut

and then some sort of casing around the side, and it looked like animal teeth

positioned in there. And it's like, what are you carrying? Are you carrying medicine?

Are you carrying some sort of a totem? But both of them... and it's not a

comfortable thing to wear around your neck— you know, grapefruit-sized or bigger.

- Do you have a sense if that's a container or is it just like a totem?

- It seems like a container. If they didn't let it get wet, they cared

for it. The guy in this picture, he's got this... this is a piece

of tree fiber that he has it on him, and then he's gotten his

hands on Brazil nut sacks, plastic sacks from one of the farms

across the river. And so they just take, they take. And one of them got a

machete and he was walking. As they were leaving, again, during that period where they got

friendly, he was leaving and he had the machete, playing with it and swinging it at

butterflies. And one of my friends, this guy Bacho, he goes, "Oye, deja mi

machete." He's like, "Drop the machete." And the guy just looked at him and was like, "Yeah, come and get it."

You know, it's like, "Yeah, you cross the river and see what happens."

- Do you think he figured out, or they later figured out, how to use a machete?

- Oh, they know the machete.

- They understand the machete?

- Yeah, they do raids for machetes.

- They understand the power of sharpened metal.

- It's an Excalibur sword to them. But yeah, that one has stuck with me

because I wonder, what were they carrying in there?

- So what are some of the questions? Like if you could

know everything you'd want to know about them—

Maybe in the space of communication and language, that's really interesting.

You mentioned that there's all kinds of calls, animal calls.

So they obviously know how to fake animal calls.

- Yeah, they can use animal calls with

enough complexity that they can do basic commands. They can speak

in Capuchin; they use Tinamou calls. Some of our

rangers were upriver a few months ago. This is recently,

they were upriver and they found a Nomole trail, a Mashco-Piro trail,

and it was Ignacio, of course. He made a secret whistle

out into the jungle and he's listening,

and they whistle back. So he and everybody on the team just

ran back to the boat and got out of there. But at least they answered.

They didn't just shoot. He whistled, they whistled, and they said, "Out,"

and he got out. But we don't know,

where are the old people? Do they not survive? What are

the marriage rituals? How is reproduction handled?

There are one or two children in the Amazon that

I know of who have washed downriver on a log and

been rescued by communities and raised. They either

learn the native dialect or Spanish, and then, at some point, somebody will go and

ask, "What was it like when you lived with them?" The answer is always the same:

"I forget." They don't talk about it.

- So maybe we know that they value

secrecy. I mean, when you're afraid of the outside world,

part of that is confidentiality. They all sign NDAs.

- Yeah, there are some really good NDAs.

- It's an understood NDA. There are no

lawyers. There's only one way to execute the law.

- Yeah. It's either a really strong NDA or that it is

savage living out there in the jungle, where you're eating

monkeys and turtles and you're hungry for days on end.

Your wife might get stolen by another tribe. Your baby might get

stolen—imagine the botflies and the things

that they must put up with. It's just... I mean, what we

experienced in three days of living with modern camping gear, headlamps,

and a sense of direction—they're doing none of that. Put us out there

naked, a very different story.

- Yeah, the brutality of nature—

Werner Herzog comes to mind. They have to live in that.

But then there's something about the

jungle that serves as a catalyst for spirituality, so they must also have

a religious component, a spiritual component

that probably unifies them. There must be an ideology they operate under.

- Oh, there must be. There's many things they must have.

They must have a belief system. They probably have amazing origin

stories. It would be amazing to know what things

they have accurately and inaccurately guessed about

us, about the outside world. I mean, they've never heard of

the country they live in or of World War II or any of it. And so seeing them come

across the beach was surreal because it's like this aperture into history.

- By the way, you do have a certain look, so you realize like—

as I'm speaking to you, your face is carved in some wood somewhere,

And there's a few of them gathering around

and like still singing about the great gringo with the—

- The full beard and the big nose. They probably drew this like, "He's got

hair all over his face and a huge nose, and they tell their children.

- Yeah. And it could be anything. They—

To the children, they say, "This is the monster you should be afraid

of," or this could be the most beautiful

encapsulation of the outside world. It could be everything in

between. You don't get to control the myths.

- You don't get to control the myths. Yeah, God only knows, but

- That's so interesting.

- So now, in that 130,000 acres that we have, we know—and this

is what we sort of have to come out with—

we are now protecting these people. And the

only way to do that is to make sure that they're not contacted, let

alone that they don't get machine guns shot at them by the

narcos, or that crazy hippie gringos don't go down

there thinking they're going to join the coolest commune on Earth.

- So how much of the land that they move

about is within the 130,000 acres of rainforest you've been

able to save? And how much of it is not?

How much of it is in the extra 200,000 acres that you're trying to save?

- Most of the rest, most of that 200,000 that we're still trying to protect

is territory that is theirs. And in order-

People always ask me this. They're like, "How could you buy the

Amazon?" They're like, "That doesn't make sense." And it's like, well, I have bad

news for you. Somebody already owns it and we have to buy it from them so that they

don't log it. And so these landowners are going

to sell their forest to the logging companies because owning

10,000 acres of the Amazon doesn't help you if you're a third-generation

jungle man. And now it's just something that's up there and you live in the city,

and so they're going to contract either the narcos, the loggers, or the miners to go

out there and use it, and they'll get a little money. And when those people see

these people, they will kill them. That's for sure. And

shotguns and machine guns in the end will win, not to mention the germs.

- So all the money you're trying to raise and all the land that you're trying to

save, it's all towards that: protecting the deep jungle.

So when you buy up the jungle, you just want to let it

be, let the natural ecosystem come back to life in the cases

when it was logged or just flourish- ...if it hasn't?

- Again, we're talking about the last great jungle.

I always called it the last endless forest because this place is

so incredibly remote. And then the other

question I always get is, "Well, why is this river so, so important?" And

for my whole career, 20 years in the Amazon, it's been

that it's massively intact forest. Places like the ancient

forest where the trees have never been cut, growing since the dawn of

time. Thousands of species can be on a single shihuahuaco tree, and

it's Avatar on Earth. You can see the sweat come off

your skin and rain down and then drink it out of the river, and you're part of the

chemical physical reality there. It's one of the last places that's untouched.

This changed everything because we realized that along with

the butterflies and the monkeys and the jaguars and the trees and the

ecosystem—there's also a human culture that

will, in the next few years, cease to exist, that

will be exterminated if we don't protect them. And when you look

back at what happened to indigenous cultures all over the world over the past few centuries,

that they've been wiped out, we collectively now,

because we know this, have a chance to undo all

the injustices of the past by at least doing one

right, by saying these people want one thing: to just be left

alone. Imagine if we just protected the river.

And then it's not that they're this thing that's vanishing from

reality, but they get to continue living that way. And if they want to come out and

contact us, great, and if they want to continue living like this for 10,000 years, they

can. And that's what we're working with now. It's

become so much more important than just, you know, trying to

protect the environment. It's like, no, we're trying to protect

things like Yellowstone and Yosemite and the sequoias that

occur nowhere else on Earth. You protect the things that are unique and

special, the crown jewels, and in both a biological way and an anthropocentric way,

this has now become a river with global historic significance because this story

is going to play out in the next 18 months.

- You're trying to save more and more rainforest.

And the mission is clear because there's just this deep jungle...

...that's full of this incredible life. And now we know with uncontacted tribes,

there's a lot of interests that don't care about the jungle they're pushing into...

...and want to cut it down, want to destroy it. And the mission is pretty clear.

You just want this whole territory to be preserved.

- Yeah. And that's what makes it so beautiful is that this is one of those crown jewels.

This is one of those special places on earth where it's like a time capsule for nature,

for human culture, for biodiversity, for climate services, for everything.

I think people get overwhelmed when you say, "We have to save the environment.

We have to save the ocean." This is one watershed.

It's 300,000 acres, and we're already at 130,000.

We've shown we can do it. The loggers are happy to turn into rangers.

People all over the world have become Junglekeeper supporters.

We have several thousand people that every month give us

between five and a thousand dollars, and that keeps the rangers going,

that employs the local people. So it's not just drawing a line and making a park

and saying, "Everybody stay out." It's like, no, you have the Nomoles,

you have the indigenous people, you have a future for the indigenous people

where their kids don't have to worry about eating monkeys. They can be park rangers.

I get blowback when I say, "People can even come see it through the treehouse."

People go, "Oh, are you going to bring tourists into the wildest place on earth?"

And it's like, look at that jungle. In those 300,000 acres,

if you're talking about a football field, we're talking about two blades of grass

that we access so people can see it, which makes a huge difference.

The fact that we can share it with people... I mean, the amount of people that listen,

look, since the first time I came here and spoke to you,

the amount to which you've made it possible for us to protect this place,

the amount of spider monkeys, jaguars, and giant anteaters,

and those ancient millennium trees that you've made it possible to protect is monstrous.

- Thank you, brother.

- No, thank you.

- It's been an honor of a lifetime to be able to watch you. I tell this to people,

there's certain people I'm glad exist in this world,

because you've educated me and millions of people about the beauty of the jungle,

and how important the fight to save the jungle is.

So if you're listening to this, you absolutely must go. Please donate,

post about it, and share it with friends: Junglekeepers.org.

You're also doing a gala in New York at the end of January.

So if you can, please go and donate to help save the jungle.

- Yes, please do. And because our first

conversation led to the first surge where people realized what Junglekeepers was—

and because we got this surge of support, we were able to expand our work, protect more

acres, a lot of our major donors, a lot of our small scale donors

came in because of that. So these are people that went, "Wait, if Lex thinks it's a

good idea, then we'll do it." I think based on your trust they came in. And so...

- I guess also I should say it's not enough to

speak and communicate the importance of saving the rainforest. You

actually have to have incredible people there making it happen. And we have

talked and we'll talk more about the dangers and the complexities involved on how

to navigate everything. And one of the things, and

the reason I'm really excited about what you're doing is I just got to meet the

team, and it brings a smile to my face—

several of the people I know who are extremely competent. Stefan,

somebody we've talked about— Yes, he likes to take pictures of stuff but primarily,

the thing he does incredibly well is run everything, organize everything

to make sure that stuff happens and happens quickly and efficiently,

all the kind of things that are required to make stuff like this happen in

the complex environment that the jungle operates in, the

sometimes lawless environment—

that the jungle operates in. So the team is incredible, which

is why when you sort of connect the money, how does the money lead to the solution

of the problem? It's the team and the team makes it happen.

- I didn't know that people like Stefan existed.

- Yeah, me neither.

- You know, because I—

- When I met him— He was a beautiful, wonderful human being.

- I just... I'm, you know, again, I can use a machete to catch a fish.

But his systems knowledge and his ability... I mean, his

bandwidth is the size of a country. It has its own area code.

It's... He's... You know, just like JJ opened the door

of the Amazon and gave us that local indigenous perspective. I mean,

yeah, okay, I told some stories about it, but Stefan came in and went,

"Okay, you guys have good ideas, but you're both jungle guys."

"You're not helping each other." And running those systems and making the website

and making it possible to connect the people that care with the indigenous ranger

program and make sure the rangers have shirts and cans of tuna and that there's a person

running the ranger team— I mean, these are things I couldn't dream of organizing.

I can't even organize my... I can't even make my bed. I can't even get that far.

- Caveman want fish.

- Caveman want fish.

- Watching you hunt for fish with a machete

is one of the most awesome things I've seen. You were literally able to

catch a fish with a machete.

That's what you're good at. And Stefan is good at everything else.

- Everything else. You remember the meme of the most interesting man in the world?

Where they say, "He once had an awkward moment just to see how it felt."

It's like Stefan's to-do list doesn't exist because it's already

done. It's just incredible.

- Quick pause. Bathroom break.

- Oh, 100%. Yes, sir.

- And we're back. One thing I forgot to ask you is about the diet

of the uncontacted tribes. You mentioned potentially monkeys and turtles,

maybe eggs? So, what do we know about what they eat? What's the source of

protein? Do they eat monkeys?

- Their primary sources of food would be

monkeys, turtles, turtle eggs, and small game

like paca, the large rodent that's the size of a beagle.

Capybaras. Stuff they can shoot. They don't really fish.

And we know these things because

our indigenous trackers and rangers find their camps.

They'll find some of those little thatch structures they make on the beaches,

and we see the bones. There'll be tapir bones, there'll be turtle

shells, which seem like their closest thing to a

bowl. The day that we interacted with them,

they did find a bowl. We saw them walking away with it in one of

the farms, and then days later we found it destroyed. So they

didn't seem like they saw much utility in the bowl.

- A temporary container.

- It's temporary. They make a fire. They must be amazing at making fire.

I don't know how they do it out there.

- It's very difficult because everything is wet.

- I don't know how they do it. And I'm a really good firestarter.

- And it's tough in the jungle.

- It's almost impossible most of the year because everything is wet to its core.

- So you think they cook the meat?

- They have to be cooking their meat from a parasite standpoint,

...everything. We know that—

...they're cooking their meat. We see it. You know, there's not a lot

of excess berries. Things like berries and nuts and

fruits, that the monkeys and the birds are—

...and the bats are getting to those first. I mean, that's what fruit does, right?

A tomato is green until its seeds are mature,

then it turns red to advertise, "Eat me," so that you eat it and

your gut transports that somewhere else. It gets free transportation.

In the jungle, that happens so quick that we're never getting produce.

- In the book, you have a picture of a native girl on the Los Piedras...

...having monkey for lunch.

- Yes.

- It looks really strange when you have— The monkey kind of looks—

It looks a little bit like cannibalism because it looks like a small human.

I don't know what it is about monkeys. There's a human—

...element to them. In their eyes, in

their form factor, but even in the warmth they bring to the interaction.

- Yeah, I was babysitting her. She was six at the time, Dira, and

her parents went out and we were left at camp. They said, "Keep an eye on her.

Make sure nothing eats her." She was like, "Hey, I want lunch."

I said, "Great, what is there?" And she pulls out this monkey head.

She was like, "It's ready," and she starts pulling at the ear.

She's like, "Can you help me?" So I pulled off the ear with my teeth—

...and then I gave it to her. We just shared this monkey head back and forth.

We're sitting there and I took a few pictures of her as she's eating.

I have this video where I go, "What's your favorite food?" She said, "Monkey."

I said, "Not cake?" And she was like, "Monkey."

She was pulling its lips off and, like you said—

...you see the teeth and the eyes. It's sort of grilled in static agony.

It looks like a tortured human, and she was just enjoying it.

- Let me look it up on Perplexity. How many people in the world eat—

monkey? Does it taste good?

- If it were prepared right, it would taste good, but they just throw it over the fire.

And even if you took a perfectly good chicken and did that, it wouldn't taste great.

- There's no reliable global count of how many people eat monkey meat,

but available data suggests many millions regularly or occasionally consume

primate bushmeat—

...especially in parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia. I mean, she looks

like that is her favorite meal— is monkey.

- Yeah, we had a great time.

- Who are we to judge?

- Who are we to judge? I mean, have a tuna sandwich or a monkey face, whatever.

- She's loving it. That's awesome. That's a good picture there.

- And she's adorable.

- Yeah. Now that some time has passed, when you look back at

that encounter, which I really do think is historic,

with the uncontacted tribe, what do you think about? What lingers with you?

- Honestly, I'm still processing it. I'll still find myself just staring off, sort of

remembering it or looking at the footage. But it felt like

the voice of the jungle was speaking. You know, these

people are... there's that separation

between humans and nature where we go, "We have to protect nature." You know?

It's like explaining what water is to a fish. We're part of it. We depend

on it. And these are people that depend on it 100%. And as we sit

here surrounded by technology, concrete and civilization, they're

still out there right now. And the

fact that we've been trying to protect their home without even

really knowing that they were in it because they're so elusive,

it gives you perspective on where we came from and how far we've come.

You know, I look at simple things. You board an

airplane or you take a picture and you go, "This is a miracle."

And I think having that perspective of having interacted with them where you

go, "How much work does it take to make this?"

If you and I were standing in the jungle and somebody said, "You have to make this,"

how many years before we came up with this? How

many rubber trees, and where would we get the metal, and what would we use as dye?

How do we make the spring mechanism and figure out how to make it rotate?

I don't know. And it's like they are working with the bare essentials.

And so it's an interesting reference point to start at in terms of how incredibly

at in terms of how incredibly

privileged we are. You know, the other thing is we have

written text—so many different types of text. We have code, and we have

language, and we have music, and we can communicate in all these different ways.

And they have spoken word. They have oral tradition, and that's it. And so they're

operating the way our ancestors did through the

power of what operated and is persisting in modern

And so I think, for me, I come back to the world and

it moves very fast when I see it because I'm still stuck on,

you know, whether or not me and you can drink out of that puddle.

Thinking about that.

- The big questions of life.

- The big questions of life.

- Yeah. I mean, you're right from the perspective of the uncontacted tribe.

Going from the technological world to the jungle, you realize

the majesty, the magic of the biological system that

is the jungle, that is nature. But from their

perspective, also there is a majesty and magic to the

technological world. The human-created

technological world of the pen and the computer,

and the light bulb, that too is magical. So sometimes we

- Absolutely

- don't give enough credit to both:

the magic of the technological world, all the incredible things humans have been

able to build, and the magic of the natural world.

- I mean, what we've been able to achieve, I think you and I and people that spend

large amounts of time in the wilderness, especially somewhere as remote and fundamental

as the Western Amazon, have a different perspective

on it. Because I think that when you're born in it, you don't

necessarily have the framework to appreciate how far we've come.

You go, "Yeah, I got on the train today. I checked my phone. I FaceTimed

my mom," and you're like, "This is all normal." And it's like we found

a way to take

things out of the ground and mix them together into magic devices that can do

anything. And it's mind-blowing.

- There's a deep optimism to that. You write in the book, which I really like, I think somewhere

in the beginning, quote, "Given all the death and destruction I've

witnessed, it would be easy to slip into the popular anti-human

narrative that we are a plague on the planet

and there's nothing that can be done, but my career in conservation has given me a

glimpse into an alternate narrative. I've met people who are

proving more and more that something can be done.

I'm talking about real heroes, people who have dedicated their lives to redeeming

the evil that is capable of being waged by the human

soul, people who are guarding the flame amidst the

storm, proving every day what so many have forgotten. There is still hope." And that

speaks against the cynicism and apathy,

and the view that humans are a destructive force in the

world. That speaks to the fact that humans, with all the technological

elements that we have created, can actually do a lot of

good. I wrote in my notes here a quote from the great Jane Goodall: "The

greatest danger to our future is apathy." So

caring about the world, having optimism for the world, having a hope for the

world is the way to help have an impact, help save it. But on that, I have

to ask you about Jane. She passed away on October

1st. Some humans in this human civilization of

ours can open our eyes to the beauty of the

world, and she is one of the best of them. And she's had an impact on your life.

Maybe can you speak to the impact that she's had?

- I mean, when I grew up, you know, my parents...

Being dyslexic, I couldn't read for a very long time. And so my parents

read to us every night, which was amazing considering

how hard they were working. But they'd find the time to give us an hour of reading every night,

whether it was Lord of the Rings or Sherlock Holmes or Jane Goodall. And

so I grew up with Jane being this figurehead of

conservation and of adventure and sort of a living

historical figure, this legendary person. And so then

one time, right around the time that I'd been going to the jungle for a few

years, I got to go see Jane speak, I think it was at

NYU. And, you know, sitting in the crowd,

watched her, completely amazed. And I had, at the time, my

cousins had been telling me that I should write down my stories, the stories of taking care of an

anteater and stories of catching anacondas. And they're like, "Write, you know?

These are such good stories." And so I'd been writing them down and I just

remember after the talk, she did at least an hour on stage and then

hundreds of people lined up, and

she sat there and each of those people wants a moment

with this legend. And so she has to take a picture, shake their hand, they say, "You mean so

much to me." She says, "Thank you." And then they move on and they say, "We'll send you

the picture." "Okay, great." So then I got my moment and we waited in line and I gave

her this manila envelope with two chapters in it. And one chapter

was "Lulu the Giant Anteater" for Mother of God, and the other chapter was me,

JJ and Pico out on the river catching anacondas, and just talking about how

amazing the jungle was. And I said, "I'd love it if you could endorse my book that

doesn't exist yet." And I felt like such a loser doing that. And I felt so

stupid because I feel like everyone was probably asking something of her, and I,

you know, it's incredibly draining to talk to that many people, even if

it is for a good reason. And 48 hours later, she got back

and she said, "You know, this is incredible. I would love

to write a recommendation for your book as soon as you find a

publisher." And what happened with that is that

Jane—the way I think of it is, you know, she waved her

very powerful magical wand in my direction, and she had the

incredible compassion and presence to

actually—I mean, after talking to that many people and being on the road 300 days a year

and being Jane Goodall, this living legend scientist, to actually

do something so mundane as look at some kid's writing. And

of course, when I went to publishers, they said, "Jane who? Who said that they would

endorse your book?" Because everyone had said no. Every

publisher in New York had already said no. And then after that, HarperCollins took

me on and they said, "Well, if Jane Goodall thinks it's a good idea, then we think it's a good

idea." And it became Mother of God and then because of that, Jungle Keepers,

Dax, everything else stemmed from that. So had Jane

not been the legend that she is truly in every moment,

my whole career would never have happened, which also means that those thousands

of heartbeats and thousands of acres in the Amazon wouldn't be protected because we

never would've started Jungle Keepers.

- And she did that not because you're special; she did that to everybody.

And now just imagine the scale, the impact she's had because of that.

And guess what? You have a bit of that responsibility now as

well. There's young people that walk up to you in that way,

and you have that responsibility of seeing them, of giving them a

chance, of seeing the potential in every single human being that walks up to you.

- It definitely... I would say that with Jane, we could do four hours

on just Jane: what she did for humanity, for science, for

women, for wildlife, the amount of other people that she

inspired and gave careers to,

everything she did for me. But to me, that presence of

mind when you reach that level, to not be worried about your own travel and your own

schedule and busy with getting some rest—and that she actually

looked at it—has informed how I operate. And

indeed like you say, at this point, as strange as it is, people will

stop me on the street and say, "Hey, I watch your videos every

night with my kids." Or someone will say, "How do I get your

job? I've been watching you for years and I'd love to help conservation."

So it's made it so that I follow her example where

it's like you stop what you're doing and you

pay attention. Because you don't know, that might be the next kid that's out there saving

a river, or the next person that makes an innovation that makes it possible to clean rivers,

or whatever it is, whatever their dream is.

Jane was in the hope business. She always said it: you know,

that not losing hope was key to

staying in the fight. And that we live at a time when,

apathy is a poison peddled by the darkness. It's—

they're trying to make you feel disoriented, apathetic, and

scared. And fighting back against that and having

conviction and passion and fire and hope

are the only way that we're gonna fight that. She understood that and spent her whole life spreading

it, guarding the flame against the storm, and

tipping her candle to others to light them. I mean, that was her whole thing.

- What advice would you give to young people on how to do that? Those young Pauls sitting

there—and your life story is just incredible in that

way. You've taken a leap into adventure,

into the unknown. What would you recommend they do?

- I think the thing that I try to communicate to them—

and again, my inbox is filled with people. "I'm from Finland. I'm from Spain.

I'm from Georgia." People saying, "How do I get your job? How do I get out

there and do it?" And it really is just that: you

throw yourself headfirst into adventure. You just do it.

I remember hearing people say, "You know, if I can do it,

you can do it." And I remember how hollow that sounds 'cause I'm like, "Yeah, you're on a

talk show or you just wrote a book..." You know, these titans

of their industries and innovators saying, "Oh, if I can do it,

anybody can do it." But now that we're protecting all this rainforest,

and that I've lived with the animals and met

the tribes, and it's becoming this global movement.

You know, I didn't have a PhD. There's that quote that someone

less qualified than you is living your dream life and has your dream

job right now, and I am the poster child for that because I went there

when I failed out of high school and started taking unmatriculated college

classes and going to the jungle with my friend JJ and just doing it for the sheer

love of it for years, almost a decade before

anything surfaced. And the other thing is there's not

even a path. There was no path ahead of us. There was no,

"Okay, you go to school. You get trained in this, and you're gonna become a this." I went there and it

was like, "You're never gonna be a conservation biologist 'cause you don't have the grades.

You don't have a PhD. You don't have family money. You're not

gonna be able to protect rainforests." So I said, "All right, well then,

selfishly, I just wanna see it." And then I ended up getting trained by the

indigenous people, and like what happens so many

times—you could use a restaurant example as the best one,

where you might start washing dishes, but at least you're in the

restaurant, you know? And then at some point, the manager's gonna need you to help

with restocking and so on. And after a few years, you're

gonna be helping the new guy, and after a few years you might end up being

the manager, and at some point you might end up starting your own restaurant.

That's the only way to do that. You can't just search it on a computer.

You have to go sweat and bleed and do it.

- And that said, especially if you fall in love with the journey,

the path you take is full of difficult periods. I think you

said somewhere this just seems to be the nature of it.

That there's going to be pain and suffering along the way. You have

a really nice post...

...that I recommend people watch about just this. When people ask for

advice: that the hardship, the suffering—

—and I've seen how much you care. When I've seen you,

just in your face, when you see a tree being cut down or you see the fires,

there's real pain there in your heart and you have to

carry that. And so the post is, "How honest can

I be? What do I tell these kids who message me asking how

they can do what I do? It's not David versus Goliath. There's

no sword or sling that can hold back a dragon this big. You're going

against the current of global economic entropy and human apathy.

Swimming against the current is tiring, a great way to

drown. Every day we don't win, we lose, and when we do, worlds burn. The more you

know, the more it bleeds. The heartbeats all stop when the flames

come through. Constellations of species turn to

ghosts, and we're the only ones saving them. Cupped

our hands around a candle in the howling darkness."

And people want to be inspired. Keep that social media going,

keep it up. You're doing great. They want to know we're

winning, and we've done a lot of winning, but not right

now. We're getting slaughtered. We're at that part of the

story. We're almost at the end game. We can think

positively, as positively as we want. Thoughts and

prayers won't stop a chainsaw, and the motor that's carrying us

against the current towards the miraculous goal only works when there's

gasoline in it. As soon as that stops, we drown. We drown. We can take the

warm light from all of those who help and not let it bother

us that there are people who could buy a planet, claiming to care. At some

point you realize what's really happening."

"As a kid you'd rather be Aragorn. You don't want to

actually carry the ring, not when you learn what it's going to

cost, even if you make it. How can you explain

to Sam why you can't get on the boats? Whatever it

takes, whatever it takes. It's that time of year

again. Here come the flames. Whatever it takes, it's

coming." And people should watch the video that goes along with this. But that

speaks to the pain, the difficulty, the challenge, the suffering involved—

when you're faced with the possibility of

destruction. And that's the other side of the sword of caring for something deeply.

- Yeah, we've watched a lot of forest burn. We've pulled a lot of

animals out of the flames. Yeah, I wrote that at a

time where we were just getting hammered. Funding wasn't

coming in. There were miners. It was just months and months out in the jungle

alone, and yeah, that— it's

a Thom Yorke track that I'd just been listening to again and again, and it was so

low. There was then a huge new invasion where they just—

burned the whole side of the river. And you know, it's never going to come back.

And it's part of the forest that I loved, and I knew the animals there and it's,

it's gone. And so we have to live through that on a

weekly basis, at least a day-to-day basis. And

when you take on responsibility for something like this, you—

you go to sleep thinking,

"If we don't do it then worlds burn. If we don't save it, then..." Every time you

said the sadness that surrounds a happy moment— well, it's

like, how am I supposed to go to a party and talk with people about

anything, or how am I supposed to go to sleep when if we don't

succeed at what we're trying to do, if we don't outrace the chainsaws and

the roads, then those trees die, those millennium trees, and

we're the only ones out there protecting them. When you see that black scorched

earth with nothing left, it's just ashes on the ground and the cacophony of life is

silenced, and it's just this horrible, violent silence. It makes you sick. And so,

yeah, there's a lot of weight that comes with that where

we're not theoretically doing

something. We're black and white, practically doing it.

- So that's the other side of the advice to young people.

- Oh, yeah.

- It's not gonna be easy.

- No. When they say, "How do I get your job?" it's like, "Well, you

don't want my job. You don't want the botflies, and you don't want the dengue, and you

don't want—don't even inquire what a normal life

looks like." I lived out of a backpack for 20

years. You know how many monkey faces I had to eat because

there was no other food? Like, seriously.

Just that shot, being alone on the boat in the river and how

many days the motor didn't work. And you sleep out there, and you get rained on because

you don't have any protection, and you have some leaves over your face. And then you go

home, and everyone's got a job, and everyone's got kids, and everyone's happy. And they're like,

"What are you doing down there?" "I'm trying to save the rainforest."

They're like, "Sure." And now we're at this point where,

I've cared a whole lot for a long time. We've had rises, and then

we've had falls, and we've had wins, and then we've had failures. And the last few years,

we've had this rolling success of people finding out

about our work and coming in. And we start to go, "Wow, if we protected 130,000 acres,

we might actually be able to do this." And so, there's that moment in

300 where they show Leonidas, and they say, "Even the king allows himself

a moment of hope that this might be okay," right before they get slaughtered.

And someone very dear to me recently said, "In celebration

of where we've gotten to, that if it happened in any harder of a way, it would have

actually killed you. And if it had happened in an easier way, it

wouldn't have been so divine."

And that slapped me in the face because it was like, "Man, it has been so

hard, but look where we are. We might actually do this."

- It just has to be that way. Speaking of which, another complexity in all of this,

you write about in the afterword of the book,

about the narco-traffickers that have moved into the river basin. They are not

the loggers that we've spoken about anymore. They're

growing coca for cocaine, and they're building airstrips. So

tell me how this came to be.

- Like you said, the loggers... our whole life on this river, when

loggers come in, JJ and I would walk up to them and say, "Hey, what's up?"

Sit down with them and have a beer or share a meal and talk to

them and ask who their father was and if we know them and then hire them. And they're

friendly.

- They are, in a way, brothers, JJ. They're the same.

- They come from the same people. They're simple local people. They're not evil.

They're just people who usually have a kid and a wife, and they're looking for

work. And so they work with the chainsaw because that's what they

know. And they work for, you know, $30 a day, if that, in very challenging,

harsh environments. And so when we see clearings, I would always go with the drone

and fly it over clearings. We'd get some intel, and then we'd go bring that to the

police. And the police, you know... Jungle Keepers supports the

police at this point because the Peruvian

government has a hard time with resources, trying to

manage Amazonia. And when you're three days from

civilization, getting cops out there is not the easiest thing. So sometimes we'll lend

boats or gasoline or logistical support. There was a moment in March, several hours

upriver from, you know, home base. And I'm with JJ on

the boat, and I fly the drone, and there's this big new clearing, and I flew the drone over, and

we lower the drone. And a few times, I've had people come out and wave at the drone or say

like, "Get away." And

we're out in the middle of the river just sort of idling, staying in one place, and I lower the

drone. And I see the, these little huts, and we're saying, "Okay, this is a big clearing."

I'm snapping images, snapping images. There are people on the boat with us, these

visitors who had flown in, and I have my local

team, and all of a sudden, people come running out of the

houses. And they run straight to their boats, and we're already above where

their boat is. So home is in downriver direction. They get in

their boats and start chasing us,

and we start driving, and we're going at full speed. We have a 60

horsepower. They had a 40, and we're driving up these... We're just

doing this chase now, and our guests, who are gonna

be potential funders. At one point, the father looked at me, and he goes, "Hey, this

whole running from the Pirates of the Caribbean thing," he's like, "It's getting scary.

You're scaring us." He was like, "Can we..."

I'm like, "What are we doing?" He goes, "When are you gonna put the drone down?" And I go,

"I'm flying the drone at full speed to keep up with the boat." And I just crash-landed the drone

on the side of the river near a big tree. I just said, "Forget it. We'll get it later."

And I was like, "Fine. This happens all the time." "They get mad. They

chase us. It's no big deal." And I smiled at him, and JJ's smiling. He goes, "This is

so bad."

And he's smiling. And JJ looked at me, and the smile fell off him like a mask, and he

looked at me, and he was like, "This is not good." And we kept going upriver

and luckily, there was a camp of police that we've worked with quite a

bit. And I went to a friend of mine, and

I remember we got off the boat. I shook his hand. He said, "What's going on?" I said, "Look downriver, and

there's a boat tearing upriver towards us." And he did three things. He

got the rest of the guys, they armed up, they got on the boat with guns. They

put ski masks on. They got ready for combat. They told us to get down. He also

said, "Hey, turn on the sat-link. Call for support back

home." We turned our boat around. And as soon as the

narcos, which we didn't even realize were narcos

chasing us. We thought we were looking at loggers.

When they saw the guns and they saw us face them, they turned their boat around, and they went back

downriver. So we got escorted downriver, and I

remember shaking his hand, my friend, and saying, "Thank you

for saving us today." And telling the other guys they did a good

job. I said, "Get back upriver." We'd been brought home safe. This is hours later.

I said, "Good job. Thank you so much." And they went

and then that night, I'm sitting at the station that you know.

know. And I get a phone call from Stefan. And he

He goes, "Pick up the phone." I go, "I'm in the middle of a conversation."

He goes, "Pick up the phone." And my friend, whose hand I had just shaken,

they went back upriver, and as they were unloading their boat and washing off in the stream,

the narcos did a drive-by and shotgun straight to the chest,

shot him in the chest. And so all of that enthusiasm,

and "We're protecting the biodiversity" and "This is so great,"

there's people from around the world... it's like that scene in the movie

where there's a montage of success and hope and acres and winning—gunshot.

And I could still feel his hand in my hand. I just shook his hand. I said, "No."

I said, "Well, is he okay?" He said, "He took a shotgun straight to the chest."

And they're like, "He's dead." I said, "Okay."

And so I had to go out to dinner and not show the guests anything,

and just smile and laugh and talk to them about whatever and keep that in,

which felt very, very difficult to do.

And so what happened, as you said, the threat level escalated and we didn't know it.

The narcos had come in and started realizing that there's so much wilderness here

that they can operate and there's no police. And then when we flew the drone,

they got mad. So we realized this.

We communicated with the police and they said, "Oh yeah, these are narcos."

Now we realize this is part of the serious drug mafia.

And then I had gone back—with the incident you're referring to at the end of the book,

I had gone back to New York, again, to speak to donors to try and get this work to continue.

You know how it works. We're at the station, then you go to that little logging town,

and then there's a road. And so our pickup truck had come in on the road,

and JJ was supposed to come down, get in the truck and drive back to the city.

JJ was on the river and went, "I forgot I was supposed to get more stuff at the city."

He goes, "You know, I'll go tomorrow." He went back up and sent the boat driver down,

and told our driver, Percy, who was waiting with the pickup truck, "JJ's not coming today."

"Go back and come back tomorrow." Percy starts driving down the road

and he sees a tree across the road.

This is a single-lane road through the jungle; there's nowhere else you can go,

and men with guns come and stick the pistols in through the open windows,

gun against his head. They pull him out and they go, "Where's JJ?"

And "¿Donde está el gringo volador?" They said, "Where's that shithead gringo

that flew the drone?" And if either of us had been in the car that day,

if either of us had been in the car that day, they would have killed

they took his phone, our driver Percy's. Thank God, they didn't hurt him,

driver, Percy. They, thank God, they didn't hurt

but they sent a message to us. They said, "Let them know."

They said, "We missed you this time, but we'll get you next time. We're gonna get you."

And so when JJ called me, he was howling. He just had that

adrenaline and that emotion of that it almost happened.

And so that was... that changed everything. And so since then we've

been, you know, it's not counting butterflies and taking ecological

surveys, it's that there's a drug war being fought on our

river. And now when these roads come in, we can't just

go out and meet these people anymore and talk to them, 'cause they are

actively looking to shoot us. They know our names, and then...

as if all these other things weren't enough indication, the police intercepted a

phone from someone they arrested, and on the phone, in the WhatsApp chat, it

said, "If you see JJ or the gringo, anyone in our network, please

kill them. You'll be rewarded." So we both have a hit out on us

and life on the river has changed. At the moment, we don't...

we can't... I can't just go out walking around, swimming and

driving my boat. You have to be looking over your

shoulder at all times. You can get as trained as you want with a pistol

and sleep with it under your pillow, but the way these

people work, they'll catch you when you're least expecting it. They'll wait till you're at a cafe in

town. They'll wait till your motor doesn't work on the side of the river. It'll just be a

quick one and they'll go. And so that feeling, on

top of the weight of- of protecting the ecosystem and

the animals, and the race to tell people about it and do all this, it's like

now we're actively being hunted when we're there.

- And this is very directed at you and JJ?

So they really don't care about the others. They understand.

Are you afraid? What's it been like living with this,

with the real fear of being murdered at any moment?

- I wish I could say I handled it better than I've been handling it.

I wonder how people in war zones do it.

I wonder how some of my soldier friends that I have immense respect for did it when they were

deployed, 'cause for me, once this happened, it was,

every phone call now I think, "Did something happen to JJ?"

Every time I go to sleep, my dreams are that I'm being shot. And

it really threw me. It really affected me. When JJ called me, the

way he was just shouting... I don't even remember what he was saying. He was just

shouting, "They almost got us! They almost got us!" He was so,

terrified and angry and,

so yeah, it's... There was a day not long ago that I was swimming

in the river. And I was just in the river, you know, right in front of the stairs

at the station, and a boat came around the bend. And I remember

thinking, "Do I run? Do I go underwater? Do I hide? What the

hell do I do?" I didn't have a gun near me. The security people were up the stairs.

You go, "Holy shit." And it's not the

danger of, "if I jump on an anaconda, it might kill me," or "if I climb this, I

might fall." These are people who want to kill you. And on top of it, you have

the, you know... When you see what your friend looks like after

three days of floating in a river, what a body looks like of a person you used to

know, that's very viscerally terrifying because there's the tragedy of

that, that person lost his life,

who was younger than I was. He was a kid. He was in his 20s.

And it's just very hard, it's very hard to do

anything because... I mean, like right now, my hands are sweating.

It affects me. And even in the daylight, if I can go, "You know, it's fine. This is

part of the thing," you know? This is the adventure, people deal with this all over the world.

You can talk yourself tough and then, in those quiet

moments, you wake up at 4:00 AM and you go, "Fuck." You know,

"Why am I sweating? Why did I just have those dreams? Why is my heart racing?"

It sinks its way into your subconscious and it's just not what we signed up for.

We wanted to just protect this beautiful place and this is this whole

new threat. We're not trained for this. We're not a

police or military force and it's like we've now seen violence on a scale that

we were very unprepared for. And so, just two days ago, I

was on my way to you and my phone rang at nine o'clock at night and it was JJ.

And my heart was jackhammering. I had to pull over

because I was going, "What news now?" You know? "Did we lose another

bunch of acres? Is it a new road? Did somebody die?" It really scatters you.

- In some sense, it's a twist that you didn't ask for and it doesn't

necessarily have anything to do with the fight you're fighting, which is

protecting the rainforest. But because of it being

pristine and quiet and away from civilization, it also becomes a place where,

you can have airstrips. It becomes lawless in a

certain way because it's so far away from civilization.

- Yeah. It's the only place that they can operate with impunity.

There's no police out there. And so they saw us helping the police

and they went, "Cut the head off the snake." And, you know, Chico Mendes, Dorothy

Stang—the list of environmental defenders that are assassinated in the

Amazon every year is huge.

There are endless examples of it. It's staggering. I forget the

exact numbers, but every year we lose local

leaders who are trying to stop an oil company or a drug cartel, and they

just shoot them because they know that one person who's able to rally

that support, who has that voice, if you just shoot

them, usually it ends the thing and then they can go back to

doing whatever the hell they want. And so right now,

we're working very closely with the Peruvian government. People

assume that, you know, a Latin American government is automatically

corrupt, but we found that these are really good people that want to

help their citizens. And the police have been working very

hard to stop the narcos, to protect the local indigenous

people because with the narcos comes human trafficking. With a team

of male narcos that are out in the woods making

drugs, they want prostitutes. And how do they get prostitutes? They go steal

girls from indigenous communities that don't know any better.

Then there's reports that the narcos have made contact with the uncontacted

tribes. And of course, they're gonna shoot machine guns at them. They're not gonna have a

shotgun where it's a fair fight. They're gonna mow them down and the uncontacted tribes are

gonna have no idea. That's why I posted a video

of me in the rain saying, "This is endgame," because there was a new

road that was coming off the north of our territory

above the ancient forest. They had jumped over 'cause we stopped it at the ancient forest.

They've gone above the ancient forest. Now, they're trying to cut down to a new

area. And so it looks like this, like that. ...Trans-Amazon...

Stefan made this map, of course. But you see the area that we're trying to

protect loosely, so that we don't give away anything...

Loosely, the area that we are protecting. So, the light green is the 130,000 acres—

...and then this metastasizing network of roads just reaching out and trying to get

in. And so they're trying to come in from the north where that arrow is,

they're trying to come down. And so the police are fighting them along this—

...and it's a full-on drug war right now. And so,

stopping that, securing this northern boundary. And again, just the

power of what we have. When I posted this, I asked Stefan to make,

show people the road and where it's going to go.

We posted this video and said, "We have to protect this 100,000 acres right now." And

all up here is uncontacted tribe territory.

And just from that one post, we got $150,000 in 48 hours and we bought this

concession. We stopped that road. But now they're up here—

...and they're trying to come down. And this is the thing: it's

great. Yes, you get to be an adventurer and live in the jungle, sure.

But it's like this Mission: Impossible thing where

you might get lucky enough to pull off your psychotic mission. You know, jump your

motorcycle off the train and parachute down and stop the bomb before it goes

off. Great. How many of those do you get? And we're having to do it every month.

These amazing people

that are supporting the rangers allow us to patrol and protect this because once we have this land

protected, the interesting thing is that the police can go into any of the

light green areas. If anybody's there, just arrest them.

They're on Junglekeepers' land, they're out. And eventually that land will

become national park if we're successful. The problem with the land that's

not is it's a gray area. It's the middle of the Amazon, are they

allowed to be here? Do they really have cocaine? Because they'll plant papaya

for acres and a little bit of cocaine behind it. You know, they'll put the

sacks... They're sneaky. And so they have to build a case, and it takes time, and

then the road comes in... You know, and in that time, they'll knock off a police officer.

And it's like if we were just able to get this tomorrow, the whole

problem gets solved. We could give the police two more

boats, and then they could do all the patrolling they need.

- So the mission is clear.

- The mission is very clear. The problem is that right now we've been playing defense

and sustaining losses. And either we need

to inspire enough people that the donor program goes through the roof, and

instead of having several thousand donors, we have, you know, 50,000 donors

and we will raise... We need $20 million to save

the rest of the corridor. We'd raise $20 million overnight with enough people. Or

we need one of these people that has the resources to come in like

Batman and just go, "I want the park named after me

and I'm just gonna come in and give you the $20 million." And then we do it tomorrow,

and then we make a documentary about how we saved a river and the tribe and the monkeys and

the... But right now, we're...

you know, begging on the side of the road for enough change to buy

bullets so that we can stay alive.

- So these narcos, they're... There's a kind of distributed

network where a bunch of them are pretending to be farmers. So they're

holding onto the land and then maybe they start planting cocaine on the land-

...slowly, and they build the airstrips. Are they trying to stay under the canopy

with the airstrip?

- It's brilliant. First what they do is they

subsidize the poorest people and they say, "Go up this river, turn left at the tree

and just start there." And they're like, "Here's a few grand." And these people are like, "I

never had a few grand before." They're like, "Buy gasoline. Here's a chainsaw. Go clear some

land." They send these people up there, and then when they show up a year later

and these people have made an illegal farm out in the jungle, they go, "Hey, we need a safe

house. Remember that time we gave you gasoline and now you live here? You're gonna

work for us now." And so they're kind of a friend of the people like that,

and they have safe houses all over the jungle. And then when the bosses come to

collect what they're growing out there... I mean, the police busted

a narco operation that was in the middle of the jungle.

I mean, hiking to the ancient forest

days into the jungle. These people are going on foot with sacks and stuff.

And the way they do their airstrips is you think the canopy of the rainforest

is 150 or 160 feet tall. And if you

clear the interior of the landing strip, the trees are still meeting

overhead. And so you can't fly over and see down—

...which is the same reason we didn't know about the road that was going to the ancient forest,

because overhead the trees are meeting, so you're not going to see it on satellite

and you're not going to see it from a plane. And these bush pilots fly in and they'll just duck

in under the canopy, land their plane, load up, and then they fly

out. I mean, expert pilots.

- So it's impossible to detect.

- It's almost impossible to detect. We're working with people now. You

know, it's this arms race. They've been going okay. There are drone

programs. I talked to someone that has a different type of drone, a

16-foot drone that uses the

thermals to climb up and has solar panels on the wings and flies for two weeks at a time.

It's like a glider-

...that recharges itself. And it'll keep constant imagery, so we'll get

almost up-to-the-moment data on disturbances in the canopy. And it's like,

well, that'll be a first-hand alert system, but then we've gotta

get the police out there which, as you know, is a two-day

expedition by boat, and it's the only way. And

so the local police force there may be dedicated, but putting

people on a multi-day expedition to go get shot at in the jungle is nobody's idea of a

good time.

- Have you researched into this whole other world of

Drug trafficking, cocaine trafficking? How big is the

operation? Looking at Perplexity—

...a multi-thousand ton, multi-billion dollar global industry?

- I mean, globally it's a monster.

- Colombia, Peru, Bolivia. And they move north and east through the Americas, the

Caribbean, and the Atlantic to reach major consumer markets. This is a machine

fueled by a lot of money and a lot of brutality.

Number of cocaine users worldwide is about 25 million people.

- Users.

- Users. So there's a market.

And when there's a market, you're going to find the way.

Quick pause. Bathroom break. All right, and we're back.

Me, as somebody who is afraid of heights,

and I've had a chance to interact with you a bunch, you're in

some sense fearless and I've watched you climb a lot

of trees. You've helped me climb a tree. And there's this

wonderful part of the book where you talk about finding the tallest tree

in the forest you knew at the time, and that was something that you

passed and thought was impossible to climb. And you talk about climbing it.

You take us through the experience of that. And that leads you to seeing the

Mist River in the rainforest as the sun rises. I was

wondering if you could talk through the story of that,

both for me, but even for you at that time, the

terrifying process of climbing a tree like

that for the first time with J.J. at the bottom

cheering you on, and what it felt like to see the Mist River.

- That tree, you've met that tree. She's a good one. Her

base is at least as big as this room, and she's probably about

160-something feet tall. And so when you're looking at

these giant buttress roots going up, which I'd been doing for 18

years at that point, I always said, "Man, if I could just climb it."

I'd never had the rope skills, and I'd developed as a rock climber.

I was working on strength, and I trained for it. It's like most things.

You can't just do it. I'd climb up 30 feet and go, "No

way." The trunk of the tree goes vertical

for about 70 feet before branches even come out, so there's just this one

big vine. And J.J. and I did it at,

I want to say like 4:00 AM, really early. The howler monkeys

had just started. And you start climbing with the rope up this vine,

and you have to... It's not technical. It's a strength climb. You gorilla up

this vine, and it's all back strength. And so I did it no shirt,

no shoes, straight up, and J.J. had the belay device. And so every

30 feet or so, I would put in a piece of webbing and a

carabiner. You go up another 30 feet, and you don't know what you're

gonna find. And you're going up in the dark.

- So when you say a lot of strength is involved, there are very few

places to rest. You're essentially just lifting the whole time.

So it's extremely exhausting.

- Extremely exhausting. I really trained for a long time, and there is

no rest. The only rest you get hurts. You have to

cling to the tree and your feet are smeared against the bark. You're

holding on with your toes. And if you fall, you know, if

you're climbing up—this is basically trad climbing—if you're climbing up

and you put a safety—a piece of rope with a carabiner—and you

put my rope through that... It's dangerous because if you fall,

you fall. Right before you put the next

one, you're going to fall double. If you climb 30 feet, you fall 60 feet.

And your head's going to smack the tree. As you climb, you don't know

if you'll reach a wasp nest or a venomous snake.

- And there's a lot of those in those trees.

- A lot of those. It took me over an hour just to get to the branches

the first time. It's full exertion, everything I had. And then you get

to where the branches are above you, each the size of a mature oak tree.

They're just these huge branches.

Thick as a minivan. You're climbing up this straight tree

that's like the World Trade Center. It's huge. Then I had to traverse

the tree on vines, and finally I get up into the crown of this tree.

From there, I called down to J.J. and I just see this little speck of

light, 85 feet below me. Then I climbed up to about 120 feet,

which is up here, and I sat there.

- And you're doing all this still in darkness.

- We're doing all this in the pre-dawn light. And so when I got up

there, now the howler monkeys are going and the jungle's starting

to vibrate. You can hear the first macaws starting to chirp; everything's starting to turn

on. And in the east, the sun is coming over the jungle, and so the

sun, when the first rays

get line of sight to the canopy of the jungle, it starts lifting the mist off the

canopy. All of that moisture starts coming up, and I'm sitting on this branch

at 100-something feet above the ground with dark jungle below

me, and all of a sudden I see the river.

I see the Mist River I'd always heard about. They say that

there's a river above the Amazon, an invisible river that

has more moisture and that more water is flowing above the Amazon than is flowing in

the Amazon. And I'd heard this my whole life and you think, "Okay, the fact that there's a

molten core of the Earth or that black holes theoretically exist." It's just like the, one of

those things, you're never going to see it." And in this moment on this tree,

sweating and just ripped apart and bleeding, I was sitting up there and I

saw the Mist River and it was flowing over the

canopy in the golden rays of the morning, and the macaws

start taking flight and there were monkeys below me that were looking

up. And you could tell they were confused. They were looking at me going, "What is that?"

And I just had this absolutely incredible moment. I wanted

to... You know, it felt like you're seeing God. I

wanted to share it with everyone. You know, I felt, I felt guilty

afterwards for having had a moment like that. But it felt like I had done

this insane risk and

risked falling out of the tree or getting strung up on the ropes, and of

course it's just me and J.J., so if something goes wrong, no one's going to help

you. And being out there on that branch felt suicidal because

even then, if you fall, it's a giant swing back to the tree. But the

beauty that I saw up there was so intense that it, you know, it sucked the

air right out of my lungs. I had tears in my eyes and I'm just watching

this incredible process flow over the Earth, this legendary

thing that I'd heard about, that scientists described, and now I'm seeing it with my

own eyes. It was... it felt like the gift of the tree.

- And you write, "Now, in the branches of the greatest tree in the jungle, I

watched as the Mist River caught the morning rays, illuminating golden

currents, swirling as it rushed over the canopy like a stream from

heaven. In the troughs and basins in lower areas,

the river was deep blue. But then, as it flowed up and

over the taller trees, slow rapids washing over the canopy, the

Mist River became ignited, electrified in the gold

magnificence of the sunlight. Scores of birds flew

up, in and out of the churning currents.

The life and breath of the Amazon was flowing from north to south along the basins

of Las Piedras over the jungle. My God. My God. I thought of everyone I

loved, of every creature contained in the leafy

distance. The jungle itself was like a great being, a

monstrous leviathan of warm green might. I

wanted to call down to JJ and tell him to find a way up. I

wanted my mother to see it. I wanted the world to see it. The light

filled my eyes, and I found myself wiping away

tears." You know, I should take the small tangent

of saying the obvious, but the thing that needs to be said

is you're a great writer.

- Thank you. I mean it, come on. I'm just describing what happened, but...

- All right. You mentioned macaws as part of the process of The Jungle Waking Up.

I read that when you first start in the jungle, that's kind of your

job is studying those. And me as a fan of monogamy and birds...

So macaws are beautiful, but they're also monogamous creatures.

They scream at each other quite loudly. What are some interesting

things about them? Among which, by the way, you write how important

the ironwoods are to— ...their wellbeing, to their life.

- Yeah, I mean, when I went down there, like I said,

for young people, if you want to get out there, go do it. I agreed to stay at the station

and do six hours of macaw research every morning.

So you'd wake up before dawn and go sit and just stare at the side of the river.

And the macaws would show up-

...and like you said, they all scream and bicker at each other. It's just how they

talk. It's very, very loud, and very, very harsh.

But they do love each other. They're always...

You can actually hear when you walk through the forest; I know what the sound of

macaws giving affection is. They make a certain kind of sound when

they're just preening each other's feathers and taking care of each

other and just nuzzling. And then there's a different call altogether when

they're yelling at other macaws or saying, "Let's go." And you start to learn

macaw language.

- What have you learned about relationships and successful marriage

from listening to macaws screaming at each other in nuanced different ways?

- Well, I guess...

- Never mind, you can skip that question.

- Yeah. It's interesting to see two animals sticking by each other's side

raising a chick. And at the bottom of the stairs at the station, there is a macaw

nest in an ironwood. And the relationship that you mentioned is

that in the jungle, there's a limited amount of macaw real estate.

And those are all ancient ironwood trees, at least 500 years or more.

So they have to be thick. Car-thickness or bigger. And

when a branch falls off, it creates a hollow and the macaws use that to reproduce.

And because there's only so many nest sites in the forest, only about

17 to 20% of the macaw population reproduces in a given year.

given year. So they have a slow replacement rate. And

macaws are one of the things that people come to the jungle to

see. And so along with gold mining and logging and all these extractive

things, in our region, ecotourism has been great. It's

given the local people jobs as guides, cooks, and chefs

and carpenters. And so macaws are a huge part of that because

it's one of the last places where you can see these flying rainbows over the canopy.

Or when you're on a branch from one of these trees and the macaws fly under you.

And again, they'll fly by. You just hear the

wind in their feathers. And they just look

at you over their shoulder, like, "What?" And just keep going.

Just loud, and they'll just keep going. Then they'll join up with other macaws and they fly across the

horizon. And it gives you this sense like you're seeing something

from the dinosaur times. It just looks like

wild jungle, and there's nothing human in sight. There's just this

savage canopy to the horizon and just these beautiful birds flying over.

It's just... they're just magical.

- You have this Instagram post with an anaconda around

your neck. There's a million questions. Maybe you can talk

about that experience, but also, how did you not die?

- So as you know, we've been studying the habits

of Eunectes murinus for quite a while.

The lowland green anaconda is the largest, heaviest snake on earth. And

I've been practicing a lot for a long time, and this is the

biggest one we've ever physically caught. This was just under

20 feet. It was 19 feet something. And you can see

she's in the middle of shedding. And the other

interesting thing with her is that she had blue eyes because she was in the

middle of shedding. The scale over their eyes turns blue right

before it comes off. And so I've never caught a blue-eyed anaconda before.

But if you look at the size of my head and the size of my hands, you start to imagine

that thing's head is bigger than a Great Dane's.

It's huge. And the power on that—when

we tried to lift her to measure her, we wanted to bring her up out of the stream and

get her over to the side so we can straighten her out and measure her.

We're just trying to take some simple data points and then release her.

And she, at one point, just decided to flex her body, and you just see 10 people

fly this way, and then she's flexing the other way and 10 people fly this way.

And every time that mouth would open, she would try to... she'd just

reach back and be like, "Just let me do it."

And you know that if she gets purchase—

once they get purchase, they wrap you so quick and they'll

just crush the life out of you like you're a bag of chips. And if

you've ever seen a mouse in a mousetrap, when the trap goes down and the eyes come out?

And when snakes—anybody that's owned snakes and fed them mice knows

this—that sometimes if they catch it right, the guts will either come out the

back end or the front end. So, I'd imagine that the same thing will happen with a

snake that's that big. That's bigger than I am around.

- So, they have a process. When you say purchase, they want a bite just to hold and then

they— It's good. So...

- But again, all she wants is to be let go. In her defense,

this massive snake—we named her Millie for the data entry—she just wanted to go on

her way down the stream. The comments on this are hysterical.

People are like, "This is the worst example of white people shit

I've ever seen." I mean, Snoop Dogg shared it. So, one guy goes,

he goes, "Congratulations, you've touched enough grass. Go back inside."

- Yeah, somebody said, "Interesting use of free will."

Yeah, and I saw Killpopper007 commented—

and maybe you can tell me if this is correct:

"Anacondas are ambush predators. If you approach them, they will

usually try to flee and will not register you as food. There's

other reasons too." This is in response to how Paul possibly didn't die from this.

"There's other reasons too, but this is the main reason. They're pretty

much apex at that size, so their fear isn't as

prominent. He was calm, so the snake was calm. It's insane to do

and still risky, but he might actually be the most qualified

anaconda handler on Planet Earth. Paul is one

interesting cat." Hugging emoji. Is that accurate?

- Yes. At that size, they're apex, so they're really not thinking

about defense. They're just like, "Get off me."

If I was to hurt her—like if I was to touch you in the arm with

a needle—you'd react. If I was to do anything that hurt her, which

I'm not doing, she would turn around and bite me to say, "Go away." But

they also don't want to bite because their recurved teeth make it very difficult to

detach. And also, they're putting their head at the source of the

danger. It's not a good calculation. And so these giants—

and I've had the privilege of interacting with four or five

anacondas in the 20 to 26-foot range—all of them have

been very Leviathan-like. And they just don't

wanna move. They just wanna keep going. And he's

100% right on all of that stuff. I've caught

90-something anacondas at this point, and many of them have been

massive. Then there's the one that JJ and I didn't get at the Floating Forest because it was bigger

than— bigger than we could tackle, bigger than my hands. I couldn't touch

fingers. But every single one of them has chosen flight

over fight. Only the little babies and the smaller

males get snappy. They'll come back at you like a normal snake, and if you grab their tail,

they'll try and bite you and then go. But these big females,

you know, they're like dragons. They're like these big, legendary things that live

in swamps, and the only reason they've gotten that big is because they have a

reliable prey source in a secluded place away

from humans, and they've been there for decades just pulling things

down to hell and eating them. And the other

thing... I mean, look, I have a team with me. You know? So...

- So, there's people holding the—

- Yeah. Let's be real here. I would never do this. If I was out in the jungle

by myself at night, doing this would be suicide,

100%, because for every second that I'm going, "Oh, I'm in this

water and she's over my neck," if JJ wasn't there to jump in and unwrap her—

...then I die. 100%.

- Because she's continuously wrapping.

- She's on her back saying, "Come in here,"

"and let me arm bar you. Let me squeeze the guts out of you." She's just

going, "Let it happen."

- And moving slowly.

- Moving really slow—

- Conjuring

- with that assurance of power where she doesn't need to try and tap you quick.

She's going to get you eventually.

- Although, to push back on something you just said, having known you long

enough, let's be honest. You're saying I wouldn't be insane enough to do it.

I think you would be. I mean, there's...

There's a line of insanity, and you, my friend, walk that line

masterfully so far. I think

when you're able to sense the animal, whether it's crocodiles,

caiman, or anacondas, and maybe radiate a sense of calm—

I've seen you be able to go into some dangerous situations,

and make it seem like it's not dangerous at all. And maybe when you

become one with the ecosystem, maybe

you're not a threat to it, and maybe that's why

you can survive? I haven't been able to make sense of it, really.

- Look, I would say this. In the case of elephants, if we ever end up in Africa

together, I can get incredibly close to elephants because I've spent enough

time with them where, time with them where, so far, it's always been a mock

charge. And you can be one with the

elephant and learn their language enough that you

respect their boundaries and you also show them that, this

better be serious because you're either going to have to kill me, or just turn around and go back to

eating. And you can have that exchange with them.

With smaller snakes, I'll be careful. I can tell you with

this that when you have both of your hands around an anaconda's

neck... I truly... I mean, I've been known to surprise

myself with the decisions I make, but this alone would lead to death, 100%.

It's like laying down in front of an 18-wheeler with it in neutral. "It's going to roll

over you." This is going to turn into

anaconda handcuffs with this thickness, and then that

is going to wrap you with this thickness, and then six more of those are going to go around your

body and you will get squeezed and you will turn into goop.

Just like that guy said, she probably is in defense mode and not food mode, so she'll

probably just neutralize the threat and then go back to sleep.

- I have to ask you about the floating forest. And you write about Santiago,

once again, beautifully in the book, of the time when he told

you the stories and when your mind and eyes were still fresh

and maybe skeptical and more leaning towards the

Western world point of view versus the jungle point of

view. "Santiago's eyes were glowing in the darkness. He watched

the orange ember spark upward to join the celestial river of

stars that arched across the night sky as if the memories

were written there. He squinted, his face as wrinkled and

weathered as an old map of the world. Vast experience

whispered in the firelight, as ephemeral as the breath that

spoke the words, but powerful enough to latch on and

sink down into some deep part of me." This is Pico saying, "Papa, tell me about

the anaconda on the blackwater stream." And,

He tells a story of that, and he talks about it being big and having horns.

And you write once again masterfully about you at that

time having doubts. It sounds like bullshit, but

now more and more of the things you've seen in the jungle

and the things you sense you have not seen yet, all of those stories seem to be

true. The one he was referring to was maybe 36 feet

long, this big. He says that, "The

floating forest is the place you need to go, Gringo,

if you want to be liberated of your doubts and skepticism." So tell me about the

anacondas you've encountered in the floating forest.

- Well, the thing he's describing there is that he's saying they found an anaconda that

had horns.

And in that moment, we were all hanging out by the side of the river and I said, "That's

enough." I stood up. I was like, "Come on, there's no anaconda that has horns."

And if I've learned anything in 20 years of living with the

indigenous people in the Amazon, it's that they're not wrong. You know, if they say

there's a tribe of naked people with arrows out there,

they're right, they're right. And they know what an

anaconda looks like. So if he says he saw an anaconda with

horns, he saw something that ain't a normal anaconda. And a smaller version of

this played out recently where one of the people that works

at the tree house, he came and he said, "I found a

snake and it was in the water tank." And he goes, "And it had

green spikes on it." And I said,

"There's no snake that has green spikes." I said, "Congratulations, you're an idiot."

I made fun of him.

And I said, "I know all the snake species that are here. None of them have spikes.

There's no snake that has spikes coming off of it." And he said, "No, it had long spikes."

He said, "The snake is this big and had spikes this long on it." And I said, "There's no snake with

spikes." Until finally he came and he got me in the

night and he goes, "The snake with spikes is there." And I said, "Well, I'll get out of bed

for that. Let's go." And I said, "I guarantee it's not gonna be there."

And we got to the water tank and I shined my flashlight down and

sure as shit, there's a snake in there and it's got

thousands of green spikes coming off of it. And I could see the snake head

and then the spikes are coming completely perpendicular out from its

body. And for a second, I really was having this out-of-body experience. And then the

snake saw us, got scared and swam, and all of the

the spikes collapsed onto its body and became smooth.

And then I realized the snake had been living in the stagnant water for a while and developed

algae that was growing off of it. So when it was sitting still, all

the algae would settle out.

And so if you look straight down on it, it's a water snake that has algae growing

on it. And so it does look like a snake with spikes. He's not wrong.

It was a water snake. It was some sort of Helicops.

But there's always an answer like that.

- Amazing.

- They're not wrong. So when they tell you something like, "There's an

anaconda with horns," and multiple people have seen it—

...you make an expedition there.

If somebody said there's giant ground sloths in this valley, I wouldn't be like, "They're extinct."

I'd be like, "Where?" You start to listen. I mean, after,

after the tribe walked out of the forest, you could tell me anything.

That day, if a Tyrannosaurus rex walked out behind them, I would've been like, "Makes

sense."

- Let's go to the floating forest. Do you ever think about what creatures are in

there? I just had a conversation with

Michael Levin at Tufts University. He's this biologist

who creates biological life forms in the

lab, but he also studies all kinds of weird, what he calls

unconventional intelligences on Earth. And he speaks

about that from a perspective of just understanding the

incredible intricacies and weirdnesses of biological

systems. So the soup of organisms that's there in the floating forest is probably

incredible. Do you ever think about what kind of weirdness is there?

- Yeah. Along with giant snakes, there are animals existing in

an ecosystem that's isolated, right? And so the tepuis...

In the movie Up, those Venezuelan cliff jungles with the straight walls,

like Angel Falls? Up there you have this allopatric speciation

occurring where these isolated communities are departing from whatever's down there.

So on the floating forest, you have this very unique ecosystem where

animals are living on grassy islands and in the tops of palm trees.

In that nightmare soup that exists beneath the rafts, there are

probably insects and, I mean, I've seen lizards there that we

have been unable to identify. There are things there in the...

I can't imagine the...

decay is probably not happening. There's not a lot of oxygen in that water.

I've brought a few scientists there and they've all just been like,

"This is... this is..." you know.

- Yeah. How do you even

- "How did this form?" We've brought hydrologists there and they're like, "How the hell did this

thing form?" And then trying to study what creatures live under that is amazing.

- But the big anacondas, it's interesting because they

truly are the apex, so they're unbothered. They're not really using

their power for anything.

- No, and I'm sure if I bit her, she'd turn around and kill me.

- Yeah, but in a bored kind of way. Like, it wouldn't even...

It would just slowly kill you.

- I wonder though, once she killed you, if she'd just be like-

- Just take a bite?

- I mean, would she bite? They swallow, right?

- Well-

- Once you collapse your shoulders, it's like if you killed

a perfectly good hamburger and it was like in your hands dead, you'd be like-

"Maybe I'll try it."

- I mean, they need the calories.

- Yeah, and then take a six-month nap.

- Yeah. They're truly incredible, majestic creatures.

- Yeah, I love this picture. Just, again, look at the size.

I want you one day to feel them. And again, the wild

ones are not like the captive ones, which are soft from sitting in a cage.

These guys have been flexing every day. It's like you're hitting steel cables.

It's just wild.

- And even if it's just being chill, you can probably get a hint of the power

it's capable of, right?

- The one good thing about those really big ones is that when they do strike, it's like

it's like being in a fight with a big fat guy. It's like that,

that haymaker comes from way back here and you're like-

..."Oh, good." You're like, "I'm gonna duck." And you get down. Because

they open their mouth and they start accelerating.

And it's pretty easy to either get out of the way or,

you know, catch it before it hits you.

...usually. Again, if you ever mess that up, just like the haymaker from the

big guy, it's over.

- Your level of knowledge and comfort with snakes is incredible. I think they

- Play with them a lot.

- ...sense that. I mean, I've seen you with snakes and they must sense it, because

they must sense in you the camaraderie. You have a way of

speaking to animals and about animals like there's zero danger.

Well, from my outsider perspective, it seems like a

lot of them are full of danger if you're not communicating to them correctly.

- With snakes, I think it's more of a

highway analogy: it's dangerous, but you can drive safely.

I know what I'm doing, so if I'm working with a snake that can't envenomate

me and is small, I can allow it to freak out. And then if I can get it

into my hands and it goes, "Ooh, it's nice in here." And of course, like

you said, I'm not scared. They are very sensitive to that, so he's going, "Okay, this

isn't so bad." You can chill him out. But I don't think snakes

have any camaraderie. I think that whales, monkeys,

elephants, I think they can sense. They can say, "Okay, this person's trying to help"

to get me out of this net. I'm gonna relax and not kill them."

In those cases, you have that dynamic.

- Speaking of an animal that does have camaraderie, there's this

incredible video on your Instagram that people should go watch where

incredible video where this spider monkey was drowning and you jumped in to rescue it.

- Sure. So we're coming down river. It's seven o'clock in the morning,

so I'm cold. I'm sitting on the boat and I'm wearing

whatever. JJ's like, "Look, spider monkey." And I go, "Great,

spider monkey in the river." That's normal. But JJ's like, "No, she's

having trouble." And I was like, "Why? They swim all the time."

And he goes, "You should help." So the boat comes around.

Then sure enough, what you can't see in the video is that the river was so full that there were these little

whirlpools and currents, and she was trying to get to the side. And again, all the animal rights people

are very quick to be like,

"Let nature take its course. Let the monkey drown." Or, "She doesn't need help. You're interfering."

Sure, sure, sure. If you were actually there, you would know

that she did need help and she was drowning. Her head kept going under.

And so I saw that JJ was right. And so we pull around.

I took off whatever I could in the moment, jumped in with the paddle—

because, now, here again, I trust monkeys,

but I don't want her to bite me. She is going to be scared, so I thought, there's two ways I can do this.

I can grab her by the neck and the tail and take her out of the river, which is going to be scary for her.

Instead I thought, "I know spider monkeys so well. I've raised so many of them."

And when you raise them, they curl up to your neck and they'll...

If you have an orphan spider monkey whose mother got shot by poachers and you're taking care of her

before we bring them to the animal rehabilitation experts,

they'll curl up on your neck and they'll go, "Oh, oh, oh, oh,"

and they'll just talk to you in your ear. So I feel like I know a little bit of broken spider monkey.

I pull up next to her and I give her the paddle.

We're in this rushing river moving at 10 miles an hour downstream,

and I try to give her the paddle and she smacks it away.

She was like, "No, get away from me." Then she keeps swimming, goes under again, and I give her the paddle again.

She puts a hand around the paddle, and that moment that you paused on, she looked back at me.

She looked at me like—yeah, right there. She registered like, "Oh, this is

another animal with a face."

- For people just listening, you need to go watch the video. You guys are just looking at each other,

and she's looking right at you. It's so cool.

- She looked right at me, but then she went, "No." She was like, "Whatever you are, no."

She was like, "I'd rather die in the river." She was so scared and drowning,

and she looked at me and got scared and jumped back in.

Then I lifted her up and I went, "Oh, oh, oh, oh," and I started talking in spider monkey.

And she just... then, in the next moment, you see it. She just goes, "Sure."

And she wraps her tail... you see her tail is around the edge of the paddle.

She puts her hand around it, and then I lifted her. Because I'm taller than she is, I lifted her out of the river.

So now, instead of manhandling her like a raccoon you're catching by the neck

she's holding on in her spider monkey way to the paddle, and she

and she looks back over her shoulder. I'm sitting there going, "Oh, oh, oh, oh," talking to her in spider monkey.

And she looks at me, and you hear her. She goes...

I can't do the sound she makes, but she does this, "Whoa!"

spider monkey sound like, "Guh!"

And she goes, "Fine." And then she's looking off the front end of the paddle as she's

looking at the jungle, and she looks back at me and she's like... You could just tell.

She's like, "I have no idea what's happening."

But she accepted the help. And the difference is, it's because I

spoke her language in this case. And I know that would be one of those

stories that people would nail me on every time if it wasn't on camera. You can

see the moment that she makes direct eye contact with me and goes, "Okay."

And then as soon as we get to shore, she jumps off and runs off into the forest, but it was-

- It's so... I mean, just watching the video, it's so amazing. She's looking at

you. Like, real... You can see that there's an actual connection.

It's... that there's like communication, like a social... You know, the way

humans, when you're maybe

saving a human being that's drowning or something like this.

There's that connection. It was beautiful to see, man. And then I read

a little bit that spider monkeys have...

they're very intelligent, but they're especially socially intelligent. So they

have social connections with each other. So they understand what

that means. They understand what another entity means. So you

speaking it in a broken language, probably

is really important and a powerful way to indicate that, "Wow, you're

in network." Like a foreigner, but like

- It's like you're in a foreign country and someone goes, "Helping, helping."

- Yeah, exactly.

- Like, "Helping." And you go, "Okay, sure." Like, you know, "You're not

robbing me, you're helping," right?

But no, they're incredibly... And I'm telling you, I've had orphan spider monkeys so many

times. And they wrap their tail around your neck and they hug you.

And you realize that connection that they have with their mothers when they hold onto

them in the canopy... When the loggers shoot the mother and then I'm

taking care of this baby, they hold onto you.

And they need that love and that connection more than they need food.

If you put food or you put warmth of a body, they'll choose the connection

over the sustenance.

- Yeah, they really value the touching, that connection.

- Very tactile. They're very loving.

They wrap their long spider monkey arms around each other.

They're very much like us. They hold their babies.

When it rains, spider monkeys will get together and huddle up.

They'll pull leaves down and all huddle up together. When it's cold-

they get close. It's very cute.

- Yeah, I mean, they're distant relatives, but that's true for a lot of our

relatives. The apes, the chimps, all of them, they have this

intricate... They're different. Sometimes more violent, sometimes more loving.

But social interactions, it's cool that way.

- Yeah, I mean, you expect it from them. They're practically us.

To me, it's when other animals show. The times that I've

been on a trail and a jaguar has walked by and just been like, "'Sup?"

Keep walking. And it's like, "It's kind of cool of you not to eat me."

"I appreciate it."

- Has that happened to you?

- Yeah. I thought somebody was walking on the trail. I was doing a camera trap.

And I put my finger up and I was gonna go, "Could you walk any louder?"

- Oh, yeah.

- I'm crouched because I was doing a camera trap. A jaguar

walked by and he literally was just like shoom, shoom, kicking leaves,

just having fun, mouth open. And he just walked by, looked at me,

and went, "'Sup?" Never broke stride.

Dead-ass eye contact with the bottom teeth out and that jaguar look

of just like, "Hey." I was like, "Okay." Now I'm going to have a full meltdown.

Your system, you start sweating.

You're like, "Whoa." Because they're also so beautiful.

When you see a jaguar, it's bright yellow and the teeth and the muscles...

It's... You know...

- What do you think you communicated to the jaguar that it didn't kill you?

- No, nothing. The jaguar was making the decisions. I didn't do anything.

saved my life. He was just going somewhere.

And because he's the king there, he just went, "Uh."

- Yeah, probably also not threatened.

- Not threatened at all.

- I think there is something to you. You're just taking for granted

the things that you're putting out into the world.

You're probably radiating calm. Or not calm- but non-threat.

- Certainly non-threat. I also smell like an animal when I'm in the

jungle, right? I shower in the river. I don't use deodorant

or shampoo or any of that stuff. So I don't smell...

Imagine to animals that have a smell that's four times as good as

that's four times as good as ours, just your deodorant, your conditioner—

... just whatever other products, the detergent on your clothes...

We smell like Times Square. We smell like a fire alarm to them.

They're like, "What is this thing? It smells very foreign and scary."

Everything's scary. Speaking of scary, the jaguar was kind of friendly.

He was like, "'Sup?" It's almost like he'd seen me before.

He was like, "Oh, it's just you." The one time I stood—

on the forest floor in India with a wild tiger and nobody else,

the thing the tiger did that was so unnerving... And again, a tiger's back

is... they're so much bigger than you think. It's like four jaguars.

They're so big.

She wouldn't look at me, and it was terrifying. She would look over there,

she would look like this, she would look like that,

and never eye contact. It was like, "You're as important to me as a stick."

When you see two fighters square up, it's all about the eye contact.

But you look through a person; you pretend they're not even there.

person. You pretend they're not even there. That-

That tiger insulted me on such a profound and disarming level

that I never forgot it. It was like, "You matter as much as a sparrow."

"You're just not one of the things that I care about."

She just was looking around and carried on doing it.

She was like, "I'm gonna walk this way." And I was just like,

"Holy shit, I'm gonna run."

It's just profound insignificance from this god of an animal

with paws the size of dinner plates. I was like, "Man, if she does look at me,

if she looks at me, I'm gonna probably..."

- That's the end.

- You know, that's the end.

- Yeah, it shows how much more powerful she is. That's probably the most

terrifying animal on earth. Tigers—

- The rock-paper-scissors of land predators.

I think the polar bear and tiger have to be the most scary.

- Yeah, polar bears.

- Polar bear's pretty scary.

- Yeah, you don't mess with a polar bear.

- I don't think they're as fast as tigers, but you're not going fast on the ice.

With a tiger, you can't outrun it. If you climb a tree, they climb better.

If you get in a car, they could smash the door. If a tiger decides it wants you,

pretty much nothing... Even if you had a gun, even if you had a nine millimeter,

it isn't going to stop a tiger that wants you.

- In the jungle, have you ever felt in danger? Putting humans aside,

were there animals...?

You've talked about how humans are really the source of danger.

...how humans, they're the source of danger.

Is there... You often speak about animals as

a, you know, source of beauty and wonder—

...and elegance and grace and all these things which they

are. But I'm sure you've felt danger.

- Yeah. I mean, I'm very aware that a hornet's nest can kill you. They'll kill you.

- Oh, so the little guys.

- The little guys suck. You know, the—

I always think like when we were going through the jungle—

...one machete whack, and again, people don't realize how dense it is. You try to

run, you get hung up on vines, you trip, you fall onto one of those trees with the

black spikes. And then while you're laying there dealing with all that, they're just stinging

you and your body—

...goes into anaphylactic shock and you die instantly. It's like you

just... That can very quickly just take you out.

- You're right. I mean, speaking of spikes, the biggest danger is not even the

spikes. The spikes just, 'cause it creates open wounds and then that can lead

slowly—

- Infection

- ...to infection. So it's really that—that is the biggest danger.

- Yeah. In the Amazon, I've never heard of a

human-directed violent jaguar in our region. They just don't attack

people. I'd say mosquitoes are the thing that come after you.

The snakes just want to be left alone. Even the venomous snakes.

Again, I grabbed an 11-foot bushmaster by the tail and he turned

around, he lifted up to about this high off the ground. And if you

could translate what he said, it was just, "Don't make me

do it." It just said, you know, "Make my day."

- See, but that's the thing. You speak snake language.

- And then I put the tail down.

- You speak snake.

- I went, "Okay." I was sufficiently scared. So the

problem happens when you don't know what you're doing. I'll give you—

...an example. You want a dangerous animal story, I'll give you one. I was walking one

time and I was trying to be responsible. It always happens when I'm trying to be responsible—

...I get into trouble. Trying to be safe, and you fall down.

I'm on the side of the stream and there's elephants on the other side of the...

I'm in India. There's a deep, like a 12-foot thing, and then a

stream and then on the other side there's elephants. And I'm walking and I'm like, "I'm gonna sit in a

tree and I'm gonna enjoy these elephants. I'm gonna make notes in my book like Jane

Goodall." Then I came up against a cement wall, and it was the back of a male

elephant. And in India, it's a male elephant that's been harassed and had

fire thrown at it and God knows what else. And he... And if I translate

what he said, he turned around and he just went, "What the fuck?" He just looked at me like,

how dare you? And then just... smacks apart the tree, turns around, and then

that elephant was trying to kill me. That was not a mock charge.

I threw off my backpack, zigzagged through the woods. He broke

apart trees. If I had a GoPro on my back to show you what I saw,

just the shrapnel and devastation of this thing just bashing through

trees. Every bush that I encounter is a possible trip.

Every vine is a possible hang-up. And if they get you, he'll step

on you and crush you. So I threw myself off the edge of

this cliff, rolled down into the stream, and the elephant got to the edge and

almost fell on me. He got to the edge and did one of these,

and then came back down on his hind feet.

Picked up a stick, threw it at me. And the stick just smacked

down next to me in the stream. I remember I gave him the finger because I was alive.

And then he just stormed off into the jungle.

- I mean, there's nothing like an elephant.

- There's nothing like an elephant anywhere. There's a...

I loved listening. I was so excited when I put on your podcast

with the dinosaur guy—

because he was like, "When a baby is born, it learns, you know,

elephant, giraffe, T-Rex."

And I was like, "Holy shit." Along with like banana, water,

sky is blue. Somehow these are initial things in your first few months on Earth—

these are the characters you're introduced to. How the hell did T-Rex get there?

They don't even exist anymore.

It was just such a fun... I could hear you smiling through the mic,

and I was like, "Oh, this is gonna be a good one."

- Yeah. I mean, the dinosaur world is incredible—

- It's wild.

- but the fact that you have such a predator evolve with such a gigantic jaw,

so much destructive power, is weird.

- And then he broke my heart because he was talking about how the T-Rex and

Stegosaurus... he's like, "All the books have them together," and then,

"They're nowhere near each other."

"They did not exist at the same time," and I was like...

- I want them to battle with each other.

- Yes.

- Speaking of elephants, I feel like we'll be up for an adventure at some point.

After all this chaos is over, you think back in the jungle? Africa? India?

- I think I would love to show you a herd of truly wild elephants

in the African jungle. I think that us

going on a boat trip through the Amazon, not a hiking one—

where we're going through areas where you can get permits to go through

where no one's allowed to go. They're completely protected areas,

and you can just go for a week through areas where the animals have no idea

what a human is. So you can move through it, and it'd be a little bit more of an

enjoyable experience, not a survival situation. And go with J.J. in a boat

and just travel through the Amazon. "Hey, maybe we protect this river."

And then the river's mapped from north to south, and we just raft down with

boat support, you know?

- It's really incredible to see how it's all connected. I mean, the river,

it's the thread that connects the whole story. And so it's nice

to see how it all is connected. And that's why us starting in the

mountains is also really nice to see, you know, where it begins.

But it keeps going. The story keeps going.

- It keeps going. We did start in the mountains. An epic first day together.

- And hopefully, people get a chance to see that video.

So I gotta ask you about the writing. I mentioned you're

an incredible writer. What's your writing process like for

this book, Jungle Keeper, for The Mother God, and for future books you're writing?

Are you like a Stephen King? Do you go to some dark places in the basement?

Do you write every single day?

Do you take little notes? Like, your notebook has a bunch of doodles

and a bunch of writing. Like, what's your process like?

- I try to journal every day for a number of reasons.

It's accountability. It helps me keep track... It's fun to see your hopes and dreams.

It's fun to record the mundane moments that we all forget about,

and that might be, like, cooking in the kitchen with your mother.

That might be a fun walk you had with your dog. Like, little things that you

think you're going to remember, but you just don't. And so I have piles of notebooks.

I have just piles and piles of notebooks in my room.

And when something happens, I write it down. If a cool story happens, I will write it down,

story happens, I will write it down, or if I find a

leaf from an extinct tree I will make an etching

Anything that happens that I find remarkable in any way,

either for my own personal memory or for writing,

I'll write it down. And then when I go

back to it later, A, I have a very good memory, and B, the facts are

there. And so when something happens like you rescue a spider monkey

or something happens that's remarkable in

life—you get to spend time with someone that you haven't in a

long time and you get that feeling of like, "Oh, that's why I'm such good friends with them."

You write these things down, and then it's always

there. And so I feel like whenever I don't journal that I'm missing out

on keeping my life and my memories.

So yeah. I don't do the... That Stephen King quote about how

"Amateurs wait for inspiration, and the professionals, we go to work every

day." And he's like, "Ten pages a day," or whatever it is. I don't do that.

I write when I feel like it. And I like

to... You know, I'll start thinking, "Oh, this is a perfect way

to start this scene," because the moment this happened, I

felt so intensely. And if we bring people in and out, I'll just be in a car

or boat or something, and I'll just start thinking about it and I'll go, "This is..."

Just the thing is, you gotta carpe diem.

Then I'll go, "Okay, where did that happen again?" And I'll go to that page. And I'll go,

"Okay, so what exactly happened?" Then you get the laptop, and yeah.

So it's brain to paper to laptop, always paper in between.

- Well, how do you go from disparate notes to the final

thing? Because it's difficult to convey the experience through words,

and you do that well. So is this like... Do you edit a lot? Do you iterate?

- That's where Stephen King was right. Because I look at writing like

sculpting. You- you have to have something to

sculpt. And so when you're thinking of a

story... Again, a lot of... I mean, I love listening to

great storytellers. And I actually love listening to bad stories, just like I like watching bad movies to

see what they did wrong. When you listen to someone that starts a story and they have you

hooked from the second they start, and then you're like, "Wait, but how did that happen?

And why was that happening? What happened next?" And they keep you going and they drop the

information perfectly. And so every now and then, you figure that out in that

moment of inspiration. So then I have my facts written down here.

And then I'll do an outline on a page or something. But then I have to get

it all out of me with a pen. Then I can move to... I'll almost close my eyes.

I'll almost just close my eyes and write the story out. I just need to... You're making

the... You're literally making your clay, and so it's like you make the

shape of the thing before you... And then editing is giving it details.

- So you do take passes like—

- Oh, my God, yes. I mean, dozens. That's where writing sucks.

When you're finishing a book—and I'll never do that again. So what I'm doing now

is... this last book, there's so much that it covered.

And I was in the jungle, and it'd be like hiking for ten hours a day, you know,

dealing with narcotraffickers, and then I'd have to edit at night.

It was like, "This is no way to live." So now what I'm doing is

I'm writing chapters as I feel like writing chapters. When something

something remarkable happens, I go, "This is going to be its own chapter."

I write it, edit it, and then I send it to my sister who's an

expert editor and has lived more in literature than

most people live in real life. She'll let me know if it's good or bad,

if it needs to be tweaked. When I get it back from her, it's marked up.

And now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put those

aside. And then, the next time I want to write a book, it's not

starting from scratch on 300,000 words; it's just here, and it's ready.

Much easier.

- What kind of books do you think you might write in the future?

- Well, there's Mother of God, and now Jungle Keeper. And then I'm

already working on Endgame. Because there is so much that has happened. I

think I told you when you were there, but right before you

came, me and JJ went to the back end, behind our river—

to this horrible part of the Amazon that's 10 times more

lawless than where we are. Instead of no people, there are people.

If you want to talk about Amazonian No Country for Old Men, it's the oil

companies, the missionaries, and the newly contacted tribes.

There's a people called the Nahua, and they were recently

contacted and ripped out of the forest. They're standing there

with their little bows and arrows. They're tiny people. The—

the normales are tall. The Nahua are small. And we just saw

brutality in this horrific... It's like Sicario. It's just

absolute lawlessness. I remember the moment JJ looked at me and said,

and we both think of ourselves as tough, I think, until we get in

these situations. And he looked at me and went, "We're not safe."

And we looked at the people around us at this side of the river

port, eight days up, and you could tell everyone looking at

us was making a calculation about how inconvenient it

would be to kill us. They were like: camera, watch, clothing, backpack.

They were like, "That's a nice backpack." You could tell they

were just shopping. And JJ and me were like, "We're

gonna..." "Where are we putting the tent tonight?" "We're not

staying here." Then I was like, "Well, maybe we should stay."

And then one of the little Nahua people came over to JJ asking for

food, and he made the mistake of explaining money. They'd never

had money before. He gave them a couple coins and said, "If you

go over there, that man will sell you something and you can eat."

The guy was like, "Bow and arrow?" JJ said, "No, give him this and

he'll give you food," and it worked. Then JJ got swarmed by

60 of these little tribals with bows and arrows, hands out. JJ was

running with all these half-naked people behind him. That—

that whole saga right there is like... That chapter's

gonna be called "River of the Dolphin Fuckers"

'cause everyone we met on the river kept telling us,

I'd have my camera with me and I'd go,

"Are there dolphins here?" And they'd go, "Yeah, there's dolphins.

And if you fuck one, be careful 'cause they'll pull you under."

I went, "Okay, weirdo," to the first guy.

And then we got to like eight hours further upriver, met the next guy and I had my camera out,

and I'm like, "Hey, are there any dolphins here?" And he goes, "Yeah. If you fuck any, be careful."

He's like, "'Cause they'll grab on and pull you under." And I was like,

"What?" And then four more people told me the same thing. So I was like, "Okay."

- The lesson we learned in the jungle: horned anacondas, believe 'em.

- Believe 'em. On that river, they were all trying to be good Samaritans and

warn me about the clear and present dangers involved with amorous dolphin

encounters.

- So stylistically, I mean, that is a bit Cormac McCarthy.

- Ooh, he would've loved it.

- There are writers you draw inspiration from like that. I mean, you're very close to him—

- It's too big of a compliment.

- You plug in every once in a while. You jump around stylistically, actually.

- I do. It depends, because sometimes I want to sink in and

flex a little bit, which I don't think people really enjoy, but I enjoy it.

You know, talk about the... Just use all those flowery words—

and make these beautiful metaphors. But what I'm finding more and more is

that modern readers aren't really looking for that. They want an easy read.

And for my style of storytelling, people really tend to

thank me for more of an Anthony Bourdain style,

where you're like, "So we found ourselves on the side of this river and we knew we

were in danger. The reason we were in danger..." And you just start telling the story.

Forget the... Maybe once every two pages you can throw in one of those beautiful

little zingers, but nobody wants to watch you flex.

- But also sometimes you go even more than... I don't think Anthony Bourdain did

like Hemingway-like minimal, like— word, period— word, like that.

That's another way to flex that I really like that you do sometimes is just—

less, and just power in the spacing,

the silences. The unsaid is what does the driving.

- I mean, that's what's so arresting. You read like For Whom the Bell

Tolls. And, you know, "The air was crisp, and the water was

sweet, and the wine was good, and the afternoon was warm."

And you're like, "I know what that's like." These are not complicated sentences,

but when he puts them together into a paragraph, you go, "Oh, yeah. I want

to drink wine out of leather and lay by the side of that stream."

It sounds so beautiful. And so sometimes, you know, I mean, just look at that.

Look at that fire cracking on the horizon there.

Sometimes the only way is just these simple statements.

- Writing's beautiful. I love writing, I love reading it. Have you interacted with

LLMs much? You know, AI systems? ChatGPT? There's a bit of a scary and a sad

aspect to the fact that they can generate language extremely well.

But something is missing, and it's very hard to put your finger on it.

- My question to you is: I can pick out with stunning accuracy

when someone sends me a message and they've passed it through ChatGPT—

I know. Somehow I could tell, and I don't know how,

but I could tell. It's one of those things like with the images,

where we're at the point where we can't tell anymore, almost.

I don't know if that's going to go away, or if, like you said, there's something...

Like, one of the things that F. Scott Fitzgerald does so much

is he describes these incredibly human moments with such crystalline accuracy

that you go, "It must have taken you a month. You

must have studied life so much to be able to

string those words together." I think in a book he writes

about someone screaming with such abandonment that at the highest register,

her voice wobbled and cracked. And you're like, "Oh my God, I know that sound."

And I wonder if... because you can say, for example,

"Write me The Jungle Book, but make it sound like Cormac McCarthy wrote it."

And it'll be like, "The jungle was dark and stern, and the boy was..." You know?

It'll do it, and it's amazing. But my question to you is,

what are we picking up on in something as simple as a text message?

- It is very difficult to define. But it's important to keep thinking about,

because: what makes us human?

- You reassured me recently because I called you and I said,

of the jungle and all anybody wants to talk about is AI."

It's like people are walking themselves into the Matrix and asking to

be hooked. You know, everyone's just obsessed with this topic.

And you were like, "Man, human art and human

literature is going to actually become so valuable as this other thing happens."

other thing happens." And I expected the opposite answer. I thought you were

gonna be like, "Yeah, man, this really is. Everything's gonna change." And you were like,

"Man, like, real artists are going to become more appreciated."

- As more and more compelling and effective bots appear on the internet—

... we're going to value that less and less, I think.

And we're going to value human interaction more and more.

So, you know, artists showing art at galleries versus on the internet—

... meeting in person. And, actually, it's going to

force people to be more authentic and real and raw with each other. That's

going to be the valuable resource.

- I mean, I think already, AI aside, I think that in today's

world, everyone's so... I mean, movies have become so

polished. Like, there's no weird quirky stuff. There's no risky stuff anymore.

It's all very, very curated. I've almost stopped watching movies.

And I used to love movies. But it's fun

when they take risks, when they're messy, when they're real.

- I think Hollywood, the Hollywood stars, the Hollywood movie-making process

has become less and less popular because of that. So I can't

wait for movies to be reinvented-

- Oh, I can't wait.

- ... for independent film. Just raw, edgy, dangerous, all that kind of stuff.

- And all the actors we like are in TV shows on various streaming platforms.

It's like they've all just gone home.

Like, they're not there. I was literally like, "Man, I miss movies.

What happened to movies? I'm re-watching all the old movies that I like."

And I was like, "Where is everybody?"

What are they doing? It's like they all have a TV

series on Hulu or something, you know? It's like, "Fuck."

- Yeah. I think it'll come. The raw, the dangerous, the edgy.

- What we just described is almost perfect... There's a scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin

Williams makes them open their books. And the first page of the poetry book

is like, "How do you identify a good poem?" He's like, "A good poem can be..." And he makes

a graph. And he's like, "By the subject of the poem, and then the accuracy with which

it is described, you can tell whether or not it's a good poem." The whole

class is sitting there bored. And he's like, "Now rip that page out of your

book." And they rip the page out. And then he's like, "Now stand up." And he's like,

"Now describe something." And he makes them bleat it and scream it. And

it's almost exactly what we're describing. It's like, yeah, you can turn it into a

graph if you need to, but it's something way messier than that.

- Yeah. And Robin Williams, the person— ... is a perfect example of a complicated,

beautiful human. I miss him. And whenever I see clips of him come up, it's just-

I still to this day can't make sense that a person like that can

take their own life. Somebody who's brought so much joy to the world.

It scares me, man. It scares me. I'm scared of my own mind

in that way, you know? That he could be at the top of the world...

- But he had an illness.

- Yeah, that's what I understand. Dude, life is a rollercoaster.

- I'm telling you.

- And you're living through it.

- As scary as that is... Since you mentioned Robin Williams, I'll give you

this. My very close friend Gleb, he has a story.

He was in New York City as a kid and he saw Robin Williams walking down the

street. And he went up to him and went, "Oh my God, it's Robin

Williams." And Robin was like, "Yeah." And he goes, "Can I have an autograph?" He goes, "Do you have any

paper?" And my friend was like, "No, I'm eleven." And

Robin Williams was like, "Go get some paper."

His manager was with him and he was like, "Robin, we don't have time. We gotta get up there."

And he was like, "Hold on. I told the kid I'd give him a thing.

He'll be back." And my friend heard this as he's thinking, "Just please stay,"

his whole life depended on this thing.

And he ran into a diner, grabbed a napkin, ran back

out into the street. It took him a few minutes, and Robin Williams was still sitting there.

This irate manager was there, being like, "Come on, let's go."

Robin had waited there and

signed the napkin for him, and actually did it with a smile and a wink, you know.

- Yeah, man. You can bring a lot of joy to the world. Never forget

that. All those little interactions. I love it. I love it.

- That was another one of Jane Goodall's amazing quotes that I couldn't

reproduce, but it's that you don't realize the degree to which

the things you do each day matter-

...even if it's just to the people around you. And it's like you

are, to the people around you, their entire life experience-

...if they're your kids, your parents, your partner. So yeah, the things you do.

And if you can manage to put that extra energy where you

put a little magic on it, where it is fun. You show up home with something, you

know, play with the kids in a way that surprises them. I had a good friend of

mine, Vinnie. I called him and said, "What are you doing?" He

said, "Oh, I have a whole plan set up. It's supposed to be really good

stars tonight. I'm putting my daughter to bed."

He goes, "I'm gonna wake her up in the middle of the night. I'm gonna have a candle."

"I'm gonna take her up to the roof to go stargazing." He's like, "But I

want her to sleep. Remember when you were a kid and you would wake up?"

He was curating a magical experience for her to see the

stars, and like, making warm tea and all this. Like,

man, you can just make it so great.

- Jane Goodall's the reason you met this guy.

- That's right.

- You've continuously spoken really highly of him, and he

gave me this book that he has recently written, Echoes from Eden. Signed it.

- Yeah. Dax, A, saved my life, and B, is the example

of what everybody wishes. Dax made an amazing

company, amassed an amazing fortune, and then said, "I'm gonna use it for good."

- He's given a lot of resources, a lot of

love, a lot of effort to helping the Amazon rain

forest and the environment in general.

He's one of the only guys I know who has a sexier beard than you.

- Yeah, he's got me beat big time.

- He wrote, "Thank you, brother, for your love of the wild. This book is about

the heroes fighting on the front line for nature. Together we can

protect Earth's last wild places. Speak soon, Dax."

- He supported all these initiatives. He went to the Amazon

with Jane. He supported Junglekeepers and Sea Shepherd. And so

he really went out and said, "Okay, what are the environmental projects that are doing the

most good? And where do I want to put my resources?" It's like everyone always

whines about that. "How come these guys don't..." And it's like he

did, and he got a lot done. Then he went and visited all

those projects: sea turtles and Indonesian

orangutans and working with Jane. And so then that

book is sort of a state of the union on where conservation is at.

There's a lot of knowledge about how the different strategies... It's so different

protecting sea turtle eggs versus trying to save a river in the Amazon

versus Jane's global message of hope.

And then he has a guy in there who's trying to save a specific part

of Sumatra, and it's just amazing stuff.

- The Congo.

- The Congo. And then he actually took the time to go to these places and

see the operations on the ground.

- And are you still working with him?

- Yeah. Well, that's sort of the... The way it

happened in my life was, the one time I

quit conservation was right around the time COVID hit. I was going through

a divorce, I'm 32 years old, and I had no job, no nothing. JJ's mom had COVID. Don

Ignacio the shaman had COVID. Pico's leg was coming off. Nothing was

working. Nobody could go anywhere. And I called Mohsin and I

was like, "I quit." I was like, "We're never going back to

the jungle." The loggers just went out and were tearing down everything.

I just said, "I got nothing." And in the absolute

black depression, I called him and I said, "I quit. I'm gonna go get a