00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. 00:00:15 Speaker 2: We hunt the meat-eater podcast. 00:00:18 Speaker 1: You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no-compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T.com. L-I-T-E dot com. 00:00:43 Speaker 3: All right, everybody. 00:00:44 Speaker 1: We got an awesome guest right now who knows a ton of stuff about something I wish I knew a ton about. You're in a great position right now. 00:00:52 Speaker 2: You sure you want to learn about it? 00:00:53 Speaker 1: Dude, I'm jungle curious, man. I'm jungle curious because I've been fortunate to spend. Let me see. Let me add it up. 00:01:00 Speaker 3: I've been fortunate to spend maybe like eight weeks, I guess. 00:01:03 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:01:03 Speaker 3: Scattered out. Maybe eight weeks or so. 00:01:06 Speaker 1: In the jungle in south america just enough to go like i should have had more of this in my life yeah should have had more of my life and it's like it's a real miss of mine if i don't want to go so far as to say if i could do my whole north american life over again i'd move it down to south america but i'm way jungle curious okay so i'm gonna i got a lot of the right place right. 00:01:25 Speaker 4: Now but uh paul rosalie so paul's a naturalist an author he's a jungle expert uh maybe most importantly he's the founder of jungle keepers a conservation organization in the Peruvian Amazon. 00:01:40 Speaker 1: I'm holding his book here, Jungle Keeper, What It Takes to Change the World. We're going to talk a bunch about jungles, and we're going to talk a little bit about something that our listeners are familiar with because it's thematic through all of our discussions. This is a very North American-centric show. We spend a lot of time on issues that are centered around, that are peripheral issues, to discussions of what we call the North American model of wildlife conservation. I think some people hear that and they just get bored just hearing the term, but it's the system. 00:02:16 Speaker 3: It's a system that. 00:02:17 Speaker 1: Accounts for, in the United States, in Canada, it's a system that accounts for how can we be so rich and have 360 million people and be like military and technological innovators and still have woods and wild places. 00:02:38 Speaker 2: Right. 00:02:39 Speaker 1: That doesn't happen by accident. No, it doesn't happen by accident. We achieve that through a model that isn't always exportable. Right. 00:02:51 Speaker 3: It worked here and it's worked here. 00:02:53 Speaker 1: But it's a model that, as we discussed before, it's a model that like in Africa, there's a different take on that model. Yeah. Right? And so I think a lot of people, as we get into this discussion, a lot of people will, as they're thinking about it, they'll be like, oh yeah, for decades I've been hearing about the Amazon, deforestation in the Amazon, illegal logging in the Amazon, illegal poaching in the Amazon, the Amazon's disappearing. One of the things I want to get in with you is, does that look like how does that happen how does it how do we stop that from happening right is our system applicable is there another system that's applicable so we'll get to there great but first i gotta ask you about some of my can you handle some jungle. 00:03:39 Speaker 2: Questions uh-oh no yes yes please you don't need your notes for these i was gonna say okay Okay, here's jungle question number one. 00:03:48 Speaker 1: Okay. And this is like, again, I've been fortunate to do a little dabbling down in- What country were you in? Well, so some was in, so I spent some time in Bolivia. Okay. In the headwaters of the Amazon. 00:04:02 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:04:02 Speaker 1: Then I spent some time in what's sort of like cheating to call it the Amazon, but I was just over the ridgeline in Guyana. So if I took a piss, it would have flowed out into the Caribbean. Okay. But if I went a little ways yonder and I took a piss, it would have made its way out the Amazon. 00:04:16 Speaker 2: You're sort of, so you're almost, were you in the Orinoco river basin? 00:04:20 Speaker 1: Well, it was the, I'm trying to remember the main, the main system, the, um, the hell is that main river? i'll have to look it up. 00:04:28 Speaker 2: That's all right yeah i get where you were though and diana's beautiful no it's freaking gorgeous dude i went down some reason it's like untouched i actually don't know. 00:04:35 Speaker 1: We were in some wild country man we were in some wild country it was amazing. 00:04:39 Speaker 3: But first off have you been bit by those bullet. 00:04:41 Speaker 2: Ants oh as soon as i got to the amazon and i was like fresh off the boat you know fresh i just you know new york kid got to the amazon and they looked at me and they went so you like the wild right now yeah you know they saw me catching snakes and climbing trees, and they went, oh, so you're like a jungle man, right? 00:04:57 Speaker 1: And I went, yeah. Big jungle guy. 00:04:58 Speaker 2: And they went, come here. They said, we're going to give you the initiation. And you take a bullet ant that's this big, and you put it on your forearm. So what we would do is put it, you know, you just drop it on so it's not upset. And then me and you rub forearms together. It's sort of like Russian roulette with a bullet ant. And whoever it stings, it stings. Hold on, who's doing this? Me and one of the guys. He just goes, you know, you want to see what it's like? He goes, let's get this out of the way. That was my initiation. 00:05:24 Speaker 3: So you're doing it and you're like, who's going to get it? 00:05:27 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:05:27 Speaker 2: So you just rub it between your forearms. It's like, you sort of just have this little. So he gets pissed and grabs somebody. 00:05:31 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:05:31 Speaker 2: And so they have huge pincers on the front, you know, their mandibles are for cutting and holding. And so he got me with the mandibles, which hurts. And I was like, oh, this is killer. Now he hadn't stung me yet. And then they sting you and they use those mandibles to get leverage and get in on you. And they, and they inject you. I mean, it's a reason they're called a bullet ant. It, hurts yeah and the you know i've been stung by bees and wasps thousands of times and i just don't care this thing you feel like it's almost like their venom is engineered to make you feel like something's wrong because it's not just localized at the site it like goes systemic and then you feel it in your lymph nodes and you feel it in weird places on your back and you start getting the sweats and you go I'm having a bad reaction to this. And like, the truth is, you just got hit with a bullet amp. And that spot's gonna keep throbbing, and you're gonna have that back of the skull headache. And the first one really got me. Like, really got me. And I was, for like 24 hours, I was feeling it, and I felt terrible, and I really didn't do much. I mean, now on number... you know, 12 or 13, I think over the years where it's like, now it's like, man, now my day is ruined. I'm going to be in a bad mood, but it's not the end of the world. 00:06:42 Speaker 1: So you just ride it out. 00:06:43 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:06:44 Speaker 1: When I, when I had got bit by one of those, I didn't know, I knew it was a thing and I knew it was bad, but I had the extra anxiety of not having read up on it. So I didn't know what was going on, but then it went away. 00:06:57 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:06:58 Speaker 1: But then I heard about guys doing it, like doing it just to do it. 00:07:01 Speaker 2: The glove. putting on gloves they have the native glove where they make it it's like a basket woven into a into a flat glove and they stick their hand in there and the somehow these they're this tribe is able to put their abdomens in the in the mesh so all the abdomens are facing in i don't know how they do that and then you stick to what end it's an initiation ceremony for the young men and That's a whole other topic about how we don't have those anymore for our young men. But they do that. And then as the young men are, I mean, I'm surprised that it doesn't just cause you so much, you know, like anaphylactic shock or something, just overwhelm your system. But as you're recovering from this and you're, you know, feverish and laying on the ground, they pair you up with a young woman who cares for you. And it's supposed to be like a, yeah. So they knock you down and then they let you get nursed back to health. That's what I understand. That's what I remember of it. 00:07:54 Speaker 3: But it sounds horrible. 00:07:55 Speaker 1: Have you ever seen the, like just for listeners, can you back up on for listeners what we're talking about here? 00:07:59 Speaker 2: Sure. 00:07:59 Speaker 1: Like, I mean, it's many. I've never seen this. Guys just told me about it. 00:08:05 Speaker 2: I've seen it, you know, anthropology class in college. I remember they showed us a video of it and I don't remember if it was Yanomami or the Kayapo or who was it did it. But I'm talking, I want to say like, you know, over 80 or close to a hundred bullet ants. Which a hundred wasps would put you in bad shape. 00:08:20 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:08:21 Speaker 2: A hundred bullet ants. I mean, I would be worried about serious injury, you know, or systemic injury. 00:08:26 Speaker 1: Well, presumably some dude's got to be, it's got to over time has to have to kill somebody. 00:08:31 Speaker 2: Oh, sure. I mean, people die from, you know, if you're allergic to wasps, I don't, I don't know if bullet ants are bad for people that have a wasp allergy. Uh, that's another thing being in the Amazon and I've had people come down and they go, uh, you know, they get there and they go, By the way, I see a wasp and I go, oh, I got to watch out for that. I'm allergic to wasps. And I'm like, you are in the M. You should have not come. And so I always have an EpiPen ready to go. 00:08:55 Speaker 1: On that wasp question, that was one of the things I was going to get to. Well, finish up the bulletin. You already answered my question, but I'll just get it over with now. Then we'll go back to bulletins. An observation I had in Bolivia and other guys I was with had it. It's like in an American summer, yeah right now and then it's just now and then someone gets bit by a hornet or a wasp like in an american summer this summer i got one wasp bite okay okay and i could talk about it and tell you how itchy it was right but to come out of your tent and just have it be that they're getting you like mosquitoes yeah you'd be like i know that when i walk out of this tent and just go down get some breakfast yeah in the other tent i know that when i walk out of this tent i'll be greeted by a wasp that will bite. 00:09:48 Speaker 2: Me yeah you get used to it man i don't know it's one of those things and that's why the jungle is not for everybody when i come north america and i'm doing some backpacking i'm like man this is great you know this is great there's like one or two mosquitoes you can walk barefoot into some brush and not be worried about anything comparatively i mean i i just i just getting stung by a wasp is a daily occurrence yeah we just covered in wasps when you're you have sweat on you they are so hungry yeah and so carnivorous they'll what i do now is i have a covenant with the wasps and that is that If they want to sit on me and eat my sweat, great. I'll be sitting there doing something. There'll be a wasp on my wrist and I'll be like, fair play. You're not, I'm not going to bother you. As soon as a wasp stings me, I spend the rest of my day trying to get the highest body count I can. I start trying, I've gotten as high as 80 where it's like, I will just start newspaper whacking them and just. 00:10:40 Speaker 1: You'll slowly have an impact. 00:10:43 Speaker 2: If you disrupt the covenant, I'm all for peace, but if you disrupt it, I'm coming for your kind. And then I'll. 00:10:50 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:10:52 Speaker 3: We covered it on Bullet. Oh, no, I was going to tell you this about Bullet Ants. 00:10:56 Speaker 1: If listeners go way back, we had an episode. Maybe Nate can pull it up, the name of it. We had the entomologist Justin Schmidt on. And Justin Schmidt studied venomous everything, like anything that bites. 00:11:11 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:11:11 Speaker 1: Okay. That was his specialty. So insect venoms and all that kind of stuff. And the reason I had him on is he famously came up with this thing called the Schmidt Pain Index. The Pain Index, yeah. 00:11:22 Speaker 3: Yeah, and he put the bullet ant. 00:11:25 Speaker 1: The bullet ant occupies the highest position on the Schmidt Pain Index. 00:11:30 Speaker 3: And he has these really descriptive. 00:11:35 Speaker 3: See, I put myself in a word trap. Descriptive descriptions. 00:11:38 Speaker 2: Yeah. Descriptive descriptions. Break through the wall. 00:11:41 Speaker 1: Of the bites. Yeah. And his description of the bullet ant is funny. I can't remember what it is. 00:11:48 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:11:48 Speaker 1: But do you agree? Highest? 00:11:51 Speaker 2: I mean, the bullet ant sort of has a riveting bouquet of semi-neurological effects and a trembling sort of feverish aftershock. 00:12:01 Speaker 1: It's bad. 00:12:02 Speaker 2: It's real bad. 00:12:03 Speaker 1: However. 00:12:04 Speaker 2: There are some big, you know, there's a tarantula hawk. 00:12:07 Speaker 1: He talks about that. I think it doesn't score as high. 00:12:10 Speaker 2: I don't know. I've never been bitten by one, but they fly by carrying tarantulas. You're just doing something. And this giant wasp, it's like three inches long. You know, they have that suit. It looks terrifying. It looks like a sniper rifle for an insect or something. It's like that long abdomen with a big hangy stinger. And it just, it looks like it's made to cause pain. But what it's made to do is get into a tarantula and then they carry them off. And those just look terrifying. The worst pain I ever felt was there was a big caterpillar with this vertical floofy hair and it was orange. It looks a lot like Donald Trump's hair. And I caught this caterpillar and I knew it was bad news and I had it on a leaf and I was like, I am going to be so careful. I'm going to put it in this box and in the morning, I'm going to take a look at it and try and get some pictures of it and figure out what it is. So I got it on this very sturdy leaf and I'm getting it in the box. And right as I got it in the box, the leaf just gave way and the caterpillar fell against my hand. So underneath all that hair were these like Christmas tree spines. And when that hit me, I have never felt of an insect. We're not talking about stingrays, but of an insect. It was shockingly horrible. Way worse than a bullet ant. Bullet ant at this point. 00:13:29 Speaker 1: Maybe Schmidt didn't know about that one. 00:13:30 Speaker 2: Maybe he didn't know about it. We're going to have to call him up. 00:13:31 Speaker 1: I think he might have passed. Nate, can you figure it out? Did he pass away? I know it was episode 208. Let's type in Justin Schmidt entomology. He passed away in 2023. 00:13:45 Speaker 2: We'll never know. 00:13:46 Speaker 1: Dude got outproduced right there by an engineer. All right, here's another one. Tell me. 00:13:53 Speaker 3: So I was with a guy. 00:13:55 Speaker 1: Yeah. I was with a guy in Guyana. 00:14:02 Speaker 3: He's Makushi. 00:14:03 Speaker 1: Makushi. 00:14:04 Speaker 3: I've never heard of Makushi. 00:14:05 Speaker 1: He's Makushi. He was explaining to me. We're sitting there looking at an anaconda on the bank. He says to me, I mean, in all, these dudes that say a lot of things where they're not being, like, they're not trying to wow you with, like, weird stuff. 00:14:22 Speaker 3: It's just like, you know what I'm saying? Like, just a matter-of-fact statement. 00:14:26 Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. 00:14:27 Speaker 3: He said, if I touch that, I was asking him, is it okay to poke it? 00:14:31 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:14:33 Speaker 1: We got up by natural, like naturally snake. I know being like, you know, in America, can I poke that American? 00:14:39 Speaker 3: I had the impulse that we would poke it to see what happened. 00:14:42 Speaker 1: And he mentions to me, he mentions to me that if you touch it with a bow, it will die in about 45 minutes. And it's a painful death. 00:14:55 Speaker 2: Wait, hold up. If you touch an anaconda with a bow. 00:14:58 Speaker 3: With a bow. 00:14:59 Speaker 2: Like a bow. 00:15:00 Speaker 1: His bow. Yeah. 00:15:01 Speaker 2: You touch the anaconda. 00:15:03 Speaker 3: He says, if I laid my bow on it. 00:15:05 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:15:07 Speaker 3: It would kill it. 00:15:08 Speaker 1: It would die in about 45 minutes. Okay. 00:15:11 Speaker 3: You ever heard this? 00:15:11 Speaker 5: No. 00:15:12 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:15:12 Speaker 2: The different parts of the Amazon, they have completely different local lore. 00:15:16 Speaker 1: Sure. 00:15:16 Speaker 2: And I've heard everything from, you know, if you shoot a giant anteater, the bullet will ricochet off and it will always hit you back. Oh. So if you shoot a giant anteater, you'll die. sure yeah uh i've caught over 90 anacondas in my lifetime and not one of them has died after now i've never touched one with a bow but as rational humans i would unders you know if i touched you with a piece of wood right now there's not a lot of reason that you would die afterwards you know anacondas are tough i've also seen from capybara that you know rodent family those teeth you know if they get them you know on the stomach the rodent turns around And will go to work just trying to chew that anaconda apart. And that's why they wrap them up like that as much as they can. But I've seen anacondas with wounds that would cause us to go to the hospital. 00:16:01 Speaker 1: Oh, to be clear, I don't think that the anaconda would die if he touched it with his bow. 00:16:09 Speaker 3: And I don't even care what I think about it. I just thought. 00:16:13 Speaker 1: I liked and was interested in that he didn't think this, but he knew it. Meaning I didn't feel compelled to, it's not my place to go argue with him about what is actually happening. 00:16:27 Speaker 2: Oh, see, I'm from New York. I would argue the shit out of that. I'd be like, what are you talking about? 00:16:31 Speaker 1: No, another white dude. 00:16:32 Speaker 2: Do it. 00:16:32 Speaker 1: Another white dude. I'd have been like, come on. 00:16:35 Speaker 2: Oh, so what is this? He gets some sort of exemption for being indigenous? No. 00:16:38 Speaker 1: Yes, yes. 00:16:38 Speaker 2: No, I want to see it proven. 00:16:40 Speaker 1: He got a huge exemption from me where I'm like. 00:16:42 Speaker 3: That's great. That's great. Let's not touch it with the bow. 00:16:44 Speaker 2: Not interested in that. So you'll argue with guys? That's all I do is argue. And I've learned a lot arguing. Um, they told me, you know, they said this route, all you gotta do with this route is crush it up and throw it in a stream and you can have all the fish you want. And I said, how would a route do that? That's true though. Well, that is true basket. Yeah. That's the thing. So that one turned out true and they picked up, you know, we'll, we ate fish for lunch that day. Cause you know, I'm gonna show you great. And then there's less verifiable ones like up this particular river. there's a type of anaconda that's triple the size of a normal anaconda. So instead of being 20 or 25 feet, they're like 45, 50 feet and they have ears. 00:17:23 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:17:24 Speaker 2: I said, okay, produce one in front of me and then I shall believe it. You know, find me a skull, find me anything. Uh, this is what I tell the alien people to, you know, find me some evidence and I'll be a lot more amenable to your wacko beliefs. And, uh, so far we're, we're still outstanding on that one. Uh, the other one was, you break an arm you you find a cane toad and they're native to the amazon unlike australia where they're an invasive species you find a cane toad you square it up on the ground and you stomp on it real hard so its guts go flying out its mouth and then you take the this little skin wallet and you put it on the broken bone area and wrap it tight with a bandage and that's supposed to make your bones heal faster now cane toads do have a very powerful poison in those poison glands just behind their eyes. Now, maybe there is a compound there that helps, but until I get a chemist to confirm that, I don't care. 00:18:22 Speaker 1: And you're bold enough just to go down and you're in their neck of the woods and you're telling them what's up. 00:18:28 Speaker 3: See, I need to get more bold. Well, I'm not telling them what's up. 00:18:30 Speaker 2: I'm saying I really want to understand your perspective and understand what things are relevant or not. But growing up, people go, don't go running in the rain. You'll catch a cold. I'm like, go to buds. And also a cold is rhinovirus. So you tell me there's a virus in the rain? 00:18:44 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:18:45 Speaker 2: I run in the rain all the time. I see a thunderstorm. 00:18:47 Speaker 1: I'm like, bet. 00:18:48 Speaker 2: I'm going running now. And so these sort of old tales that have no basis in reality. And I like to undo those because I feel like, you know, science has led us to the place where me and you can get on a plane and go somewhere or a relative can have a heart transplant. And like, there's a lot that comes from this sort of logical way of thinking. And so when you're in the jungle, I want to know, is this true or is this not? People say, you know, a Bushmaster is the only snake that will attack you. If you see a Bushmaster, it's going to attack you. Okay, so I went out and I found a Bushmaster, a big 11-foot Bushmaster. I stood near it and it was all curled up, thicker than my arm, and they have crocodile spikes on their back. It's one of the only snakes I've seen that has like physical features. 00:19:31 Speaker 1: It's terrifying. 00:19:32 Speaker 2: Terrifying, that big angry face. They look like they want to kill you. But he was curled up on the ground and I sat there for a while and the Bushmaster looked at me and I looked at the Bushmaster and he flicked his tongue and I was like, hmm. It was really peaceful for a while. And then I said, now I got to poke it. Now I have to poke this 11-foot venomous snake. And so I went and I got a stick and I picked him up by the tail. And then, you know, the snake started moving in such a way and there's people nearby and we had to measure him because we were doing a reptile survey. So I got him by the head and I had, you know, you have this snake with these giant fangs just out. And your heart, you know, it's one of those things where you have to be concentrated because they could also close their mouth in anger and bite through their lower jaw and envenomate you. Or as you're holding it, I mean, their skulls are so malleable. If you're not perfectly, if you don't have perfect form, they could, you know, get you. And that's all it takes. So I'm really concentrated on head. And so I have a body going over my neck. This is an 11-foot snake. And then the most terrifying thing happened. I feel... a sharp point piercing my skin, but it's not where I'm looking. It's not at the business end. It's on my other arm. And I had a full body. I just felt my blood reverse direction in my veins. I got so terrified. I was like, I've been envenomated. And I said, this makes no sense. And I look and on their tail, again, no other snake that I know of has this. I think it's the males have a spike at the end of their tail. Most snake tails just end in scales. This guy has a hard spike, like a nail spike. And it was driving it into my skin. 00:21:05 Speaker 1: It's like carrying a Derringer. 00:21:07 Speaker 3: In your boot, man. 00:21:08 Speaker 1: You know what I mean? 00:21:09 Speaker 2: It scared the hell out of me. I would put that up there with top five moments that I've been truly scared. I just didn't expect it, didn't know about it, never read about it. 00:21:18 Speaker 3: But it didn't do anything to you? Or is it just a spike? 00:21:20 Speaker 1: No, no, no. 00:21:20 Speaker 2: It's just a spike. But it works. It works. So you've got to imagine if a predator grabs a Bushmaster and it's not able to defend itself with its fangs, well, it's just going to scare him with this secondary punch that's a stab, any logical predator is going to run from that. Not to mention most of the animals in the jungle know that a Bushmaster is bad news. Just like even elephants, you know, a King Cobra will raise up its head. I spent a lot of time in India. A King Cobra will raise up its head and look at an elephant. You'd be like, look, if you want it, I'll give it. The elephants know. They know. They're like, yeah, we're not going to step on you. 00:21:56 Speaker 1: Don't worry. 00:21:57 Speaker 2: We'll go around. And that's fine. That's why they have the hood. It's to say back off, just like a rattlesnake's rattle. It's just like, hey, man, I don't want you to meet God, but I can make the introduction. 00:22:09 Speaker 1: You know, here's one more we kind of solved yesterday when we were talking about you coming on. This is my second to last one. Is I, until yesterday, believed... Uh-oh. I'm going to have to make fun of you. I, until yesterday, believed that there was a little teeny catfish. 00:22:28 Speaker 4: Okay. 00:22:29 Speaker 1: That climbs up your pecker. 00:22:30 Speaker 4: Okay. 00:22:31 Speaker 1: And lodges into your urethra. I believe that so much that I was wondering yesterday, is this a female problem as well? Like, will it lodge itself in the female urethra? What made you stop believing in this yesterday? Someone, while I was talking to you, might've been him, was looking online and they're like, that's not true. 00:22:52 Speaker 2: Uh, I think it is. The candiru is a fish. 00:22:54 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's him. 00:22:55 Speaker 2: Yeah. Candiru. So we have large candirus that we catch. It's so annoying, man, when you're fishing and we, I know what they feel like now and they're horrible. They're just, I mean, it's a junk fish. You can't eat it. They're foul. It's a parasite fish. Okay. And in the Amazon, they, they have these barely eyes. They're sort of light sensing organs. They're incredibly archaic looking. 00:23:15 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:23:16 Speaker 2: And they grab onto your hook and they come up and they make a terrible noise. They make a terrible vocalization. Locals just kill them and throw them in the jungle, let something else eat them. 00:23:24 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:23:25 Speaker 2: But apparently there's a tiny species of candiru that swims up the gills of fish. So when there's rushing water, they can swim up there and latch like a lamprey. 00:23:35 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:23:36 Speaker 2: And then you won't get them out. So apparently in the annals of history, three or four people have been swimming in the Amazon, submerged in the water, and had one swim up their dick. This has happened, and it is possible for women, although I imagine that the entry is a little more complicated. But it's like, I'm way more worried about getting struck by lightning, getting in a car crash, getting bitten by a venomous snake. There's about a thousand things I'm worried about, not dickfish. 00:24:04 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:24:04 Speaker 5: I don't want to overstate how, but hearing about it, I would never not go in the water because of something like that, but in the water, I was definitely always like, How serious are people about this? 00:24:18 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:24:18 Speaker 1: The last one I'll hit you with I know is not true, but I loved it. It's these guys. So in Bolivia, these guys were telling me, they're like, hey, heads up. They're saying this through a translator, but heads up. If you see a beautiful woman, if you see a beautiful woman rise out of the water. Oh, no. 00:24:36 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:24:37 Speaker 1: Telling you she's drowning, don't go help her. 00:24:42 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:24:43 Speaker 1: Because she will die. she will grab you and drag you under and they'll never see you again. Heads up. 00:24:50 Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's as far as it went? 00:24:53 Speaker 3: But it was like the sirens from The Odyssey. 00:24:56 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:24:57 Speaker 3: When I say that, I mean Homer's Odyssey. 00:24:59 Speaker 1: I haven't been fortunate enough to watch the new Odyssey movie. But I want you to know this is coming from a deeply literary perspective, not a contemporary film-going perspective. It's like the sirens in The Odyssey. 00:25:09 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:25:10 Speaker 3: They beckon to you. 00:25:11 Speaker 1: Yeah, so. 00:25:14 Speaker 2: I'm so sorry to have to tell you that that's somewhat true. 00:25:19 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:25:20 Speaker 2: Okay. Because apparently there's, I was on a river where they said, you know, there's pink river dolphins here. And they said every now and then a man will mistake a dolphin for a woman drowning. Oh. And, you know, you'll see this sort of very human-like skin and he'll rush out into the water and grab this dolphin, which doesn't sound realistic. The dolphins are curious. 00:25:41 Speaker 4: Okay. 00:25:42 Speaker 2: And again, in the annals of the, on all these tributaries. And they'll bump you along and push you under. And they'll bump you along and push you under. And then there's at least a few instances. They told me on the river, I don't want to have to tell you this, but they told me on the river, they said, you've got to be careful. We don't know. There could be people in the Amazon right now listening to this. They said, if a dolphin makes advances on you, whatever you do, don't have sex with the dolphin. And I went, thanks for the note. noted yeah next river and then i was like hey are there you know i want to get a picture of a dolphin you know or i'd like to see you i never saw one and i said you know are there dolphins here and the guy goes yeah he goes but if you make love to a dolphin you have to stay in the shallow so he goes because if they take you deep you'll drown and they they won't really they don't want to kill you but they will out of pure passion you know what how many of you were fucking dolphins i said why is everyone telling me this and they all kind of laughed they said no no yeah but at the end of the day just be careful you know And this was serious to them. One guy told me a halfway reasonable story where he said this dolphin was coming close to his wife and his daughter while they were washing. But then they figured out over time that there was a cadence to it. They figured out that the dolphin was only coming at certain times in the month. 00:26:55 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:26:56 Speaker 2: They figured out it was a menstrual cycle. 00:26:58 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:26:58 Speaker 2: So the dolphin was picking up on the smell. 00:27:00 Speaker 1: Sure, yeah. 00:27:01 Speaker 2: And coming in. And the dolphin was just spending time with them. being really friendly or just like swim around to the point they could almost reach out and touch it. Dolphins being friendly, this freaked this guy out. So he shot the dolphin, which, which I think, you know, that's the coolest thing in the world. You have a friendly dolphin coming by. There's certain, there's, I don't think there's any records of dolphins, you know, attacking humans in a predatory way, at least the pink river dolphin, but they, the locals definitely have a complex relationship. And there's always been this sort of, whether it's seals and silkies and the sirens in the ocean. When you're out there and you start hallucinating, I think pretty much anything can look like a woman. 00:27:40 Speaker 1: Is that river dolphin, that pink river dolphin, are they moving in and out of saline water? 00:27:48 Speaker 3: Can they live their whole life and never touch salt water? Great question. 00:27:52 Speaker 2: Apparently, when the continents were connected, the Amazon and the Congo were touching. The original watershed flowed. from east to west in this sort of proto-Congo river system. The continents separated, and then South America hit the Nazca Plate, which tilted the whole end up, and you got the Andes Mountains. And then, now it had, it was still a basin, and so it had salinated water in it. And then as that started draining out, before the jungle ever formed, as the jungle formed, you had these these species like freshwater stingrays, manatees, dolphins that gradually adapted to desalinated freshwater life. 00:28:32 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's real interesting. All them damn stingrays running around Earth is crazy, man. 00:28:35 Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. 00:28:36 Speaker 1: Yeah. Like, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the ocean, stingrays. 00:28:41 Speaker 2: Oh, no. I mean, they're just jungle stingrays. 00:28:43 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:28:43 Speaker 2: And they're beautiful. 00:28:44 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:28:45 Speaker 2: So they've figured it out. They totally, totally unrelated. I mean, where I work is thousands of miles away from the ocean. It's about as far away from an ocean as you can get, you know, there's only a few places where you're that far from an ocean. I mean, because you think you start in the Pacific, you're over the Andes down into the Amazon. And then it's like 4,000, at least 4,000 kilometers to Rio. You know, it's like you're, it's the whole Amazon basin to the Atlantic. 00:29:11 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:29:11 Speaker 2: So the animals that are living up in the little tiny tributary headwaters, like where you were in Bolivia, chock full of stingrays. No access. I mean, totally freshwater species for millions of years. 00:29:21 Speaker 1: You don't even need to comment on this, but I just invite you to think about it. I can't remember what the distance is. So over 100 miles away from where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico. 00:29:33 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:29:35 Speaker 3: The bottom of that river is below sea level. 00:29:36 Speaker 2: How is that possible? possible? Is this like a deep trench? Just hold that in your mind. 00:29:48 Speaker 1: I don't know yet. We're going to interview a guy that knows a lot about this subject. 00:29:52 Speaker 2: Because in the Amazon, from the headwaters where I work and where you visited, to the Atlantic, it's only a few hundred meters drop. Like it's not like thousands of meters over the whole continent. You're going thousands of miles and it's nothing. And that's why the rivers are squiggling like that. That's why they S up like a snake, because when there's a steep decline, river's going to flow straight, you know, the easiest path when the landscape's that flat, it's kind of just finding the, the easiest path along the way. And that's where you get those, you know, as the crow flies in the Amazon, you go, that's just 60 miles. Well, if we're going by boat, it could be 300 miles. It's totally different. Crow flies versus river miles, a completely different thing down there. 00:30:36 Speaker 1: All right, let's get more serious. Not that this problem with these ladies dragging the hunters is. 00:30:42 Speaker 3: A serious issue, but we'll get more serious. Help me. 00:30:49 Speaker 1: And others that haven't been lucky to explore this area much. When... When we say the Amazon, what are we talking about? I mean, it's a river, it's a jungle, it's like all these different countries. Help us understand what the Amazon or the Amazon jungle, what does that mean? Oh, boy. 00:31:11 Speaker 2: What I can tell you is this. When I was a kid, I grew up, my parents, they said, you're not allowed to watch anything. Nature documentaries is all right, so I got to watch nature documentaries. And I would always gravitate towards the ones that were about the rainforest, whether it was gorillas or whatever. But the Amazon, they were like, this is the largest contiguous rainforest on Earth. When you look at planet Earth and you see South America there, it's this giant green patch. And so in my mind, I said, man, this is the largest wilderness. Some of the largest wilderness areas where there's just no people. And you say that system has been developing for 55 million years. untouched so you talk about old growth this is original growth never touched in much of the amazon and you talk about species you know rainforests hold about half of the species terrestrial species on earth and they're only on six percent of the land mass Half of the species on earth on 6% of landmass. 00:32:08 Speaker 1: Oh, I got you. 00:32:09 Speaker 3: Along the rainforest. 00:32:10 Speaker 1: Half the species on earth crammed on six, 50% of the species crammed on 6% of the space. 00:32:15 Speaker 2: It's wild. And so there's so mega biodiverse. 00:32:17 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:32:18 Speaker 2: And in the Amazon basin. And so, you know, I just, I just always had it in my head that it was almost mythical. And when I grew up. 00:32:26 Speaker 1: That's what I have in mind. 00:32:28 Speaker 2: Yeah. It's sort of, you know, just mist and giant trees and undiscovered species and, know brightly colored birds and super dangerous insects and giant anacondas and and we think of you know we'll get to this but you know top-down predator ecology you're talking about murderer's row it's not one you got harpy eagles and giant river otters and anacondas and cayman and jaguars and there's several in any given spot in the amazon of these major predators and then just the millions and millions you think of a 160 foot tall tree that's 1,000 years old. You do a time lapse on that tree from the time, from 1,000 years ago to now, and that tree's been sitting out there. 00:33:07 Speaker 1: 1,000-year-old trees. 00:33:08 Speaker 2: You think of all those historical events. You just go to World War I, World War II, our great-great-great-grandparents. That tree was standing out there in the middle of the jungle. And if you do a time lapse on that sapling as it grows to be a tree that's bigger than this room, thousands and thousands of species moving up and down that thing as all the years pass by. And so this single tree that has thousands of species that have lived on it, and each of these trees are sort of a bio water pump, pumping water up. And so trillions of liters of water every day are coming off the Amazon rainforest and forming that weather system that makes it a rainforest. And my brain loved the ethos, just like we love the the feeling of the mountains and antlers and clear water and sort of, there's a feeling that comes with the American wilderness, that feeling of the American wild. And everybody knows what that's like, even if you've never been there. And with jungle, there was sort of this drumbeat feeling of like raindrops and arrow frogs and really sheltered green. You're underneath 100 feet, 120, 140 feet of canopy, and it's a 3D environment. You're not just walking on a trail and you can look around. No, you're walking on a trail and you're on a little trail that's a tunnel. 00:34:25 Speaker 3: That's a great point, man. 00:34:27 Speaker 2: Some of the 50% of the animals that live in a rainforest live in the canopy or off the ground in branches and never touch the ground. So that's a whole 3D environment where all the wildlife is and you don't have access to it. 00:34:39 Speaker 3: That's a great point. You're around here. 00:34:42 Speaker 2: Everything occurs at eye level yep everything is at eye level yeah and so it's trippy you're almost at the bottom of a green ocean yeah so that's a great point so getting lost out there feels incredibly claustrophobic and so people say what's the most dangerous thing in the amazon is honestly just the size of the amazon because you get off a trail you have no navigational points You're just dead reckoning through the jungle, which most people can't do. And even if you are good, you come to a tree fall where there's two acres of trees that have come down and you can't make it through there. And there are wasp nests and venomous snakes and, and thorns. It's, and then you gotta make it around that, which is a, you know, let's say a mile long detour potentially, and then you hit a swamp and then you gotta make it around that. And all of a sudden you're going miles in the wrong direction or your other, your only other alternative. is to hack your way through that dense thing. Open old growth forest, the canopy is so dense that it is kind of open in the lower, under the understory. But man, I've hit places on solos where for one or two days, you feel like you're never going to get out. It feels like you're under just this impenetrable mess of branches. And it's kind of terrifying. 00:36:00 Speaker 1: One of the things that struck me is, especially in the evening or in the early morning, is you know the stress of having just too loud a noise? When most people think about that, you always associate it with music being too loud or a building having poor acoustics and it's too loud. But such loud animal noise, especially when you throw in the howler monkey and everything, Such loud animal noise that you, I would just catch myself sometimes wanting to go like, shut up. Everybody has to shut up. 00:36:37 Speaker 3: Because like bewildering amounts of noise. 00:36:41 Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, that's the dawn chorus in the Amazon. It's funny because at night you hear the frogs going except times a million. And then there's this really quiet period around 3.30 to 4 a.m. Things get a little bit quiet. And then all of a sudden you'll hear that first bird that goes and then all of a sudden the macaw you'll hear a set of macaws on the horizon howler monkeys just before dawn at that purple purple point oh and you're like oh there they are and then the other group will start answering and the jungle starts rumbling and you hear the tinamoos popping up and the macaws and the motmots and everybody starts turning on spider monkeys start calling and all of a sudden the jungle turns on sun comes over the horizon and it's just a party and then everybody's up and everybody's trying to get to it's great Same thing in the evening, you get down, and again, somehow it's the Tindamoo's at the crepuscular transitions. The undulated Tindamoo's side, it's sort of the anthem of the Amazon. And you get to this point, you're like, wow, that was a beautiful, we get to a high point, and you go, that was a beautiful sunset. And then you hear that first wah, you hear that first frog, and then you hear something else answer, and you're like, oh man, they just, it's like someone's switching on the lights at night. It's like, oh, we just switched over to the nocturnal chorus. And it's, it's, it's really beautiful. If we were in a swamp in the rainy season, when the frogs decide to mate, I would have to be screaming in order for you to hear me. 00:37:59 Speaker 3: Yeah. It's like stressful. I'm sure you're used to it. 00:38:01 Speaker 2: I actually find it very, it's like a blanket. It's falling asleep to that. Yeah. You know, people, people I find when I come back, people, you know, people like, oh, I, this is my noise machine. And I'm like, I'm going to throw that out the window. Um, I fall, I've fallen asleep to frogs my whole life. And, and, and I love it. It's kind of like a blanket when I come. stay in a hotel room and all you can hear is an air conditioner or that building sound i i get i find it very i'm the guy that'll put on rainforest sounds to go to sleep you know i got kind of used to it. 00:38:32 Speaker 1: Let me let me ask you about the amazon in a different way um i mean you're you're you talking about what it's like to be in it is is is puts you there and it's beautiful but like let me let me try to express my question this way it would be If you talk to Americans, you. 00:38:48 Speaker 3: Say, let's say you go the Rockies. 00:38:50 Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. The Rockies. Right. People have a picture comes in their mind, a picture, a mountain landscape comes in their mind. Right. But then it'd be like, not many people that have visited the Rockies. It invokes an image in their mind. Right. 00:39:08 Speaker 3: They might think of skiing. They might think of elk, whatever. 00:39:10 Speaker 1: They think of something when you hear the Rockies, but not many people would be able to come and say from other parts of the country would be like, well, You know, the southernmost, right? 00:39:20 Speaker 3: They sort of begin, whatever. 00:39:21 Speaker 1: I don't even know. They sort of begin in New Mexico, right? The spine runs up. There's these ancillary chains coming off them. They go up into... British Columbia or whatever the hell it is. Like, we know what it means, but we don't know what it means. 00:39:36 Speaker 3: Yeah, the average person. 00:39:38 Speaker 1: So layout for me in sort of a, like in a, layout for me in, not geologically, but like geopolitically with country boundaries or whatever, like, how big is it? What do we mean? 00:39:52 Speaker 2: So I always forget that there's so many numbers, you know, 20 trillion liters of water come off the Amazon every day. And well, look, I'll give it to you the best. 00:40:00 Speaker 3: I got it. 00:40:00 Speaker 2: Brazil contains 60% of the Amazon. 00:40:03 Speaker 1: It does. 00:40:04 Speaker 2: It does. 00:40:04 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:40:05 Speaker 2: That's unfortunate. 00:40:07 Speaker 3: And so they're not who you want to have 60%. 00:40:10 Speaker 2: Well, the problem, and we're learning this right now, and I'd love to ask you questions about it, but you know, in conservation, they say that the victories are temporary and the losses are final. Once you lose that old growth, And so the thing is, you can say, well, all this is protected. Well, then the administration changes and they come in and they go, well, actually, we're going to use it all for oil. And so Brazil, the last few presidents, we had Lula who said, he got in and he said, protecting the Amazon is part of my mandate. My mission as a president. And then you had Bolsonaro that was going, we have to open up the Amazon. We got to make new roads. I want to develop. I think that, you know, try, he was, I mean, this guy was coming out. This guy was coming for him. He was going, you know, tribal people are a relic of a time past and we need to get them to catch up. He wasn't like, oh, you know, the Warani and the Zingu people and all, you know, these are great assets to our country, Amerindian nations that need to be respected and, you know, respectfully integrated into our idea as a national, as a country. He was like, we got to get rid of them. 00:41:11 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:41:12 Speaker 2: And he was saying it publicly. 00:41:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, he had a very, like, very aggressive mid-1800s view. 00:41:17 Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it was strange. It was spooky to hear it. And he did a lot of damage. 00:41:21 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:41:22 Speaker 2: And then Lula got in and it calmed down a little bit. But now I think there's either another Bolsonaro or the same Bolsonaro almost running again. It's always terrifying for the Amazon. 00:41:31 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:41:32 Speaker 3: So that's... They got... Okay, I didn't realize that. 00:41:34 Speaker 1: So they got 60% of what we... When I say the Amazon jungle and I'm picturing the scene you laid out, they're sitting on 60% of that. 00:41:42 Speaker 2: Just this big basin. 00:41:43 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:41:44 Speaker 3: Columbia has some, right? 00:41:45 Speaker 2: Columbia has a tiny bit. They got a little corner of the Amazon, the upper Amazon. Okay. Ecuador has a significant portion. 00:41:51 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:41:51 Speaker 2: Peru has the next, next to Brazil, you have Peru. And Peru, if you're looking at a map, Peru has the headwaters of the Amazon. 00:41:59 Speaker 4: Okay. 00:41:59 Speaker 2: So, you know, there's, John Hemming described it as the tree of rivers. You know, you got the mouth in the Atlantic. 00:42:06 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:42:06 Speaker 2: And then you have this giant, you know, just lay a tree down. You got the headwaters. Sure. And you have this huge artery coming down. We, I work in the upper branches. I'm all the way up at the top of the tree. 00:42:16 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:42:17 Speaker 2: And because of geological conditions, features in isolation, you know, you got the Andes mountains that are extremely, you know, incredibly intense to navigate. And then you have all this jungle that was always impenetrable. And so, you know, people could, you could take a ship from the Atlantic and drive straight up into Manaus. You could keep going into Loreto, Peru, which is, which is, I think several thousand, it might be the, the, the furthest inland shipping port on earth. That's, I remember that's a superlative I heard, but it's like, there are tankers going in. along the main Amazon channel now. Then from there, from Iquitos, then it branches out into a lot of smaller tributaries. They do not connect to our part of the basin. They're separated. There's different drainages, just like you said. So where I am, we're in the Madre de Dios, which is you have the Manu River, and you have the Tempopada River, and the Madre de Dios River. And so these are these other major rivers. 00:43:11 Speaker 1: These are all Peruvian rivers. 00:43:12 Speaker 2: These are all Peruvian rivers. And And so the Amazon is this giant basin where everything is connected. It's this huge rainforest. And when I say everything is connected, I mean that the rivers all connect through political boundaries. You know, the Heath river runs between Peru and Bolivia and they've protected it on both sides. I believe it's Boa Hacen in a national park in the Tambo Pata and then Medidi on the other side. And they share the river as a border. Both countries have agreed that that is some of the most pristine rainforest on earth that has to be protected, which is, which is rare. 00:43:44 Speaker 3: And, um, Like that level of protection. 00:43:47 Speaker 1: So, so in this, all these countries that hold part of it, Bolivia holds part of it. 00:43:52 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:43:52 Speaker 1: And, and, and they have done, they have done forward thinking protections in alignment with a neighboring country. And that cooperation is rare. 00:44:03 Speaker 2: That cooperation is very rare. There's so many examples that I could think of where you have this beautiful national park and then you have a boundary. And then on the other side of it is complete destruction. 00:44:14 Speaker 1: I see. 00:44:14 Speaker 2: And, Now, the other note on Brazil is I, in college, I did a study abroad with Columbia University, and we were out in the Atlantic forest. And most people, you say- What does that mean? Exactly. And so the Atlantic, you think of the Amazon, and to the north, you have the Orinoco River Basin, which is another incredible rainforest river basin. And then here, below the Amazon, in Southeast Brazil, you had the Atlantic forest with a high endemism, a lot of species that occurred there and nowhere else. You had the golden lion, tamarin, all these other species. Different ecosystem in the Amazon. There's something like 4% of it left. Of what that Atlantic forest was? Yeah, it's gone. 4%? 4%. And so you have Rio and Sao Paulo and sort of Brazil, the country, is developed in that area. That's where they developed. That forest is wiped out. There are conservation areas and little islands of biodiversity. But as a functioning system, it's gone. 00:45:15 Speaker 3: So Rio de Janeiro was, that's in the rainforest. 00:45:21 Speaker 2: It was. I haven't been to Rio, so I can't speak in an educated way about exactly how it is. But I also know that there's quite a bit of forest right outside of Rio. I know it's from documentaries where they're like sort of that boundary where like, here's the city. And then there's boa constrictors and macaws. And like, I don't, you know, it's completely foreign to me. But when you think of this giant, rainforest it's it's really hard not to just wax poetic about this but it's not just something that's held in seven or eight latin american countries but it is this undeniable geographical feature where everything runs together where the rain that comes off the the mist that comes off the canopy creates the rain that that makes this whole rainforest possible and when you're there i mean you've seen it but it's this whole system is water water and forest and water and forest and In the morning, there's all this mist coming off the, the, the canopy. And so with the Amazon, the re aside from the fact that the, you know, there's undiscovered medicines and more species than anywhere else, 1500, no 4,000 species of butterflies that we know of across the basin. 00:46:25 Speaker 1: Is that right? 00:46:26 Speaker 2: Highest number of dragonflies spiders. You know, there's, there's, I think Peru has more birds than any other country. So birding is huge there. And then, you know, harpy eagles, macaws, everything. 00:46:38 Speaker 1: I saw one of those harpies. 00:46:39 Speaker 2: Yeah? 00:46:40 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:46:40 Speaker 2: They're very hard to see. 00:46:41 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:46:42 Speaker 2: Because they stay in the canopy. 00:46:43 Speaker 3: Yeah. We saw, I mean, I wanted to see it. We saw it. 00:46:46 Speaker 2: Wow. 00:46:46 Speaker 1: And it was regarded as that we were lucky. 00:46:49 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:46:49 Speaker 1: By the guides we were with. 00:46:51 Speaker 3: Yeah. It was, we were lucky to see it. 00:46:53 Speaker 2: I think it's sort of, a harpy eagle is sort of like a wolverine where it's like, you're not, they're uncommon throughout their range. A visual encounter with one is not something you can guarantee. 00:47:02 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:47:03 Speaker 2: And I mean, we only see, I'd say maybe one a year and that's when we're living out there. But the Amazon is such a system and it's so complex and on every acre there's millions of species and such complex botany and the trees that as these Latin American countries begin to eat into the Amazon, the challenge here is that we've already destroyed 20% of the Amazon. And so as sort of a global society. 00:47:33 Speaker 1: That's the current estimate, 20% of it's gone. 00:47:36 Speaker 2: Roughly. 00:47:37 Speaker 3: It's hard to estimate. I would have expected you to say. 00:47:40 Speaker 1: A higher number. 00:47:41 Speaker 2: You know, 20% is the established normalized number that we say. 00:47:45 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:47:46 Speaker 2: You know, it could have been higher in the last few years. But I would think that with, you know, sort of satellite mapping and everything, we have a pretty clear view of that. 00:47:53 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:47:54 Speaker 2: Maybe it's 22% or 18%. 00:47:55 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:47:58 Speaker 2: With the Amazon, the worry is. And there's a lot of scientists warning about this. This is a pretty simple equation. If you don't have enough forest to keep that massive amount of moisture coming up off the trees, well, then you're not going to have as much rain. And if you don't have as much rain, that forest is going to start to dry out in a snowball effect. And they're worried that we can pass a threshold that there is absolutely no going back from a sort of one way door where we've removed too much of the rainforest. And no matter what we do, it's not going to replace that amount of moisture. And then It's not just the Amazon creating its own weather system. It's also there's sand from the Sahara that's coming over the Amazon and delivering nutrients to the forest. And so there's sort of this interchange between Africa and the Amazon. And these, I just, you know, I've become so immersed in these complex systems and in the beauty of deep wilderness that to me, when I hear about what's happening to the Amazon and when I watch what's happening to the Amazon on the ground, where areas of forest that I loved, that I grew up exploring in my 20s, get incinerated to the ground. Those thousand year old trees turned over, burned. I'm talking about million dollar mahogany trees just burned because they're just building a road. They're trying to get access. They want to do cattle farms or grow papaya or cocaine or whatever it is. They just want land, and the jungle's in the way. And for all of history, it was the impenetrable jungle, the heart of darkness. Now, they have excavators. And they have the funding. And the Chinese just built a giant shipping port in Lima. because they want to start getting into the Amazon. They want to start extracting resources. And so they're talking about building a railway system either through or over the Andes to start sucking on the Western Amazon, which is terrifying. Because whether you care about nature or you don't, we need this system. I'm sure that everyone that listens to this podcast knows that without clean water and clean air, nothing else you're interested in is going to happen. And the Amazon, it seems like it sort of puts it on a global challenge. This is not up to us. It's not about whether you believe in it or not. Do you think that we should protect this monument? No, no. It's about survival, too. This is not just, is it pretty? It matters to our health. 00:50:24 Speaker 1: The point you're making, I never thought about it at landscape scale, but there's this idea, like take the passenger pigeon, which went extinct in the early 19th, well, officially extinct in 1913 or something. 00:50:34 Speaker 3: But There's an idea that. 00:50:40 Speaker 1: There was no version where you could have a few. 00:50:44 Speaker 2: Interesting. 00:50:44 Speaker 1: You had to have all of them or none of them, meaning their whole system, right, how they functioned and operated relied on there being millions. Yeah. And there wasn't a way to have 100. No. And so to hear you talk about the Amazon as being That maybe you can't have a little. 00:51:07 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:51:09 Speaker 1: Because the thing that generates the rainforest, like, at a point, it's either you got to have X amount or none. 00:51:18 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:51:18 Speaker 1: You can't just have a little patch. 00:51:20 Speaker 5: No. 00:51:20 Speaker 1: Down the road. 00:51:21 Speaker 2: No, and we can't turn it into an archipelago of, like, protected areas and desert. I don't want to say desert wastelands, but just wastelands. 00:51:28 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:51:30 Speaker 2: And so where we are. 00:51:31 Speaker 3: Maybe it has to be big. 00:51:32 Speaker 2: It has to be big. That's the thing. It must be. And so where we work in the Amazon, illegal gold mining, there's gold in parts of the Amazon, but you don't get gold nuggets. You get sedimentary gold. In the sand, you have to put it on your finger, and then you go, oh, there's a little piece of gold. It's much better with a magnifying glass. But if you were to cut down the forest, burn the forest, remove the forest, flood it, even better, do it to a lake, drain the lake, and then use a hose and a motor to just suck the ground up, and then get the gold out of that. 00:52:05 Speaker 1: Plaster mining, yeah. 00:52:07 Speaker 2: Using mercury, and then you burn off the mercury with a blowtorch, you're left with this little bit of gold. But you have to deforest and destroy unbelievable amounts of land. And so, not too far away from where I am, there's hundreds of kilometers that have been denuded and destroyed, turned into a wasteland. And I was down there with ABC News, and we literally saw tornadoes of dust. There was a dust storm there. in the Amazon because that part has been destroyed so badly. And that sandy environment, the sun is beating down on it, the mercury pollution, you're not, you know, and even if you were to leave it, a thousand years, a few thousand years before it becomes jungle again, like this is irreparable damage we're doing to the earth. And, you know, when it's plentiful, you know, in the areas that I protect with jungle keepers, you dip a hook in the river. Try not to come out with a fish. You know, it's just, it's so, it's original growth forest. And I think that, you know, I've heard different accounts of how many, what the populations of animals were in the U.S., you know, prior to 1700. The numbers are staggering, you know, what there was. 00:53:19 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:53:19 Speaker 2: When there was habitat everywhere. And in the Amazon, it's like, man, just to, you know, you were in the Bolivian headwaters. I'm sure it was the same thing. It was like, there's just animals everywhere. 00:53:29 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:53:29 Speaker 2: And it's beautiful to have that. But it's not an issue of whether or not it's beautiful or preferable or some people want it. In this case, the system depends on that purity. You can't remove all of these things. And it's very dangerous. I think the information wars are very interesting where people go, like you and I were just speaking about this before we got on, where someone goes, you know, we could make an access road into Yosemite and it'll be great because then more people can experience Yosemite. And it's like, You, sir, are trying to destroy Yosemite. We're already having traffic jams. You're just trying to get your resort access to Yosemite. 00:54:07 Speaker 1: No, they play it. They play it. They play a word game where acts, people, hunters, whatever, anglers, people out in the outdoors, access is a positive word. And so they rebrand certain efforts to be that it's access. So right now we're going through a thing where they're rebranding lot of efforts as fire mitigation which is necessary but they're they're doing things that don't service fire mitigation but just talking about that part because that part's necessary or being like oh no it's access i thought you guys loved. 00:54:45 Speaker 2: Access yeah yeah yeah road building is access well it's also it's real easy to sell like you said like people don't really know what the rockies are and so when you're selling america on a on a on an idea of what can be done in a wilderness area so well we got we got to make these these fire stopping roads well i want to stop fires that sounds great support it and it's like yeah no you know you know so you can tell people that have never been there you know we have to do that you know in this they're not gonna you know i could say in the in the there's just so much rainforest never stops raining you know if you want if you ever want to have the sun come out it's like you could just you could sell it a certain way if you wanted to but Fact is, is that we're at a very dangerous point in the history of the Amazon in 55 million years where the future of it is uncertain. And I am not a climate alarmist at all, but the Amazon rainforest does so much to stabilize global climate and to influence. I mean, what we're getting up here with hurricanes and what's happening on the ocean levels, there's so there's such a tremendous influence that comes off the Amazon and those moisture systems that supports the agriculture all over South America. and those economies, which influence our economy, that to mess with this system is suicidal. And so what I've been doing over the last 20 years is working with the local people. You know, it's funny, just the other day, I posted something about this new road that's coming in and threatening the reserve that I'm trying to create. We're trying to make a national park, and there's this road that's racing in, and there's our protected land, and they're trying to get around us and in before we're able to protect this land. 00:56:18 Speaker 3: And so it's a race. 00:56:19 Speaker 2: Can we raise the funding to protect this land before this road comes in? And someone commented and they went, if only there was a way that we could join the indigenous people and collaborate and get them the funding they need to protect that land so that it doesn't get destroyed. And I was like, That's what Jungle Keepers is. Like, I've been doing that for a living. If only there was a way. Yeah. You know, if only there was a way that I could walk without always injuring the bottoms of my feet. Like, bro, you're going to love shoes. And so I, but that's what we've done. I met this guy, Juan Julio Durand, who is, he's an Eseha Indian. And so he grew up no shoes. 00:56:57 Speaker 1: Tell me what that means. You know, can you hold that for a minute? Because I want to ask you, you mentioned something. 00:57:02 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:57:03 Speaker 1: No, I, I, I really want to get to your work, but I got another thing that I wanted to ask you about it. Cause this will help explain your work too. You mentioned, um, illegal, like illegal mining, illegal mining, illegal forestry, legal logging. 00:57:21 Speaker 3: I need you to help me understand that. 00:57:24 Speaker 1: Like here, there might be an unpopular mining project or an unpopular logging project. 00:57:31 Speaker 5: Right. 00:57:32 Speaker 1: But, It's not illegal, right? So I have a hard time understanding the sort of logistics and scale. It would be laughable that someone would sneak out into the national forest in the United States of America and start hauling out truckloads of logs illegally. 00:57:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, I understand what you're saying. 00:57:56 Speaker 1: It might be a policy position that you don't like, but there's a way this happens. So Help me get logistically how it could be that you're filling ships with logs illegally and some version of a cop or whatever isn't able to go, but where are these logs from? Yeah. 00:58:20 Speaker 3: How does this happen? 00:58:22 Speaker 2: That's a great question, and the answer's fun. In the Amazon, so you fly into Iquitos or you fly into Puerto Maldonado or you fly into Manaus. You fly into an area with an airport. 00:58:33 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:58:34 Speaker 2: And then you go three days by river. And you end up at the last place with a town. The last place, I mean, once you leave the last place with an ATM, let's say, right? 00:58:44 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:58:45 Speaker 2: You go sort of off the grid. And then you end up at the last place that will sell you cigarettes and a Coca-Cola. 00:58:51 Speaker 1: I got you. 00:58:52 Speaker 2: And then you're just in the wilderness. 00:58:53 Speaker 3: And that might be three days by river. 00:58:55 Speaker 2: That might be three days by river. And then you're just off the map in the sense that there's no one out there. and there's really no one out there. And so, you know, if you get into a dispute, I mean, you get into a dispute, whatever happens happens because that's it. There's, there's no, there are no cops out there. There's cops three days back that way, but they don't have the fuel gasoline or inclination to come out and mix it up with us. And so that's why you have the Amazonian back country. You know, the West is still being won. It's wild. So they might be within the territory of Peru and, or the territory of Brazil, but you're way past society. You're out in unconstructed dream space. 00:59:35 Speaker 1: But you're producing a product that's huge, and it needs to be exported. 00:59:39 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:59:40 Speaker 2: They have an answer for that. They take the chainsaws, and I think we call it an Alaska mill, but down there they get those long steel chainsaws, and they put a rig on either side, and they have the frame. And so they cut down a log where the trunk is standing nine feet high. 00:59:57 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:59:57 Speaker 2: And then they'll just start ripping boards. And they'll sit out there for a month ripping one tree, get it into boards. 01:00:04 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:00:04 Speaker 2: I mean, what these guys do is just- And. 01:00:06 Speaker 3: This could be mahogany or something. 01:00:07 Speaker 2: Mahogany, ironwood. A lot of people in different countries have different trees that they call ironwood. It's just a common name. 01:00:14 Speaker 1: Got it, got it. 01:00:15 Speaker 2: We have diptyrics, micrantha. And they've just been going through a horrible period of extraction. They did the mahogany boom about 20 years ago. Where they got every mahogany that was within two kilometers of the river. 01:00:28 Speaker 1: Just hunting them down. 01:00:29 Speaker 2: Just hunting them down. They'd send out local, local tribe guys who really could walk in the forest with no map. The real guys, barefoot. And they would go out there and they would go, okay, I know where most of the mahogany trees are. And then the logging crews would go out and there'd be like one guy with a chainsaw. 01:00:46 Speaker 1: And they're milling them. They're milling. On site. 01:00:50 Speaker 2: I see. 01:00:50 Speaker 1: On site. 01:00:51 Speaker 2: So they knock them down. They sit out there in the jungle eating turtles and monkeys and piranha for three, four weeks at a time, living in the jungle. And I'm talking about in a way that would make any American outdoorsman cringe. People, you know, I post stuff where I'll go, oh, man, my boat sank. And we have a 30-foot canoe. You get crazy rain for 40 minutes. It fills up the boat, and the boat literally just sinks. 01:01:15 Speaker 1: Yeah, got it. While you're taking a nap or something. 01:01:19 Speaker 2: And people go, well, why don't you cover your boat? 01:01:22 Speaker 3: With what? 01:01:23 Speaker 2: You know, the nearest store is two days away. And even if I bring down a giant 30 foot tarp, it'll work for two months. And then what happens when it, you know, it's like, it's just nothing lasts in the jungle. So there's a reason we do things the way we do them. And the local guys, you know, your clothing's just going to get wet. And then when it gets wet and sweaty and you hang it over a stick at night, the moths and the mosquitoes, they're going to lay bot fly eggs on it. You're going to put your clothes back on and you're going to have bot flies burrowing into your skin. 01:01:49 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:01:50 Speaker 2: And so you know what? Forget the clothes. It's easier to just go bare shirt, bare chested. And so you just, you live out there and there's certain things that the ecosystem dictates. It kind of pushes you towards being naked, weirdly enough. 01:02:01 Speaker 1: Got it, got it. 01:02:03 Speaker 2: And so we go up to these logging camps and a lot of my local friends either are loggers or have been loggers at some point. And that's part of my work is turning them into rangers, giving them better pay. But a logging camp is an amazing thing because they're sitting out there with three chainsaws, a bunch of shotgun shells, one backyard shotgun where they bought a pipe and they figured out a trigger and they have the shells, but they've made the gun. And so I refuse to shoot. I did it a few times and then I'm like, you know what, for the sake of my eyes, no. There's a lot of output right by your face, of course. 01:02:41 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:02:42 Speaker 2: And they're just living out there for weeks. And so they mill the wood up into these giant boards that, you know, 12 foot, 15 foot long boards. Then they carry them on their backs. And I'm talking about a 350 pound piece of wood. That's 12 feet long. They carry them on their backs to the edge of the river where they pile them up. And now this could take another two weeks. So now you're talking about two weeks to cut it, two weeks to load it to the edge of the river. And then they cut down a few balsa trees or they'll use like a big oil drum with no oil in it and they'll make this float. And then they attach, they take one piece and they'll drill through it, make a hole and drop a motor in there. And they'll literally make a logging boat with these big flat beams of timber. 01:03:25 Speaker 1: Ship it down. 01:03:27 Speaker 2: And they, and they'll go down river slowly. And so if you run aground and you have, you know, 17 tons of timber, you have to figure out a way of winching that off the ground back into the channel. And these rivers are not deep. Or if you get stuck, they generally don't log in the height of the rainy season, but in the height of the rainy season on those riverbends, sometimes you get a 40-foot whirlpool that if you drive into it can be very bad news very quickly. That can flip a boat. And so these guys will spend another week going downriver with these logs where they'll get to the nearest place that has Coca-Cola cigarettes and shotgun shells. And there, then they unload it onto the dirt, and there there's trucks waiting. And those trucks will load up the wood, take it out on one of those roads, those access roads that are just kryptonite to the Amazon. And then when they get to the Trans-Amazon Highway, now what you're talking about is like, how is someone not finding out that this is illegal? Well, what they do is they'll just put, you know, tree species like kapok or something that's just, you know, a pulpwood that's not important. It's not an illegal tree. you know, mahogany at this point, it's illegal to cut mahogany. They'll just put the legal wood on top of the illegal wood. And it's so heavy that the, not to mention, but then you. 01:04:45 Speaker 3: Probably weaseled it. 01:04:46 Speaker 5: Yeah. 01:04:46 Speaker 3: You've weaseled it into where there is legal transport. 01:04:49 Speaker 2: There is legal. You've weaseled it in. And then there's just slipping the guy a hundred bucks and just saying, don't worry, just sign the papers. They sign the papers and it goes. And so everyone's making money. Everyone's happy. And the logs are just flying out. And we see these logs coming out of the jungle and Sometimes they're in milled boards and sometimes they have these ancient trees, these giants piled onto the back of these trucks and it's just horrifying. It just drives me crazy to watch this because each of those was a thousand year old story or at least a 500 year old story with all these animals living on it. And it's just being ripped out with no regard for, you know, I explain this to the locals where I go, you know, we still have deer in New York because we have a system. You are allowed to hunt a deer because they monitor how many deer there are. You know, we know there's a certain sustainable take and we manage the populations. Here, it's just unregulated. And so then, you know, that's logging. And then, you know, illegal gold mining. If me and you go far enough out, let's go six days out there. We'll set up a mining rig. We could work out there for seven months. From year to year, nobody's gonna go out there. It takes an expedition and it's sort of a serious expedition, boats. 01:06:06 Speaker 1: So in the mining, there's just the remoteness. 01:06:09 Speaker 3: Gives you an immunity. 01:06:10 Speaker 2: Nobody can get to you. And then the other thing is in the areas in La Pampas where they have, you can see it from space. There's a big scar on the Western Amazon. It's just this sand pit. And now they've developed this power where they're, they're like, we, you know, we have machine guns. We have, we, we guard the boundary of what we're doing. So when the Peruvian police, police are, you know, that's hilarious. We'll just kill him. 01:06:39 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:06:40 Speaker 2: You know, if the military comes in, they can go bag a bunch of these people, blow up their mining rigs. But even then, then they leave, you know, and we come back. 01:06:51 Speaker 1: So they, they operate with a, with the might of a, like a, of a funded organized criminal enterprise in some cases. Yeah. Yeah. 01:06:59 Speaker 2: And Peru has been trying to, to, to peruse credit. They've been trying to figure out how to get this under control. Cause it's not just the, the forest destruction. It's not just the mercury contamination. It's the destruction of watersheds that provides stability to the country. It's also that when you have huge areas of it's almost medieval rain, These are not areas with the rule of law. It's the Wild West. You have these teams of men working around the clock in mines, and so then you have drug problems, and then you have human trafficking where they're going out into the native communities to get prostitutes. It's just everything bad gets sucked into there, so it's in everyone's interest to stop the illegal gold mining. No one's come up with a good answer on how to do it, though. 01:07:46 Speaker 1: So in I want you to explain jungle keepers, but I guess within that explanation, as you're considering how you'd explain it, I have this question. It'd be if they're, if they're rogue and illegal anyway, and you are able to start an organization that buys land, right? Um, how do you deal with the, how do you deal with the illegal elements? They don't care who owns the land. They don't care if jungle keepers owns land. So like within your explanation, I mean, it's two part, right? Like, again, just to keep bringing it back for, you know, for Americans listening who understand law, like land ownership and stuff, a problem in the U S is not that you own land, but you can't control the people on your land, stealing your wood, mining your gold. 01:08:36 Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying? 01:08:37 Speaker 2: It's like, it's just, it's hilarious. Yeah. You can just make a call and it would be done. 01:08:40 Speaker 3: There's plenty of things wrong, but that's not a thing that's wrong. 01:08:43 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:08:44 Speaker 2: So people have this misconception where they go, well, nobody owns the Amazon. I go, we got to buy this land and protect it. And you always get those like sort of bunny huggers that go, you know, nobody owns the Amazon. And I'm like, is it an imaginary place in your mind? You know, it's not. not Avatar, it's the Amazon, it's on Earth. And so, what Peru has done is gone through and drawn these giant grids and I guess in some situations just squiggled with a pen and been like, hey, let's, because, you know, the idea that wilderness is not economically productive was a problem in all kinds of places. But they went through back in the day and they assigned lands to various stakeholders. Okay. So let's just say we give you 10,000 acres. Make it 20,000 acres. And you go, great, I'll pay you $ 6 for it. 01:09:35 Speaker 1: Who am I that has it? 01:09:36 Speaker 2: You're a proving guy. When the government formed, you went into the office and said, hey, you know, this land between the River So-and-So and the River So-and-So is really mine. You know, I've kind of always used that land. And they go, great, well, here, that's a concession. That's yours. Government owns it. 01:09:50 Speaker 3: You have a lease on it. Because I'm part of the political class? 01:09:52 Speaker 2: No, no, no. They gave it to local stakeholders. They really did. Okay. And they said, you guys can farm Brazil nuts. We have some mining and logging concessions. 01:10:01 Speaker 3: I have an interest here. 01:10:03 Speaker 1: I've been here. 01:10:04 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:10:04 Speaker 1: And they're like, now that we're assigning ownership, it sounds like you have basically squatters rights. 01:10:08 Speaker 2: And we're going to formalize it. That's huge in the Amazon. 01:10:11 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:10:11 Speaker 2: And so indigenous nations like everywhere else have to fight for their titled land so the community that jj my one julio my friend the guy that i've started jungle keepers with he's from this community where he grew up barefoot and they were local fishermen and bows and arrows and all this now the introduction of the shotgun and the chainsaw which only happened 50 years ago changed that and so he watched they had stable population of peccaries they had stable populations of spider monkeys howler monkeys all the game species like taper and fish, abundant fish in the rivers, and he watched his community go from this abundant place to all the big trees getting taken out, all the game species being annihilated, because there was no bag limit. It was just like, we're gonna go out and like we see a herd of 70 peccary, they're like, let's just surround them and get them all. So, you're annihilating herds, you're not taking one or two, you're just wiping them out at that point. And so, he watched that happen. He watched a climax ecosystem become a silent forest, secondary. 01:11:15 Speaker 5: Okay. 01:11:16 Speaker 2: And so he said, I want to protect the wildest place. So he went up this river and chose a spot. Now out there in these really wild spots. And he's tribal, obviously. He's from an indigenous. 01:11:26 Speaker 1: Tell me the name of his. 01:11:28 Speaker 2: The Eseha. 01:11:29 Speaker 1: Eseha? 01:11:30 Speaker 2: E-S-E dash E-J-A, I think. Dyslexic, I can't spell. It's in there. It's in the book. He asked me to spell restaurant. I still couldn't do it. 01:11:40 Speaker 1: But that's admittedly a tough one. 01:11:41 Speaker 2: That's a tough one. Or camouflage. Yeah. But so out there to answer your question is, is, you know, if, if you were, if your family at some point was awarded 20,000 acres and, and, and JJ's father, for example, had several thousand acres in an area that became a national park. 01:11:58 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:11:59 Speaker 2: And because they're local tribal indigenous, when the national, he got, they got grandfathered into the national park. Okay. Fair. And so what I grew up doing, and when I say that, I mean, in my twenties was going on these amazing hunting expeditions and, with these Amerindian guys. There's JJ's wild family. He has all these brothers. And we'd go for 10 days up a river into the middle of nowhere. They'd be like, oh, that's, remember that bend? That's, you know, that's, uh, you know, Rio Tinto. That's, that's this. And then we'd get past the point where I go, JJ, what's that stream called? And he'd go, we ain't got names for it. It's just, we're just out there now. Okay. And so we'd go hunting peccary and fishing for catfish and just surviving out there. Open top canoe. and we would get to the land that JJ's father owned. 01:12:45 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:12:46 Speaker 2: And I'd say, how do you know that this is the land that your father owned? And they'd go, we've been coming here our whole lives. We know the river bend. Yeah. You know, we just know it. Okay. And then we'd make camp. We'd always hack a new camp. You know, there's not like an official camp. We'd hack a new camp, set up two sticks, make a roof shape, stretch a tarp over it, put our tents under that. 01:13:07 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:13:09 Speaker 2: And spend a few days there walking trail, you know, There was like little game trails that were also sort of, you know, you could see a few machete breaks on them from last year. And so we grew up doing that. So that was Santiago's land. That was JJ's father's land. That's inside the national park. It's never going to be touched. Now in the rest of the Amazon, there's these huge parcels of land. And so if your granddaddy got that land and you know, he was, he used to be a trapper and a fisherman and a jungle man. And then his son, your father, worked the land a bit, maybe collected some Brazil nuts, did some light timber, but never really into it. Now you got it. Actually, even better, your kid got it. Okay. So now you're dealing with a 25-year-old Peruvian guy who's probably by now moved to the city. 01:13:51 Speaker 1: I see. 01:13:53 Speaker 2: No longer cares to be eaten hand to mouth, does not want to eat a spider monkey, has been integrated into sort of more modern society, has a TikTok account and a bank account. You know, it's like... You know, this guy, you're going, you want to go eat some turtles? And he's going, no, I want to go to a restaurant in Lima. Like, and they're like, but you own 20,000 acres out there. Well, he's going to do what everybody else does that owns land. He's going to go, well, how can I make money off of it? Call the developers, call the loggers, call whoever. And so what they do is they'll talk to the loggers. The loggers go, hey, you own that land that's way up, up, up there? Yeah. He goes, it's completely illegal to log up there. And they go, yeah, but. Who the hell's out there now? So, okay, I want 30%. You guys can go to my land, log the shit out of it. Well, then they got to go make a road. So then the road starts and then they talk to the various landowners. And so it's just a race between the loggers and us. Because we've gone to landowners and me and JJ, because, you know, he's the indigenous guy. There's these people, and I've seen this in Virginia where it's, you know, are you one of us? 01:14:58 Speaker 3: Are you local? 01:14:59 Speaker 2: Or are you from outside of here? Because we know how things work here. And there's a skepticism to people from outside. And it's kind of beautiful. And in the Amazon, there's that same thing. If I show up as a foreigner, they're like, what does this gringo want? You know what gringos want. And it's never good for us. That's what they know. And so when I walk in with JJ, I say, hola, whatever else. Then JJ is the one that'll sit down and go, so. And usually it'll be the loggers. And we'll sit down at a logging camp and he'll go, oh, you shot a pukakunga, a spix's guan. I'll go, give me a leg of that. He'll sit there. He'll eat their food. He'll go, hey, I brought you. 01:15:33 Speaker 1: What is that animal? 01:15:34 Speaker 2: A pukakunga. It's a spix's guan. 01:15:36 Speaker 3: Oh, a bird. 01:15:38 Speaker 2: A bird. 01:15:38 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:15:39 Speaker 2: It's kind of like a turkey. 01:15:40 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:15:41 Speaker 2: Very beautiful bird. It's dumb as hell. It's an indicator species because if you are going hunting, If anyone is hunting in this patch. 01:15:51 Speaker 3: Of forest, it's the first thing to go. 01:15:52 Speaker 1: I got it. 01:15:53 Speaker 2: They're loud and slow and terrible at flying. 01:15:56 Speaker 1: I was with some guys that got a guan, but I didn't know the name for it. 01:15:59 Speaker 3: That's interesting. That's funny to be like, if he's around, no one's been through here lately. 01:16:02 Speaker 2: No one's been through here. They're kind of comical. We love them for that. They're the ones that tell us we're in good forest. And we'll sit down with the loggers. And go, what are you doing? And they go, oh, you know, we're going to be here. There's about 35 ironwood trees that we're going to get over the next two years. So we're going to just live here and they'll have kids running around. And they go, we're just going to live here and cut the wood and we have a deal with so-and-so. And we'll go, so who owns this land? And they'll go, oh, you know, Sanchez and JJ. I'll go, oh, yeah, my dad knew his dad. And that's that link. That link you can't duplicate. Okay. And so I could never do that because they'd go, who the hell are you? And then they'd shut down the conversation. Whereas JJ is like, yo, and then you go, okay, Sanchez. Yeah, you gotta get it. Okay. And then he goes and talks to Sanchez. He'll go find Sanchez in the, in the city and go, okay, Hey, I saw the loggers on your land. They're just starting out. And the guy will go, yeah, you know, I don't go out there. I figure I'll make some money off it. And now with jungle keepers, what we do is we go out there and we go, how much is your land? 20,000 acres. How many years is it gonna take you to get those ironwoods out of there? Six or seven years, it'll probably make a few hundred grand. 01:17:13 Speaker 1: Great. 01:17:14 Speaker 2: How much? $ 350, 000? Great. How about you get that today? By the way, here's some paperwork. You want it today. You're saying today instead of over five years. Today. And then we just pay him, get the land, and then we go back out to those same loggers that were there. And you go, guys, Thanks for the guan the other day. The puka kunga was delicious. Now you got two options. You either got to get out of here and get your next logging job or because we like you guys and you seem to be jungle people. Do you want to just come for work for us? And they're like, what's that like? And I usually have some jungle keepers rangers with me at this point. And we go, well, we're going to give you a super cool t-shirt and you're going to get to drive a jungle keepers boat. And your job is going to be to make sure that people are not cutting down the ironwood trees. And they're like, do I still get to fish? And we're like, yeah, you can still fish. And they're like, what does it pay? And we're like, three times what you're getting paid now. And you'll have medical benefits and you'll be part of a team. And we're going to teach you a whole bunch of stuff. And you're going to teach us a bunch of stuff because you probably grew up native. And they're like, I don't have to use a chainsaw all day. And we're like, no. And so your family is going to be better provided for. You can come in out of the cold or you can stay out there. We might build a ranger station. You already cut down some trees. We might as well build an outpost out there. And we've done that a bunch of times. Because for our rangers being two days up river, that ain't great. It's much better if you have a little, you know, a deck and a roof for them to stay at. And so this is what we've been doing. It's sort of this secret sauce that we figured out, which is like, these aren't bad people. They're not evil people. They're poor people. that are logging working for a larger enterprise who's probably connected to a china who's selling stuff to the chinese companies that have taken out all of this timber but if you stop it at the micro level right down there on the river we can stop it so we're we're working on on the Las Piedras River, which is this incredibly wild watershed. And the reason it remained unexplored and undestroyed is that there's a lot of uncontacted tribes there. And that's when I say the West is still being won. These are the Comanches. 01:19:24 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:19:24 Speaker 2: These are people that would just as soon kill you as shake your hand. We've had situations in the Madre de Dios where anthropologists have tried to make contact with them We've had situations where loggers have gone around the wrong river bend and, you know, there's the uncontacted is a, is a, is a stupid word for them. That's just like their common name in society, but they're, they're the Mashka Piro. They're, they're voluntarily isolated nomadic people, people, they're tribes that have chosen over the last few centuries to have as little contact as possible. 01:19:57 Speaker 3: That's a pretty important distinction there. 01:19:59 Speaker 1: And that's something that's like, that I've kind of come to understand is that And maybe you can tell me this, that at this point, we're kind of beyond the idea that there would be people living in the Amazon who are sort of unaware, that they would be unaware of the fact that, you know, civilization is out there and that there's cities and, you know, cities and economic interests encroaching on their area. Is it that they don't know? or that some don't really understand that, they don't know that? Or is it that they're like, no, I know that very well, but I'm just choosing to not take part? 01:20:42 Speaker 2: No, it's the weirder one. It's that they've been out there for so long. So the rubber boom, industrial revolution, there were rubber barons going down to the Amazon. We needed hoses and gaskets and tires and all this new stuff for the industrial revolution and the war effort. And so we sent these people down. And the only way to get this was latex trees. And those only grew in the Amazon and they only grew deep out in the forest. And Henry Ford tried to make Fordlandia make a giant plantation of rubber trees and didn't work because of, I. 01:21:14 Speaker 3: Got to plug the movie Fitzcarraldo. 01:21:18 Speaker 2: Exactly. And that's exactly that time period. And he used like Machiganga Indians for that. He used the real deal. He went and talked to a bunch of my friends and said, you guys want to be in a movie? And they were like, hell yeah. You know, he's, I don't know if you ever saw The Burden of Dreams. 01:21:33 Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. Herzog was on this show. 01:21:36 Speaker 2: Oh, really? 01:21:37 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:21:37 Speaker 2: I got to watch that episode. 01:21:39 Speaker 1: Yeah. I interviewed Herzog at his house, but what's so hilarious, just for people, we'll get off this pretty quickly, but Herzog made this incredible movie about the rubber barons in the jungle. 01:21:49 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:21:50 Speaker 3: And it's called Fitzcarraldo. 01:21:51 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:21:52 Speaker 1: And there was a movie. 01:21:53 Speaker 3: about the making of Fitzcarraldo. Which is almost better. 01:21:56 Speaker 1: Yeah. It's the same thing with Apocalypse Now and the movie of the making of Apocalypse Now, which is Hearts of Darkness. And it's hard to tell which is better. It's hard to tell if Fitzcarraldo or Burden of Dreams is better. But in it, the funniest part about it is, one of the funny parts about it, is Herzog is the director. And he's working with a very volatile actor, Klaus Kinski. And Herzog is always fighting with his actor, his lead actor. the indigenous people that are on set know that Herzog writes the checks. And so at one point, a guy comes to Herzog and says, I see how much this guy upsets you. 01:22:32 Speaker 3: Would you like me to kill him? He's like, no, please don't kill the actor. 01:22:37 Speaker 2: Please don't actually kill him. We're just disagreeing. I mean, but that, for people, if you go watch that though, it's like that is the world that is still there where there's these indigenous people. I mean, there's a scene in Burden of Dreams where they wanted there to be a moment where these people come up on sort of untouched tribes and they cut the trees and they're falling into the river. I mean, it's just so incredible, but these uncontacted tribes, I'm just going to call that for convenience. These people still live. So during that rubber period, there's a lot of tribes that got, if not annihilated, severely abused. It was a horrible moment in human history. And they were just shooting people. 01:23:20 Speaker 1: Well, like you keep using the wild west, but it was like, it was very similar to us coming out in the 1840s, 1850s into the west. 01:23:27 Speaker 2: It was very, very bad. I mean, there were, there's a, there's a quote from one of the, uh, the priests, you know, these missionaries that were down there where they, they said, it's, it's, it's untenable. They said these, these rubber barons would come in, round up the village and and be like, y'all are gonna be working for us. And the village would be like, no, we're not. Like, we're absolutely not gonna be listening to you. And they would just set a few people on fire in front of them and be like, do you want more? You know, and we're gonna take your wives. You know, this is not a joke. You're going to listen to us. It was horrible. And so during that time, there were some tribes that said, not us. And they moved deeper into the forest. And so since that time, you say since the turn of the century, they've been living out there. And these are probably tribes that, what were they doing before that? Living out there. I see. And then they had this one horrible interaction with the outside world. 01:24:20 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:24:21 Speaker 2: And they learned the outside world is trying to kill you and they are savages. They will light you on fire and send you out for work for no reason whatsoever. Let's stay out here and you kill whoever comes because it's safer to kill them than to see what they want. So the uncontacted tribes have been out there for ages and some of the land that we protect now has them on it. Mm-hmm. And exactly what you were saying, there's not really even planes that fly over where I work. It's so big. We've had a few narco-trafficking, like little old Cessnas with a piece of duct tape on the wing. But even that, imagine these tribes, they watch it go by, if they could even see it through the canopy. 01:25:02 Speaker 1: Sure, yeah. 01:25:03 Speaker 2: They know there's other types of people out there. But the idea that they don't know about or the internet or, you know, the fact- Legitimately, like today. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's, in the book, there's pictures of these people, because we were up working with a very normal, contacted indigenous community that we work with, that we patrol with and interact with, our friends and colleagues, and this uncontacted tribe showed up on the beach. And they showed up with bows and arrows. I'm talking six-foot bows, six-foot arrows. with bamboo tips that are 18 inches long. And so when they fire these arrows, they'll go straight through a person. And they can hit a spider monkey, you know, at wild angles as the spider monkey's going through the trees. So they're deadly accurate with these. 01:25:52 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:25:53 Speaker 2: And they don't know. And they don't speak a language that directly translates to any outside language. 01:26:00 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:26:01 Speaker 2: The guys that I was with, the community that I work with, they speak Yiné. They were speaking yin-yang to the tribe, but there was a little bit of still a barrier. They're related. 01:26:12 Speaker 1: So in the area you work, I'm guessing these people are nomadic to some degree? 01:26:18 Speaker 2: To an extreme degree. 01:26:20 Speaker 1: They move. 01:26:21 Speaker 2: They don't have houses. 01:26:22 Speaker 3: Got it. 01:26:23 Speaker 1: So in the area you work, in the areas you're trying to buy and and just to point out to people like you're buying areas willing seller willing buyer. 01:26:32 Speaker 2: Yeah somehow when i say buyer both sides get upset um the bunny huggers get upset where they go you can't buy the amazon and then i'm like no no we're conservationists and we're it's indigenous led like jj and and the local people are the people that are doing it i'm the mouthpiece that can come up here i'm from new york i could talk all day and i've been down there and i'm amazed by it and so i'm helping yeah right and so. 01:26:53 Speaker 3: Yeah i should i When I say you, I didn't mean you. 01:26:56 Speaker 5: No, no, no. 01:26:57 Speaker 2: And that's okay. I'm just, I'm just, I'm, I'm slicing into it because sometimes I do a public speaking gig and someone will stand up and I'll go, you know, on my river and someone will stand up and go, well, it's not really your river. And I'll go, well, is it really your house or is it just your turn in that house? And it's been there since the 1700s, you know? And it's like, that's just how we talk. 01:27:15 Speaker 5: Yeah. 01:27:15 Speaker 2: And, uh, and we're not buying, you know, people go within, uh, uh, you know, a white foreigner buying land in the, I'm like, listen, This is an organization that's Peruvian-led where we secure the land from the people that are trying to destroy it and join it with the indigenous reserve that's protecting a watershed. 01:27:35 Speaker 1: So let me re-approach my question. 01:27:38 Speaker 3: You're totally fair to clarify that. 01:27:39 Speaker 2: You hear what I'm doing here, yeah. 01:27:40 Speaker 1: No, I do, and it's totally fair. In the areas where jungle keepers is active, there are nomadic groups. there are nomadic groups of what we're, and you did a good job of explaining it, nomadic groups of what we'll agree to call uncontacted people passing through these areas. And you don't go, you, your partner, other indigenous employees, members of the organization, you don't need to go and say, hey, You're cool here. 01:28:17 Speaker 2: No. No, they'll shoot you in the neck. Okay, yeah. No. 01:28:20 Speaker 5: Really? 01:28:20 Speaker 2: No, you can't do that. It was really funny. We were planning a gala as a fundraising event in New York City. And it was funny because the planner, great, great human being, put on an amazing event. But he goes, you know, is there any way that we can get one of those uncontacted tribe to come here and represent? I was like, it's really hard to explain. But when you see the pictures of these people that I have in the book, or some of the footage that we've shared of them, they're so wild. They're naked. They have their penises tied up with string. It's really the only thing they wear. They have bracelets. They like rope. They don't really fish. You know, it's funny because I do see comments on the internet where someone goes, you know, I said, we never find fish bones in their camps because we find their camps. You find like a little fire, a few palm leaves like this that they've sat under in the rain on the beach. They love turtle eggs. So you see all the things that they've been doing. You find a few skulls, a few bones, and a bit of fire. So we know a lot from that. We've never found fish bones. And when I say we, I mean me and the indigenous trackers I work with. 01:29:29 Speaker 1: Who know what they're looking at. 01:29:30 Speaker 2: Who know what they're looking at. And so they go, these people don't eat fish. They don't have access to them. Think about it. In that muddy water, how are you going to find fish? We have mud water where we are, brown water. They're not using metal hooks. They don't have metal. They may have stolen a few machetes from loggers that they killed because they do kill loggers. There's been a few instances where loggers are working. 01:29:52 Speaker 1: You're not going to hear some dude. 01:29:54 Speaker 2: You're not even going to see them. They're right out of the forest. Loggers are dead. And then they're like, we'll take the machetes. We have no idea how that hellish chainsaw works. Leave that there. They don't even want the clothes. They're just like, they'll take what they want. We, I shouldn't say we, the local people, so I stay out of trouble. They said to them, so what do you want? They said, first of all, please put down your bows. And what do you want? And we were on one side of the river and the other side of the river. We were short of the shirts versus skins. We were over there saying, what do you want? And they were on the other side. We said, put down your bows, first of all. We had a ton of shotguns, but that was for self-defense. They're over there looking at us with bows and we're like, look, put your bows down. We had a guy, a local anthropologist who could speak to them. He said, we're not talking to you unless you put your bows down. So they put their bows down. They came out to the river and they're clapping and they're talking to us and they're gesticulating and they're... And he said, what do you want? And they said, we want plantains. 01:30:55 Speaker 3: We want rope. 01:30:56 Speaker 2: And so their wants are very, very basic. And so we pushed a boat with plantains and rope. We added in some sugar cane for good measure. And so they're all like eating the, you know, they're like taking the plantains and they're deconstructing the rope. That was so interesting. We get what they got was some nylon paracord, you know, pile of it. Instantly, they start deconstructing it, bringing it down to the fibers and expertly weaving it into something know to do to do their fletchings oh i got it you know they just start making bow and arrows right there in front of us like as they're talking they're going yeah yeah send us some more and they're making. 01:31:29 Speaker 3: That in that in the internal line inside the sheet. 01:31:32 Speaker 2: Yeah and they were expert at it it was amazing um but but they they you know we had this exchange with them and the indigenous natural uh anthropologists were saying you know you don't have to be violent like we're friends yeah And they're going, ah, we don't know about that. They're going, some of you cut down trees. We know some of you cut down trees. We know you got those chainsaw things. Then they were like, why do you cut down the trees? For them, they're like, what are you doing with trees? What could you possibly want with these giant trees? We don't like that. That was their main message. So we had this three-hour-long interaction with them, which was incredible. I mean, absolutely. It's like seeing a woolly mammoth or something. It's like you just go, this is something that, I thought was from a different time. And you're seeing people that are living like the way that people would have lived a thousand years ago, naked in nature with no... What do you do without a blade? What do you just have a peccary tooth? How does that work? They don't even have rocks. There's no rocks in that part of the Amazon. And so, we left that day, they went back into the forest and we went back to the community and nobody had died. It was a huge success. Me and the other directors of jungle keepers head down the river. There was a whole bunch of other, you know, secondary and tertiary things that had to happen now because the Peruvian government was like, okay, this tribe came out and there's reactions. And they had taken all of the yuca and the plantains from our friends in the indigenous community. So we had to get them supplies. Because now they were like, we don't have food. Like, yeah, we catch fish and stuff, but like our carbs, totally gone. So we were like, let's get back. Let's get a boat up as quick as possible. It's going to take two days. We were doing all that. One of the guys that we were literally with the day before, my friend George, he was driving a boat up the river and the tribe came back out. But this time he was driving a boat and we don't know what happened. I had a bunch of other friends on the boat, but the tribe was on both sides of the river this time. And they started loosening arrows. These six foot arrows start flying on the boat and everybody else got under the edges of the boat. So they were sort of safe from these arrows. And he's driving though. So he's sitting up on the back of the canoe and an arrow went in just above his scapula and came out by his belly button straight through his lung. And so they took him out of the boat and I saw the boat later on and it was just blood everywhere. And they took him up to the nearest spot they could take him and then we actually got a military helicopter to go up and evac him. 01:34:09 Speaker 1: He survived? He lived. No way. 01:34:11 Speaker 2: With a pole through him. Somehow he lived. I mean, he's never going to be the same, but he lived. And so it's like, that's the thing. You can have a friendly encounter with these tribes and they still, they're not getting it. They don't know about the outside world. They don't know that if they would just be friends with the next indigenous community, they could teach them how to grow plantains. They don't even have agriculture. And so- That's a complicated relationship that's going to have to play out. 01:34:39 Speaker 1: It is, and I was going to ask you a half-smart-assy question just to have an intellectual wrestling match about it, which would be, well, you answered it already. Oh, okay. But it would be, I'm. 01:34:51 Speaker 3: Devil's advocating. 01:34:53 Speaker 2: Sure. 01:34:53 Speaker 3: I'm playing the devil's advocate role in something. 01:34:55 Speaker 1: It would be, if you have an uncontacted group or a barely contacted group and they want stuff, Is it fair to say, I'm not going to give it to you because I like thinking about you how you are. 01:35:12 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:35:13 Speaker 1: And even though you want it, I don't want you to have it because it's going to upset my view of you as an ancient one. 01:35:20 Speaker 2: Yes. 01:35:20 Speaker 1: And it's fun for me to know that you're out there without this stuff. Yeah. 01:35:25 Speaker 3: And I was going to, like I said, devil's advocate that idea. 01:35:30 Speaker 1: But when it. 01:35:30 Speaker 3: Gets into a people. 01:35:34 Speaker 1: That a people peoples that I don't want to integrate. Like, I don't want anything to do with you. I want to have, yeah, I want to like, I want to be here with my family, my people. I want you to stay out of my area. I'm not coming to you for these things. And I think it's different. And I think it's like, it's noble to respect it. Unless you have something to say about the devil's advocate position is like, is it our place to tell people they can't have stuff they want? 01:36:06 Speaker 2: Uh, hell no. And it's funny, it's funny because this would cause so many people to go nuts. This sort of politically correct thing of, you know, uh, this is like another culture coming to us and going, well, I thought Americans drove, you know, used horses and, and, and drove across the plains and wagons. You know, you guys had, no, no, no, you should still be Americans. Like go back to that. And I was being like, what are you talking about? We've, we've, we've grown. In this direction. 01:36:29 Speaker 3: And, you know, I mean, look, I think every- That's a funny point. 01:36:32 Speaker 4: Right? 01:36:33 Speaker 2: And it's like everybody wishes, or at least I really wish, that, you know, America formed and then the Comanches still had so much power over so much land. Don't you just wish that they just stopped at that and said, you know what? You guys maintain control over that. We got the coasts and like, you know, there'll just be the United States with a few less and you guys keep it. It would just, we'd have Comanche. It would just be cool. And like, what's happening with the Mashko Pure, or picture talking to Native American people today who's saying, why don't you only live in buffalo skins? I like that. Go do it. 01:37:09 Speaker 3: It happens to Native people all the time here. 01:37:11 Speaker 2: I know. 01:37:11 Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. 01:37:12 Speaker 3: Like, you want to hunt whales. Well, why don't you do it with a, you know? 01:37:16 Speaker 2: You know, with a, you know. 01:37:17 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:37:17 Speaker 3: You can only do it with a stick. 01:37:18 Speaker 1: Because I don't need to. 01:37:19 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:37:21 Speaker 1: We have other ways of hunting whales now. 01:37:22 Speaker 2: Well, there you go. And then it seems like the only way that that gets through is when they go, well, it's better, it's more humane for the whale to not be speared to death. But I think that here, there's a few tribes in the Amazon, like the Waurani and the Kayapo, I think, you know, who have done, and the people in the Zingu River, who've done amazing jobs of maintaining their tribal heritage and still sort of like adapting their clothing to more modern traditions still a lot of feathers, and they really, you know, they still do their, women wear makeup, they wear their tribal, certainly for ceremonies, and they've really proudly maintained their indigenous heritage as their main thing. And they've even embraced ecotourism, and they're like, we're gonna bring you out there, and we still do wear feathers, and we're experts, and we always have been experts, but they've had the luck, these are the few tribes that have had the luck of getting some of their members educated enough in Western ways to come in and make that jump before the damage is done. 01:38:27 Speaker 1: I see. 01:38:28 Speaker 2: Because what usually happens is you have a group of indigenous people that are living out in the forest. And then one road comes through, one missionary comes through and goes, I don't want you. I don't want you believing in whatever you believe in. You need to believe in our God in our way. And we're going to start, you know, put down the bows. You're going to start eating pigs and chickens because that's what we want you to do. And they strip them of their indigenous ways, which is just horrific. And what happens is that alcoholism, the, how to say it, like the tribes that I work with have a very strange relationship to money. They're like, why are you going here instead of just going in a straight line? Like I want meat, so I should go get meat. Why would I have to work for the meat? Or then I can just go out and shoot the meat. 01:39:16 Speaker 5: Yeah. 01:39:16 Speaker 2: And then when they get the money, they're like, well, I'm going to get my family some soda and a thing and a thing. And they kind of like, well, they'll spend all the money. And they'll be like, shit, now I need more money. I don't have any gasoline. I got to get somewhere. It's like, that's because you got to save the money. And then they save some money under their mattress and it gets stolen. And it's like, well, this isn't working. It's like, this is not a great system for you. So with the uncontacted tribe, which is such an extreme example of this, some people say, They've been running scared for, you know, a few centuries or at least a century. Someone should go bring them in. 01:39:52 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:39:54 Speaker 2: Now that's happened in different places and it doesn't go well. Uh, there's one place where a child washed down the river in a, in a remote part of the Amazon and they, they picked him up and he was one of them. One of the Moscow or washed down alive, washed down alive. Yeah. They picked him up and, He never went back. He stayed in this tribe who speaks Spanish and their local dialect. And the anthropologist that I work with, he went and he spoke to this kid. He said, well, what was it like when you lived out in the forest with the nomadic tribes? He said, I don't really remember. He got a trauma response. He got like, I just don't worry about it. You know, it's okay. There's a wall of of silence. It's not, you know, when you think about what are their infant mortality rates, how are their women treated? You know, is there intertribal warfare? What are their wrong beliefs? You know, you want to talk about like, what things do we believe, any scientific method, you know, are they saying that, you know, all illnesses are bad spirits. And so, you know, every time that you look at me funny, I should kill you. It's like, you just don't know what they're operating on. One, I mean, after seeing with them, after interacting with them and my interaction with them was very simple, you know, holding up my hands and they, held up their hands and we kind of just kind of smiled at how different we were, you know, and that was this very human moment at, you know, almost across centuries. Cause you go, man, you have, I have no idea what's, what goes through your mind. You have no idea what goes through my mind. And it was just sort of like, you know, basic hello. And, uh, so, so interestingly now coming back to our world, I come back up here and I write this book about the work that I'm doing with the local people and there's these tribes and all this wildlife and I'm just trying to protect it because the butterflies and the jaguars and the ancient trees should be protected. And I even want to protect the indigenous people, the uncontacted tribes. And then you get articles being written online where people go, you know, Paul Rosely comes back from the Amazon and releases footage of uncontacted tribes without their consent. And this is horrible. And you see, you know, the comments of people going, look at this, another white guy using this to sell his book and to push his organization. He's probably making millions. And what we did was after that, most of it was people just, just experiencing awe at seeing this footage, but they were the detractors. What's great though, is that through jungle keepers, we raised enough money to protect another 20,000 acres and that's land that the tribe lives on. So now, They're safe from loggers and gold miners and narco-traffickers because we're protecting their land and they have no idea. And nor will they. Because if we have it our way, if they want to come out, they'll come out. But otherwise, it's their choice. And it's not that we want them to stay like that. It's that they've made it very clear they don't want us. On a trail, if you're walking and the Mashko Piri are there, they put an X over the trail. They'll cut two sticks and put it over the trail. And you know, you go past that, you're going to get shot. Fair. Like, that's great. And so, you know, they have their own respect system. You just don't want to surprise them. 01:43:14 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. 01:43:15 Speaker 2: I mean, I could go on all day about horror stories about that, but they're very, very happy to engage you violently if it'll mean that they're not in danger. 01:43:26 Speaker 1: Is there a, with Jungle Keepers, is there a direct relationship, like an infinite relationship direct relationship where dollars in yeah dollars in yeah will continue to be acres secured or is it or is it that um there's there's a finite amount of available acreage so because you just keep going and going and going and going great. 01:43:56 Speaker 2: Question and this is what makes jungle just two things i think that three things that make Jungle Keepers different than anything that I grew up on. When I was a kid, you had these big organizations that are going, send us donations and we'll send you a stuffed polar bear, a teddy bear. But where's my donation going? Which project? You're saving the environment. Where is it going? So if I send you $ 5, $ 100, $ 5, 000, where? And so first thing about Jungle Keepers is that Our whole plan was developed by indigenous strategies to protect their land. Second, we developed a donor program that allows all the kids like me that are sitting at home wanting to save the Amazon, they can go join our team, which is giving $ 5, $ 10, $ 50 a month. And there's all these people, I keep telling people, for the price of a latte once a month. You're helping us protect, you know, a lot of raindrops make a flood. You're helping us protect all these acres. So the fact that normal people, and we have our large donors that are going at the $ 100, 000 mark. And so we're getting all this land and we're allowing people around the world, because that's the thing, these Latin American countries would say, you want us to protect our land? Who are you? You know, several thousand miles away in your other country to tell us what to do with our land. Help us. And so what we're doing is we're helping them. We're improving the lives of the local people. We're educating them. We're improving their standard of living. And we're doing this by asking all the people up here that go, yeah, I really care about species and the rainforest. Well, great. You know, you subscribe to Netflix. Well, help do something important with your money. It doesn't have to be a lot, but give us the consistency. And that allows us to keep blocking out pieces of this river, and it's not a forever project. And that's the difference. We're not trying to protect the ocean or the environment. There's one watershed. This Las Piedras watershed that we have identified as one of the wildest places on earth, original growth, superlative biodiversity, nomadic uncontacted tribes, and just this intact ecosystem, this rare crown jewel on earth. And so once we were at, we're at, we're at about 160,000 acres right now. If we can double that, we need about $ 15 million to do this. We got $ 15 million tomorrow. We could do it. 01:46:13 Speaker 3: Is that right? 01:46:14 Speaker 2: That is the mission I'm on. That's why I'm in the US right now, is I'm talking to large scale funders and also trying to talk to people like you who have these huge audiences. Because out of the people that listen to you, there's going to be those people that go, you know what? I want to protect the greatest wilderness area on earth. I want to be part of establishing it. And that's what we're doing. We're doing something historic. And so if we got that 15 million tomorrow from one donor, we could finish the park. We've had politicians in Peru We spoke to, what, the Department of the Interior? Department of Labor? Where they said, look, if you do all the hard work of securing the land and get it, we're never going to do that. But if you guys can do it, we'll sign it over. 01:46:52 Speaker 3: Do you trust those guys? 01:46:54 Speaker 2: So, incredibly, everyone assumes that everyone in Latin America, like the police, are corrupt. 01:46:58 Speaker 1: Man, no, no, no. 01:46:59 Speaker 3: I don't assume that at all. 01:47:01 Speaker 1: No. 01:47:01 Speaker 3: I don't assume that at all. 01:47:02 Speaker 1: Politicians. No, I'm just saying, does your vision, right, like, if it's a national park, you're sort of. 01:47:10 Speaker 3: Handing the deed over to agency. 01:47:14 Speaker 1: Yeah. And agencies missions change. I'm not implying corruption. 01:47:18 Speaker 3: I'm just saying. 01:47:19 Speaker 2: Gotcha. 01:47:19 Speaker 1: All right. Political wins. Yeah. I'm saying like, is, do they have, let me, let me put it dark. I definitely don't want to imply that like, Oh, it must be some banana Republican. They're crooked. I mean, is, do they do a thing in other places that you look at and you're like, yes, I want them to do that thing here. 01:47:41 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:47:41 Speaker 1: Okay, so they're already doing it. They have a template for what you'd like to see. Yeah. 01:47:46 Speaker 2: Manu National Park, which is right near us, is sort of like just the neighbor over, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Incredible national park. You know, there's a little bit of issues at the borders, but it's a roadless area. 01:47:58 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:47:59 Speaker 2: No one's allowed in. I mean, there's a deep, deep, deep research station in there that you can get to. 01:48:04 Speaker 5: Okay. 01:48:04 Speaker 2: If you really want to see Manu, you can, but you can't drive through it. 01:48:08 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:48:08 Speaker 2: You got to go by river, which means you got to be approved. 01:48:10 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:48:11 Speaker 2: So really that's the only way to access it. 01:48:13 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:48:13 Speaker 3: So there's like a thing. 01:48:14 Speaker 2: Oh, Peru has a great national park system. Yeah. So that's why I say I want it to be a national park. and if that means something that means something it's not just a paper park yeah yeah now in the tambopada there's been tambopada national parks there's been a recent flare-up in people that are piercing past the park boundaries and illegally mining okay now the question of is there boots on the ground? Is there enough of a park service to go out and stop them? Not really. Cause it's guerrilla warfare. Cause if you know, the park service shows up with their little badges and says, guys, you can't be here. You need to come with us. They're going to say, yeah, we got more guns than you do. 01:48:56 Speaker 3: What? 01:48:57 Speaker 2: Uh, and so that's the problem with the Amazon is it's very wild West. If you want to go in and arrest people, you better come with a lot more guys and better guns. 01:49:04 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:49:05 Speaker 2: And, uh, And so if we can establish this as a national park, it will be safe. And if by political wins, let's just say in six months or 18 months, we get there and we do this and it's better as a private reserve, well, then we'll put it as a private reserve and have it as that. 01:49:25 Speaker 1: Whatever works to protect the river. Yeah, you could choose that it wasn't the right. 01:49:31 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, look, as we've seen, administration changes and even the things you thought were locked away and sacred. 01:49:38 Speaker 3: Can be unlocked. 01:49:39 Speaker 2: And that's terrifying. 01:49:40 Speaker 1: We're going through that right now. 01:49:41 Speaker 2: That is terrifying. And so for us, the danger right now is we're in a race against time because we have roads coming. Right now, there's a road on our northern boundary that, you know, if we got at the beginning of the year, we got a lot of funding because I was doing a lot of press. And that's what happens. I do a lot of press. and a lot of people reach out. $ 5, $ 10, $ 100 a month, great. But then you get those people that are like, we're going to give you $ 300, 000. We're going to give you half a million dollars. Go get that piece of land. Let's just do it. So we get these funders on all levels. And then things quiet down. And so we have the landowners on another 100,000 acres. The contracts are drawn up. Our lawyers are waiting with the pens. We just got to get the funding. 01:50:29 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:50:29 Speaker 2: 15 million is not that much money. 01:50:30 Speaker 1: You need to be able to go like you did in that story you told where you're like, no, no, I'm talking today, man. 01:50:34 Speaker 2: Yep. And so right now there's a road coming and we don't have the money for that land. So we're a few million dollars short of that. That's emergency right now money. And so we're just scrambling right now. And it's funny because the last year at this time, the narco traffickers decided they were going to kill me and JJ. That's what they figured. They said, well, this is, you're making it very difficult for us to work out here. We're going to kill the two of you. And there was actually a day that JJ was in a car and they actually showed up asking for both of us. Sorry, it was a day that our car was driving, our driver was driving. They showed up asking for us and neither one of us was in the car because that would have been it. We've dealt with that situation by collaborating with the Peruvian authorities. That's no longer a problem right now. But last year, we were dealing with that and it seemed like everything was going to die. Then we got some donations. We got some help. We worked with the Peruvian police. We removed the narco threat. We got a bunch of land. We got them out. Great. Now this year we have this road and it's like every year something is coming and it's like if we could just, I mean, I just met somebody who they were renovating their cafeteria at a zoo and he said, we just spent 25 million on this new cafeteria. And I went, oh, that was so casual. Can you please tell me where you found that money? Because 15 million to protect the wildest place on earth. I'm shocked that I have to work this hard to get it. Like I'm, I'm writing books and I'm going on podcasts and we're bringing people down there. We own the tallest tree house in the world. We put it up in one of those thousand year old trees. And so people can come to this luxury tree house and watch the mist and the macaws and the monkeys and the Amazon. Um, you know, so it's not even like you give the money and there's no way to see it. It's like people, you can come with us. And so we're, my job right now is to just go find the person that's willing to go. You know what? I want the park named after me. I don't, you know, what's the thing that someone said, they said, you can get just about anything done if you don't care who gets the credit. I don't care who gets the credit. I'm my gravestone. I wanted to say that I protected more heartbeats than anybody else. That's it. You know, and I'm not doing this. I know your audience. I'm not doing this from a bunny hugger perspective. I love the abundance and I want to be able for the local people to be fishing and hunting and man fishing is good in the Amazon. But if we don't protect it, we're going to ruin it. And I think it's really interesting being up here right now because, you know, hearing what's going on in Yosemite and what's going on with the roadless areas. And, you know, growing up, me and my dad, when I was 18, we went to, I think it was called the Wemenuch Wilderness Area. And just learning that, and we did a, you know, multi-day trip. And just learning that there are these areas in the U.S. that people before I was born said, this should be protected. These mountains, these ecosystems, these forests should be protected. And we've put roads and stores and polluted the crap out of everything. But let's just pick a few spots on the map that we don't touch. 01:53:39 Speaker 4: 2%. 2%. 01:53:39 Speaker 1: 2% is federally designated wilderness area. 01:53:42 Speaker 2: And is roadless even less than that? 01:53:45 Speaker 1: Roadless is. 01:53:45 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:53:46 Speaker 1: I don't know. 01:53:52 Speaker 3: Getting this too deep. 01:53:53 Speaker 1: But there is a thing that federally designated, like, congressionally approved, like, roadless areas. Like, wilderness with a capital W, 2%. We also have a lot of areas that happen. 01:54:06 Speaker 3: To be roadless. 01:54:07 Speaker 1: Yeah. And there's a debate right now about do we sort of codify that roadlessness and recognize it and keep it that way? And it's been that way for 25 years. or do we say, um, nevermind, there is no sort of like de facto protection of a roadless area, but the 2% that is wilderness with a capital W is very well protected. 01:54:36 Speaker 3: Uh, we could potentially grow that percentage if we choose to do that. 01:54:41 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:54:41 Speaker 2: But, but that is such an important thing, I think to, to so many people. 01:54:45 Speaker 1: It's, it's, it's of an, um, I like to knock around in those places, but I would argue that it is of economic, it's economically. 01:54:56 Speaker 3: Imperative that we protect these places. 01:54:59 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:54:59 Speaker 1: Because my gamble, my investment gamble is that these places will prove to be of incalculable value in the future for future generations. 01:55:12 Speaker 3: Yeah. So anyways. 01:55:14 Speaker 2: And not just on a beauty or appreciation level, but as a country. 01:55:19 Speaker 1: Just, yeah, I don't mean that we're going to, I don't mean to do them later. I just mean that, um, as more of the world gets developed and laid over in concrete and polluted and, and, and spoiled those places that are like that will be, we'll look and we'll continue to say, like we say of Theodore Roosevelt and all those, we'll continue to say. 01:55:40 Speaker 3: What genius, what genius did that? 01:55:45 Speaker 2: Yeah. And, and, and so that, you know, That's what we're aspiring to with this Jungle Keeper story. And so, what the book is about is, you know, going from a kid that was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New Jersey and started doing solo expeditions in the Adirondacks and the Catskills. And I kept coming out on the other side. You know, I'd go into a 4,000 acre state park with my dog, you know, and like go looking for bears and foxes and just, you know, just tracking and having fun and camping and developing my bushcraft. But I was sick of coming out the other side. And I hadn't really been out west yet. I didn't realize how big things were and that there's a lot up here. But my love of specifically animals and poking them, just like you. I really want to interact with them. I was just like, man, the Amazon is it. I got to see this before I go. And then the urgency of the rainforests are disappearing. I'm skeptical. If a local person tells me, well, if I touch this with a stick, it's going to die. Show me. And if someone says the rainforests are disappearing, we're losing 700 football fields a day. It's like, all right, I want to see. Is that true? What's really happening on the ground? I don't trust anyone. I want to go see for myself. And I went down there and I was like, oh shit, this is bigger, more beautiful and complex and incredible than I could have ever imagined. And the first few years was all just expeditions and, you know, climbing trees and getting to know these guys. It was just playtime, wilderness playtime, hardcore wilderness expeditions. And then we saw the road, the damn road and the smoke on the horizon. And then we realized, I realized, I said to JJ, I said, who do we call? Because I'm from the US, right? So I said, who do we call that's going to show up and stop us? 01:57:31 Speaker 3: This will not stand. 01:57:31 Speaker 2: This will not stand. I want to call the proper authorities and stop this. And he, in his incredible, beautiful, almost perfect English, he went, he goes, you see anybody? He goes, look that way. He goes, look this way. He goes, we're the only people here. He goes, you want to do anything, you got to do it. And then that ended up being the call to adventure in our lives. Like that ended up being the narrative. This is all I've ever done. I've never done anything else. I've never had a job. I've never, nothing. I've been living in the Amazon collecting bot flies and scars and stories and just trying to convince people. to protect this one wildest place on earth. And unlike every other, you know, yeah, I started an organization, but we're totally accountable. You said dollars to acres, 80% of every dollar that comes in, 80 cents on every dollar goes directly to land. 01:58:27 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:58:28 Speaker 2: And then there's, The rest is rangers and admin and gear. 01:58:34 Speaker 1: That's a great nonprofit percentage. 01:58:36 Speaker 2: That is a great percentage because a lot of them are like 80% goes to advertising and the rest goes to paying the CEOs. 01:58:43 Speaker 1: 80% to mission is commendable. I mean, it's good. 01:58:45 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really good and we're very transparent. The people that become part of our team and are regular donors, a lot of them come down, which I also think is really cool because it's not just– sort of a faceless thing that you give to it. No, no, no. Come down. See what you did. Some people, one guy, he did a quarter of a million dollars, $ 250, 000 to protect this huge piece of land. And he was like, I got to see it. 01:59:10 Speaker 1: He was like, let's go. 01:59:11 Speaker 2: We took him on this canoe top expedition out there to see it. And it was such a beautiful thing to see. It was always just an idea in my head. And he said, I just one day said, I want to be part of something important. And I said, look at all these animals. They're all here because of you. this whole thing would be gone. And so the fact that it's not a forever project, if we can protect this river, this watershed, then we've done something incredible. And even better, we've come up with a blueprint that can be replicated in other rivers in the Amazon, in rivers in the Congo, Indonesia, whatever, how to mobilize the indigenous people and empower them to connect with people around the world so that you can just save these rivers. We don't need to have this this common narrative that every beautiful, wild thing, every pristine stream, every great, you know, the salmon runs that somehow it seems like there's always a developer. There's always a mining project. There's always a, you know, there's always something trying to destroy the beautiful thing. 02:00:10 Speaker 1: Yeah. 02:00:11 Speaker 2: And it's like, well, what if we just, you know, made it a little bit easier for people around the world to protect that thing, especially when it's their indigenous, and we use the word indigenous, whatever, when they're the local people that live there and depend on that ecosystem. Um, they deserve to be able to fight those powers that come in from other places and go, well, we just, we're going to put a factory up river from you. You can't drink your water anymore. That's just, it just can't be that way forever. I feel like we can grow out of that. And I want to be part of that movement. 02:00:43 Speaker 1: Well, man, thank you. Um, I, I, I'm probably guilty of me. I sometimes describe myself as like an environmental nationalist. I'm like, you know, like a deeply patriotic American. And I look at most, I look at conservation through, through that lens in some ways. 02:01:02 Speaker 3: I'm very focused on America. I think we're the same on that. 02:01:05 Speaker 2: I'm very proud. 02:01:06 Speaker 1: But, but, but, but what you're talking about in the world you're describing, like I said, I've, I've dabbled. It's gorgeous. I think what you're doing is a great thing for people to support. I wish you the best of luck. 02:01:21 Speaker 2: Thank you. 02:01:22 Speaker 1: And again, man, everybody out there, Well, thank you. And Paul Rosalie, check out the book Jungle Keeper, What It Takes to Change the World. 02:01:35 Speaker 3: It was a New York Times bestseller. Congratulations. 02:01:38 Speaker 2: I'm shocked by that. For a kid that didn't do very well in school, that was a huge thing for me. But for people listening, you can come down and visit it. we'll give you native guides, and I mean, you should come. 02:01:51 Speaker 3: Dude, I'm already planning on hitting you up. 02:01:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, tallest tree house in the world, and this thing, like I said, we can either get one big donor that lets us make the national park tomorrow, or we just reach so many people that we just let the people do it. And so, junglekeepers.org, we get enough people, then I can stop doing this. Then I can just go explore the rainforest, describe some species, and bring I meant to tell you that you had this guy on that I listened to when I, when I knew I was going to be on your podcast, the guy was doing top-down predator ecology. He sounded like a, like an old timer. He's talking about like coyote population, how turkeys lay eggs. And I was riveted like that stuff. I just want to be out there collecting that stuff. I want to be learning. 02:02:35 Speaker 1: So be a man of the woods, man. Oh yeah. All right. One last time. Jungle keeper by Paul Rosalie and check out the organization. Jungle keepers. 02:02:43 Speaker 5: Yep. 02:02:43 Speaker 1: All right. 02:02:44 Speaker 3: Junglekeepers.org? 02:02:45 Speaker 2: Junglekeepers.org. 02:02:46 Speaker 1: All right. Help these boys out with some cash. 02:02:48 Speaker 2: All right. 02:02:48 Speaker 1: Thanks, man. 02:02:49 Speaker 2: Thanks, Steve.