Paul Rosolie #3

I mean, metal—I think you have to be able to excavate into the earth and forge metal. These people don’t even… As a Peruvian anthropologist said to me, “You know, people think of them as Stone Age tribes.” And he was like, “They don’t have stones.” So they don’t know that water… They see water that they drink, but they don’t know that water freezes because they’ve never seen it. They don’t know whether water boils because they don’t have… they don’t even make clay pots. They just have their bamboo and their string. And so they’re living an incredibly simple life. So all of that, I mean, even a camera is a miracle to them. You have to bend your mind to even understand how far back they are. It’s like looking into thousands of years ago, like the Stone Age.

When they hear the sounds of the chainsaws, the sounds of machinery in the distance— …I wonder how they can possibly comprehend what that is.

I think they view it as a demonic, destructive force. When I show you the encounter that we had… we left with more questions than answers, but one of the things that they were able to communicate across the language barrier was, “Why are you cutting down the trees?” They don’t like it.

Yeah. That represents to them the danger that the outside world brings, the destruction that the outside world brings.

They see us as the destroyers of worlds. Intense new encounter

So tell me about this encounter in October of 2024.

So, in order to tell you about that encounter, I think we need to orient people into where we’re talking about. We’re talking about this river that runs through the western edge of the Amazon rainforest that you know well now, after spending time there with me. It’s a high tributary of the Amazon rainforest where you have the main river channel and then smaller and smaller tributaries. And the smaller you get, the less trafficked they are. And so this river has remained wild through the centuries. And even during the ’90s when there was a mahogany boom where people went out for mahogany trees, there were very few people going up this river.

And so 20 years ago, when I first got to the region and people were telling me that there were uncontacted tribes out there, it was always in the realm of something… You know, it’s like people say, “There’s Bigfoot,” or, “Don’t go there, it’s haunted.” It was like a tall tale almost. And even the Peruvian government at the time that I went to Peru first, which was 2006, their official position was that the tribes are a myth. “There’s no such thing as the tribes.” That was the official position. And you would hear these stories of people that got shot. You’d meet someone four days upriver, deep in the Amazon, that had an arrow.

And you’d look at this thing and it had this mega gravity. And so as we’ve created Jungle Keepers and now we’re protecting 130,000 acres of this river, we’re protecting the plants and the animals and the ancient trees, and trying to preserve the ecosystem, counting the butterflies and conducting ecological surveys, what we’ve inadvertently found ourselves the caretakers of is the fact that these people, in order to continue living, have to remain isolated. They want to remain isolated. That’s their one mandate as a civilization, the tribes of the Mashco Piro. And so in October, as Jungle Keepers now, we’re working with the indigenous people.

What we do is we take loggers and gold miners and make them into rangers and give them better jobs, and we try to protect the forest. And those people who live up in the remote indigenous community, they called us on a satellite phone and they said, “Directors, you’ve been working with us and telling us you want to help us. The tribes are coming out. What do we do?”

So, even they don’t really know, when the tribes emerge from the deep jungle— —what to do?

They were terrified.

What was your thinking when you got the phone call?

When we got the phone call, it was a mix of… you know, we should keep… because we’re over here trying to get land concessions and doing all this important work, part of me was like, “That can’t be real,” so we’re going to keep our heads down.

Bigfoot is emerging— —from the forest.

Like, yeah, sure. And then we hung up and we said, “Okay, maybe tomorrow if they’re still there or something.” And then it was crazy because it was probably about noon and we had an important day of meetings. We had a meeting with the police, we had a meeting with the landowner, we were trying to do all this stuff for the conservation work. And then I got together with the core team of directors—JJ, Mohsin, Stephane—and we said, “Wait, if this is real, we have to get there like now. Like now, now.” And so we dropped what we were doing, canceled the meetings, put other people on the meetings. We got a boat and we called Ignacio. We called our most hardcore ranger.

Who has been shot.

Who in 2019 was shot in the head by an arrow and still bears the scar, and he barely survived. And we said, “Look, this is going down.” He said, “I already know, because the whole river already knows.” And we said, “Can you get us there by tomorrow morning?” And he said, “Look, it’s a two-day journey by boat. So, no.” And we said, “Is there any way you can get us there?” And he went, “I’ll get you there.” And so we got a couple of sacks of rice, a couple of cans of tuna, our dry bags, our tents. We got on a boat by 6:00 PM and we started riding up the river—

Through the night?

…through the night. And so, a two-day boat journey that we’re trying to flex in one night. And so I was at the front with the headlamp— …with the torch. And so the first few hours, it was clear, and that comet—remember that comet—

…that was going? There was that comet in the sky. I remember looking at the comet and going, somehow, “This is it.” I knew this was it. And the first few hours were clear, the stars were out, and it was beautiful. And then it clouded over and the lightning started, and then it just apocalypse-downpoured. And from midnight until 8:00 AM it was just the front of the boat with the light, and it was just Star Wars vision of just raindrops and galaxies and moths flying in my eye. People don’t realize you can get hypothermia in the tropics, but as you’re going at night, even if it’s 80 degrees outside, in the rain and the wind at night in a lightning storm, you’re freezing.

And so by 2:00 AM I’m convulsively shivering, and we’re using the caiman eyes on the side of the river because it was so dark we couldn’t see where we were going, so those shine back at you. So, I was finding the caiman eyes and then motioning with the light to Ignacio where to go, and he knew how to find the channel and we had to jump the waterfalls. We did the two-day boat ride in one night.

Nice.

And we got there and we arrive at this community where—and it’s morning now and the howler monkeys are calling over the jungle and the little naked children are all by the side and everyone’s scared. And we get a hug from this guy, Bacho, who we know, and they’re like, “Come in, come in, come in.” And they’re like, “The tribe came out yesterday. We saw a few of them on the beach and they’re gone now.” And so we collapsed, we fell asleep. It rained the whole day. That night we went out and we looked for them and there was this crazy moment where we’re standing on this beach and their footprints were there.

And the local indigenous anthropologist was standing there and we’re looking out into the Amazon beyond, and there’s just all this wreckage. It looked like something very Cormac McCarthy, just dark sky, iron clouds, and we’re standing there. Everyone is waiting, because at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck. And there’s people holding shotguns and the anthropologist, this little guy, is standing there in the front and he’s going, “Nomole.” He’s going, “Brothers.” There’s only a few words that intersect between the languages and he’s going, “Brothers, we’re here. We don’t want to hurt you.” He’s speaking in the Yine language.

And he’s saying, “Come out.” And you can tell by their footprints—the trackers explained this to us—that you could see it was just the balls of their feet. So right as we pulled up to the beach, they had run. So, they were there listening to us, and he’s going, “Nomole, come out. It’s okay. Lay down your arms. We’ll lay down ours. Nomole.” Just kept saying nomole. And nothing happened. And we went back to the village and we went to sleep. We wake up the next morning and it’s 5:00 AM. And again, we’re trying to save the jungle. We’re in a race against time to get these land concessions. And so my team, like Mohsin and Stefan—JJ couldn’t come because he was in town actually signing paperwork and interviewing loggers and landowners.

And also, he didn’t think there was any chance this was going to be real because in his entire 50-something years in the Amazon, he’s never seen them. And so we’re getting ready to leave in the morning. We had tents on the boat. And Ignacio comes up to me and he goes, “You’re my director, right? You’re my boss?” And I went, “Yeah.” He goes, “I need to talk to you like a friend.” I was like, “Yeah, shoot, go.” And he goes, “You’d be an idiot to leave right now. They’re coming.” And so he convinced us to stay. We pull our tents off the boat. Stefan and Mohsin go off with their cameras. They start shooting the community that we’re in. These are monkey eaters and fishermen. And everything’s quiet.

And I opened my laptop, and I was working, just writing my book. And then it happened. Then you start hearing people screaming, “Mashko, Mashko.” And people are screaming and women are lifting children and running into the huts, and the dogs and chickens are going nuts. And I mean—

So fear. Fear.

Fear.

Because we should say, kind of the obvious thing is, as far as anyone remembers any encounters, any minimal, small encounters with these tribes— …have been violent.

Extremely violent. These tribes have remained alive because of their violence. Almost like the Spartans or the Comanches, they seem to have adopted violence as a first response to contact.

Maybe you can correct me on this, but I read that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, there was documentation of encounters with these tribes by the private armies of the rubber barons. And those encounters were, from the rubber barons’ armies’ perspective, violent. And so maybe the lesson the uncontacted tribes learned is that any interaction with the outside world is going to have to be violent because they have to defend themselves.

Yeah. You had colonial missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s. Then you had the rubber barons in the late 1800s into the 1900s—just periods of extraction, domination, and cruelty. And these tribes, their grandparents must have told them, “When the outside world comes, you shoot first. That’s the only thing that’s going to keep you alive.”

Do you think the memory of those violent encounters is defining to how they think about the world?

Yeah. Because even in my lifetime, in the 20 years I’ve spent in the Amazon, Ignacio was shot in the head. My friend Victor survived a violent encounter where they murdered somebody on a beach. I mean, they’ve shot numerous people. They’ve even shot people who were trying to help them, people who were trying to give them clothing and bananas. They call it “porcupining” them, where they find a body on the beach with so many arrows that when they fall over, all the arrows are sticking up. And they’ll do it out of curiosity too, where it’s like, “Hey, you’re wearing a suit. That’s weird.” We’ve never seen anybody in a black and white suit.”

And then get the clothing. You know, the way Teddy Roosevelt would shoot a bird for science. They just want to look at you. And so they’re operating on a different… They don’t have the moral system that we have or understand. They’re truly wild.

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

Yes. It depends on the mood you get him in because one day I asked him, “If you could see the people that shot you in the head, what would you say to them?” And he looked at me with that Ignacio look and he said, “I wouldn’t say anything. I would kill as many of them as I could.” I said, “Okay.” He also had a time where he was in a really remote guard station working for the Ministry of Culture, and they showed up and he knew that they were going to kill him. And so he climbed up into the peak of the little structure there. And just like a dog in a car, that greenhouse effect, in the top at midday with the sun beating down, he was huddled over a mattress while they were walking on the deck—

…moving pots and pans and looking at our items and artifacts. And he knew that if he was found, they’d kill him. But if he stayed up there, he was literally frying to death. He said he was soaking the mattress. He could feel himself dying. For two hours he had to stay there. And he was constantly making this decision of, “If I come out, I die. If I stay here, I probably die.” He’s like, “Probably die is better than definitely die.” So he was terrified. And so as they’re screaming, “Mashko,” and everybody’s running and women are lifting children, Ignacio comes and finds me. And you can see in his eyes, you can see when somebody has that PTSD response where he’s breathing heavy. He’s moving behind trees.

He’s keeping me close to him, and he’s going, “Look there. He has a bow. He has a bow.” And we’re looking up the beach, and there’s just this clan of naked men walking down the beach with these seven-foot bows, and they’re hunched over and they’re pointing at us. They’re going, “Look at that one.” They’re going, “Look, there’s a gun there.” And you can see them communicating to each other. And the butterflies are swirling off the beach. And, you know, in these moments you go, “Am I entering a moment that is a one-way door? Is this an irreversible situation?” Because there’s an unfolding situation where they’re coming towards us. Are they going to attack? What do they want?

I mean, I am soaked in chills right now just talking about it because I remember standing there and going, “There’s no way this is real life.” It’s burned into my memory, them walking down the beach and seeing them with the bows. And of course, Stefan is up there just firing off pictures and Mohsin is down getting video. And the community that we’re with, you hear shotgun shells loading home. But they’re also getting ready. And there’s this one guy, an anthropologist named Romel, who has been the only person who has communicated with them peacefully. He did it in 2013 where he stood on the beach and he spoke to them.

He knows enough of the local dialect that overlaps with theirs that he can speak to them. And so as they’re coming down the beach, the butterflies are flying up and we’re all waiting. And again, you’re talking, how many meters? 30, 40 meters. For an arrow, you loose a seven-foot arrow that weighs nothing, you’re talking about 300 meters easy. They can shoot you from across the river. So Ignacio was pulling me and he was like, “Down. You go down. You stay behind this tree. You watch them from there. Watch out, that guy has an arrow.” He was watching everyone because you could see, he’s like, “This is how it happens.”

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

I was, yeah, of course I was afraid. I’m with my two best friends and a bunch of people that I work very closely with. And you’re in the middle of nowhere and there’s no help coming, and you’re with like—

…you know, 26 people and there’s 50 of the tribe that you can see, and you know that they’re surrounding us. There are men on the other side of the river. And then we had guns looking back towards the jungle because we knew we were being surrounded. And again, this is always the story of someone’s uncle, brother, or cousin telling a story that happened, and now it’s happening. And it’s not happening in the shadows, it’s not happening in the middle of the night. It’s happening in broad daylight. They’re walking out onto the beach. It’s like the first time they saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. You’re going, “There’s no way.”

And you’re walking on the knife’s edge. It’s funny you say this, …about taking pictures. ‘Cause there’s two ways to think of this situation. This is fascinating, or this is extremely dangerous. And it’s both. It is a knife’s edge. So you could approach it one of the two ways. Like if I die, I die. I’m gonna take some good pictures.

But also we’re there—that was also our mission, you know? As the directors of Jungle Keepers, we’re working with this community to ensure that their lifestyle can continue, and they’re saying, “Hey, that’s great, but as an indigenous community, we’re dealing with these people that come out and raid our stuff, try and steal our women, that kill our hunters, and now they’re coming out. We want you to see it.” And so documenting it is part of our job. We have to show what happened that day. And so those guys were shooting and then—yes, very seriously—Mohsin’s wife and I, we always joked like, “Oh, if the tribe ever comes out, you stand in front of him, you take the arrow.

He has kids.” And that day we were strategically positioning ourselves being like, “You, down. You cannot get killed.” And you start in those moments to go, “Okay, where will I be safe from arrows? Where can I run to the river if they come over?” And you start planning, “Okay, if I jump into the river…” I was going, “Okay, I got my bag. I have a can of tuna. I have a flashlight.” I was like, “If I jump into the river and float down and I live, I’m still days upriver.” And so you start going through all these things, but—

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

Well, the interesting thing is that they’re initiating the contact, right? They are the ones coming out of the jungle and confronting us.

And fundamentally that contact is they’re at least giving peace a chance. They’re trying the peaceful contact first, correct? Or was there a violent element? Like what did you sense in the caution of them emerging to the beach?

Fear.

Fear.

As they came out, you could see fear on them because the way they were hunched over, the way they had their bows ready, they were worried. And so they came and Ramal is standing there, closer than any of us at the edge on one side of the river, and it was like shirts versus skins. It was two tribes looking at each other with a thousand years of civilization between them. And Ramal’s going, “Put down your bows. Put down your bows and we can talk.” And he’s saying, “Namole, Namole.” He kept saying, “Namole.” He kept saying, “Brothers, brothers, please put down your…”

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

Namole means brother in a language that they do understand, and it seems like they refer to themselves as the Namoles. The brothers.

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

Exactly, and actually, the anthropologists that we’ve been speaking to post this event have been explaining to us that Mashco-Piro—you know, Piro is the group that they’re from, these various nomadic tribes, and Mashco basically means like wild Piros. And so the one thing we know they call themselves is Namoles.

So at the end of this, we might converge towards the name of this tribe being Namole versus Mashco-Piro?

The Namoles, yeah. It seems like the most current, or at least their self-appointed identity, is the brothers, Namole.

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

With seven-foot arrows, and we’re all standing there. And so the first thing, again, you just think of like the peace pipe in the old stories. And the first thing is let’s make them an offering of peace. And so they got a canoe with no motor, and we piled it with plantains, like just full of plantains, 16 feet of endless green bananas. And then, I mean, the balls on this guy, the anthropologist, he gets into the river, takes the canoe—and it’s the dry season, so the river’s only about three or four feet deep at the channel—and so he walks this thing out, this one man walking in the face of all these warriors. And he takes the boat and he pushes it towards them.

And they rush out, and they start grabbing the bananas, and they’re not going, “Okay, we will unload these bananas and use them later.” They’re saying, “These are my bananas” and “You’re grabbing your bananas.”

And they’re fighting and they’re yelling and they’re all grabbing them, and then they push the boat back and he talks to them a little bit. Again, it’s not a perfect translation. So he’s saying, “Where have you come from? What do you want? Who’s your leader?” And he’s trying to establish these things, and they’re saying things, and they all sort of talk at the same time, like a flock of birds. It wasn’t like one man speaks. And there were no women. The women were nowhere to be seen. And actually, at one point as we were preparing the second canoe of bananas, there was a moment of absolute panic.

And it happened when there was a noise behind us and you just hear a bunch of shotguns swing around. Mohsin goes down. I go running away from the river now because I want to see it coming if there’s an attack coming. And I’m standing there, me and this guy were sharing a tree as cover, and he’s got a shotgun and he’s looking back into the forest and peering through. And what was happening was the women of the tribe had come silent-foot and they were just pulling the yucca out of the ground and taking the banana plants and ruining the farm completely. They were raiding the farm behind us while the men were talking up here. So again, were they peacefully contacting us or were they like, “Hey, we need some food, so go make a diversion”? …and take the food out the back”?

So you really were surrounded.

We were completely surrounded.

So they could have murdered all of you, probably.

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

Yeah. And it’s probably fair to say that part of the reason they did—maybe they wanted peace, but part of the reason is they didn’t know how deep this goes. They didn’t know if you have backup.

They don’t know if we have backup. They also had questions. Some of their questions were incredible. “How do we tell the difference? How do we know who the good guys and the bad guys are?” Because to them, all you outsiders are the same. So, who were the ones cutting down the trees?

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

Well, the big trees seemed to have incredible significance to them. They’re significant to us in a different way, but to them, it’s offensive on an almost religious level to cut a big tree, as if you’re killing their gods.

So there’s a spirituality to the trees to them.

It seems like that.

And so whoever’s cutting them down is a source of destruction on a spiritual, existential level.

Yeah. “Why would you destroy our home?” And I think they’re right.

Yeah. In a deep sense, the uncontacted tribes represent the deep jungle. And so if they’re threatened, that means the deep jungle is threatened.

Yeah. I mean, they are the human voice of the jungle. They’re asking questions and they’re also demanding. They’re clapping at us and waving and saying, “Send more bananas.” And so they loaded up another boat and pushed it out, and this time they gave them some rope. They all had rope tied around their waists. But they love rope, and some of them were wearing rope that they had made, which is brown or reddish. And then some of them were wearing rope that they had clearly pillaged from logging camps or the communities because it was modern nylon paracord. They had this wound around their waists like a thick belt. And they took the second boat, and they had some rope and some plantains on there.

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

Could be.

From a couple of months before that.

Absolutely, could be. But what Romel said as he was talking to them, he turned to us and he said, “You know, this group… the other groups call me the Grandfather. This group, I don’t know any of these. This is first contact. This is the first time this group is talking to us.” And you saw people from maybe 12 years old to what looks like 40-something, like a banged-up 40. And no really old people and no women.

So this is a particular clan of the uncontacted—

It’s a particular clan.

… tribe who they’ve never contacted. Yeah, is there, just from your memory, interesting aspects about the way they were trying to communicate? Like you said, clapping. I think it’s, from an anthropology perspective, from a human perspective, fascinating. How do you talk to people from an uncontacted tribe like this? So clapping, yelling. It’s interesting to know that there’s not a hierarchy where there’s a leader that represents them.

Well-

Or is that we know for sure? Never-before-seen footage of tribe warriors

Before even coming to talk to you about this, we passed this through anthropologists and ethicists and people, and we said, “Look, is it even, can we talk about this?” Because if you talk about this and you tell people there are these uncontacted tribes, people have misconceptions. They go, “They’re the last free people on Earth. They’re living the real life. We need to go join them. We want to see them. We want to photograph them.” There’s all this bad stuff that happens and all these people want is to be left alone. So, the last thing we want to do is kill the thing we’re trying to protect by telling the world. But at the same time, they’re speaking out. They’re saying, “Stop cutting our trees.

Leave us alone.” And so if we’re not successful in the greater Jungle Keepers’ mission of protecting this river, they cease to exist. And so advocating for these people requires us to have this conversation. It requires us to have this footage and to show the world, and then leave them alone. In order for any of this to make sense, I have to show you this footage.

And this has not been shown ever before.

This is a world first. I mean, up until now, that’s the other thing. You know, we’re sitting there this day and the only thing you’ve ever seen are these blurry images of them from someone’s cellphone from 100 meters away. And we’re sitting there with 800-millimeter lenses with a 2X teleconverter and R5s. And so this is as we’re looking through the binoculars, anticipating the tribe coming. I’ll put a little bit of volume so you can hear it. And then you can see, this is the moment. This is us running when they’re like, “They’re out. They’re coming down the beach.”

Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

You see how many thousands of butterflies? But look at the way they move. Look at the way they point. Look at him with his bow.

Wow.

There it is.

They’re trying to figure out what they’re looking at.

And they didn’t know what the cameras are there for. So this was the guys looking out the back. So he’s going, “There’s something back here.” … hear the women in the woods. And I’m looking in every direction because I’m going, “Which way is the arrow coming from?” But see, he has his shotgun. This is just like a farm shotgun. Even if he shot it, you have to use a stick to bang out the shell. But see, as they come closer, they start laying down their… See, he’s laying down his bow and arrow. They understand.

So these are warriors, and the way they were at first moving, it really looked like they’re ready for violence. And now they’re all standing in a relaxed- And they’re smiling? Are they smiling?

Smiles come at some point. I would say that one of these guys seemed like he was in a leadership position. He did most of the talking.

What’s with the different hand gestures? This holding your hand up to the face—all of this means something.

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

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

Again, there were just these two dominant guys. And this guy and one other guy who looked almost like him, like his brother. A lot of gesturing.

Wow. This is incredible, Paul.

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

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

Right? All right, so a few of the… But see, even that, as he’s pointing- … with them, what are you pointing at?

You guys are nuts. You guys are nuts.

You see as they’re rushing in, there’s this desperation. They’re hungry. They also-

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

In this particular video, it’s a guy named Liner. But see these guys? They’re fighting over it. It’s not that we’re all going to share it later. It’s, “I get mine, you get yours.” And so what does that mean?

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

Now, after we’d given them several boatloads of bananas, things did calm down. Ramo said to them, “Look, we’ve given you what we can give you. We gave you sugarcane. We gave you boatloads of plantains.” And so then there came a time where things were a little more relaxed. They were walking around. We had a great moment where we’d given them the plantains and the bananas, and he’d said, “Look, that’s it. We’ve given you what you asked for. You asked for bananas. We don’t cut the trees here. All of us here are not tree-cutters.

We’re indigenous people.” And he couldn’t explain who the hell we were, but they were like, “We don’t cut the trees. We’re not the loggers.” And they’re like, “Okay.” So then at some point, Ignacio went out and started, you know, he’d go like this and they’d go like this. He’d dance a little bit, they’d dance a little bit. And then there was this very human moment of just sort of joking.

So even Ignacio warmed up.

Even Ignacio warmed up. Once he realized that it didn’t seem like anyone was going to die that day, things did calm down. It was a false sense of security. Here, I’ll show you. There’s a couple more things that are relevant here, though. This is just them interacting with the boat.

This is truly incredible, man.

But then they don’t have boats. They don’t have stone tools. They don’t… Imagine if you showed them ice. You know, they wouldn’t…

This is historic.

I mean, you hear of Percy Fawcett encountering the tribes. We’ve heard of anecdotal accounts of the tribes. This is the first time that the tribes have been filmed, that we can hear their voices— —that there’s a documented interaction happening. I mean, look how comfortable he’s getting. He’s so close. They asked him for his shirt. He gave his shirt.

This is incredible.

They asked him for his pants. He gave his pants. He was in his underwear. You see this? The shirt that’s over his shoulder. Ignacio took off his JungleKeepers shirt and threw it to the anthropologist, and then the anthropologist walked off and threw it to them. So over the shoulder of that uncontacted naked warrior is a JungleKeepers shirt with the logo showing.

That’s great.

So their second shirt and they’re…

You just upgraded that guy’s status in the tribe. He’s gonna be the new boss with that shirt.

He’s got a dope polo. Yeah, and he didn’t even have to order it. But yeah, this is in the aftermath when things were calm. And my sort of moment with this that really stuck with me was when Ramo said to me, “They’re asking about you.” And I said, “Me?” And he goes, “Yeah, they’re asking about you.” Again, I’m not tall, but compared to the people in the village, I was a little bit taller with big shoulders. And he said, “They said you look like a warrior. Could you come forward? Show them that you don’t mean any harm. Show them your palms.” And so he pulled me up onto the beach. This was right before they left. See, I hold up my hands. Listen. And they sang back. They’re singing. They raised their hands. I raised my hands.

Wow.

And then we were left watching them walk off the beach into the jungle with everything that we’d given them, and they were gone. And so we went downriver the next day and the community said to us, “Okay, now you understand this is real. This is terrifying. You felt that fear. You have a duty, if you’re going to protect this river, to protect us from them and to help us figure out what future they want. If they want to come to us, if they want to learn farming, whatever it is, that’s fine.” But they were like, “We need protection from you guys.” And then in this video in the beginning, I’m narrating to the camera and walking around right as they’re coming up the beach. But you see this guy, right there in the blue shirt?

That’s George. And he was very friendly, very confident with this. He said, “Don’t be scared. They’re not going to hurt us.” And the next day, we went back to town—a long journey back to town. We go to sleep, we wake up in the morning, and we find out that the following early morning, our friends in the community had said, “Okay, the tribe is gone. We gave them all the things they wanted. We gave them sugarcane, bananas, and we said, ‘Please come back, you’re welcome here anytime.'” And George was driving a boat with people on it, and as they were going upriver, 200 of the tribe ran out, surrounded the boat, and they started firing arrows.

And everybody else could hit the deck and get under the benches and hide behind bags of rice. George was driving and he was leaning back as he was driving as fast as he could. And one arrow came in just above his scapula and came out by his belly button. And so he had that seven-foot arrow tip through him. And so they pulled him out—and I saw the boat afterward, and there’s just horrific amounts of blood all over the boat. And he had to be medevacked out, and somehow he lived. We were able to help get him a helicopter, getting him evaced, all this. But again, you just go, “What?” You know, these people came out of the jungle and they asked for bananas.

We gave them bananas and we, in every way possible, said, “We mean peace. We want friendship with you.” And then the next day they attacked.

What do you think happened? Why do you think their mind turned? Or maybe this has to do with the role of violence in their society. Maybe it’s so integrated into how they interact with the world that they don’t even see that as a fundamental shift in the interaction.

I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of it. And the only thing I can think is that the way they hid the women from us, you don’t know—for them, maybe we’re not allowed to see their women. Or because the one thing that we got was that as George’s boat and this other boat were going upriver, which is how they live—it’s not like they were doing anything wrong, these people live in a community days into the Amazon and were going fishing—they came around a bend and I think they spooked the tribe. The tribe might have just acted defensively and said, “We don’t know who this is.” The motors could have set them off, we don’t know. But they shot him. And then the other thing is the thing with the necklace.

I’ve asked anthropologists about this, and their answer was that at this point, they said, “You know more than we do.” Because two of them had the exact same item around their necks, and it seems to be a Brazil nut and then some sort of casing around the side, and it looked like animal teeth positioned in there. And it’s like, what are you carrying? Are you carrying medicine? Are you carrying some sort of a totem? But both of them had it, and it’s not a comfortable thing to wear around your neck— it was grapefruit-sized or bigger.

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

It seems like a container. They didn’t let it get wet; they cared for it. The guy in this picture, he’s got this piece of tree fiber that he has on him, and then he’s gotten his hands on Brazil nut sacks—plastic sacks from one of the farms across the river. And so they just take, they take, and one of them got a machete. As they were leaving, again, during that period where he got friendly, he was leaving and he had the machete and was playing with it and swinging it at butterflies. And one of my friends, this guy Bacho, he goes, “Oye, deja mi machete.” He’s like, “Drop the machete.” And the guy just looked at him and was like, “Yeah, come and get it.” It’s like, “Yeah, you cross the river and see what happens.”

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

Oh, they know machetes.

They understand the machete?

Yeah, they do raids for machetes.

They understand the power of sharpened metal.

I mean, it’s an Excalibur sword to them. But that one has stuck with me because I wonder, what were they carrying in there? The mysteries of the jungle

So what are some of the questions? Like if you could know everything you’d want to know about them— Maybe in the space of communication and language, that’s really interesting. You mentioned that there’s all kinds of calls, animal calls. So they obviously know how to mimic animal calls.

Yeah, they can use animal calls with enough complexity that they can do basic commands. They can speak in Capuchin; they use Tinamou calls. Some of our rangers were upriver recently, and they found a Nomole trail, a Mashco Piro trail. It was Ignacio, of course, and he made a secret whistle they do. He whistled out into the jungle and he’s listening, and they whistle back. So him and everybody on the team just ran back to the boat and got out of there. But at least they answered. They didn’t just shoot. He whistled, they whistled, they said “out,” and he got out.

But it’s like we don’t know: where are the old people? Do they not survive? What are the marriage rituals? How is reproduction handled? There are one or two children in the Amazon that I know of who washed down river on a log and were rescued by communities and raised. They either learn the native dialect or Spanish, and then at some point, somebody will ask, “What was it like when you lived with them?” And the answer is always the same: “I forget.” They don’t talk about it.

So maybe we know that they value secrecy. I mean, when you’re afraid of the outside world, part of that is confidentiality. They all sign NDAs.

Yeah, there’s some really good NDAs.

It’s understood. It’s an NDA. There are no lawyers; there’s only one way to execute the law.

Yeah. It’s either a really strong NDA or just that it is savage living out there in the jungle. You’re eating monkeys and turtles, and you’re hungry for days on end. Your wife might get stolen by another tribe; your baby might get stolen. Imagine the botflies and the things they must put up with. I mean, what we experienced in three days of living out with modern camping gear and headlamps, they’re doing none of that. You could put us out there naked, and it’s a very different story.

Yeah, the brutality of nature- Werner Herzog comes to mind. That they have to live in that. But then, there must be something about the jungle that serves as a catalyst for spirituality, so they must also have a religious component, a spiritual component that probably unifies them. There must be an ideology they operate under.

Oh, there must be. They probably have a belief system. They probably have amazing origin stories. It would be amazing to know what things they have accurately and inaccurately guessed about us, about the outside world. I mean, they’ve never heard of the country they live in or of World War II or any of it. And so seeing them come across the beach was surreal because it’s like this aperture into history.

By the way, I mean, you do have a certain look, so you realize like— …as I’m saying to you, your face is carved in some wood somewhere. And there’s a few of them gathering around and still singing about the great gringo with the—

The full beard and the big nose. They probably drew this like he’s got hair all over his face and a huge nose, and they tell their children.

Yeah. And it could be anything. You- they- You could be like… To the children, they say, “This is the monster you should be afraid of,” or you could be the most beautiful encapsulation of the outside world. It could be everything in between. You don’t get to control the myths.

You don’t get to control the myths. Yeah, God only knows, but I mean, it’s—

That’s so interesting.

So now in that 130,000 acres that we have, we know—and this is what we sort of have to come out of the closet with—we are now protecting these people. And the only way to do that is to make sure that they’re not contacted, let alone that they don’t get machine guns shot at them by the narcos or that crazy hippie gringos don’t go down there thinking they’re going to join the coolest commune on Earth.

So how much of the land that they move about is within the 130,000 acres of rainforest you’ve been able to save? And how much of it is not? How much of it is in the extra 200,000 acres that you’re trying to save?

Most of that 200,000 that we’re still trying to protect is territory that is theirs. People always ask me this. They’re like, “How could you buy the Amazon? That doesn’t make sense.” And it’s like, well, I have bad news for you. Somebody already owns it and we have to buy it from them so that they don’t log it. These landowners are going to sell their forest to the logging companies because owning 10,000 acres of the Amazon doesn’t help you if you’re a third generation jungle man. If you live in the city, they’re going to contract either the narcos or the loggers or the miners to go out there and use it, and they’ll get a little money. And those people, when they see these tribes, will kill them. That’s for sure. Shotguns and machine guns in the end will win, not to mention the germs.

So all the money you’re trying to raise and all the land that you’re trying to save, it’s all towards that, protecting the deep jungle. So when you buy up the jungle, you just want to let it be, let the natural ecosystem come back to life in the cases when it was logged or just flourish— …if it hasn’t?

Again, we’re talking about the last great jungle. I always called it the last endless forest because this place is so incredibly remote. The other question I always get is, “Why is this river so important?” For my whole career, 20 years in the Amazon, it’s been that it’s massively intact forest. Places like the ancient forest where the trees have never been cut, so it’s forest that’s been growing since the dawn of time. Thousands of species can be on a single Shihuahuaco tree. It’s Avatar on Earth. You can see the sweat come off your skin and rain down and then drink it out of the river; you’re part of the chemical physical reality there. It’s one of the last places that’s untouched.

This changed everything because we realized that along with the butterflies and the monkeys and the jaguars and the trees and the ecosystem, there’s also a human culture that will, in the next few years, cease to exist, that will be exterminated if we don’t protect them. When you look back at what happened to indigenous cultures all over the world over the past few centuries, we collectively now have a chance to undo all of those injustices by at least doing one right—by saying these people want one thing: to just be left alone. Imagine if we just protected the river. Then it’s not that they’re this thing that’s vanishing from reality, but they get to continue living that way.

And if they want to come out and contact us, great, and if they want to continue living like this for the next 10,000 years, they can. That’s what we’re working with now. It’s become so much more important than just trying to protect the environment. It’s like protecting Yellowstone or Yosemite or the sequoias that occur nowhere else on Earth. You protect the things that are unique and special, the crown jewels. In both a biological way and an anthropocentric way, this has now become a river with global historic significance because this story is going to play out in the next 18 months.

You’re further and further trying to save more and more rainforest. And the mission is clear because there’s just this deep jungle— —that’s full of this incredible life. And now we know with uncontacted tribes, there’s a lot of interests that don’t care about the jungle, they’re pushing— —and want to cut it down, want to destroy it. And the mission is pretty clear. You just want this whole territory to be preserved.

Yeah. And that’s what makes it so beautiful is that this is one of those crown jewels. This is one of those special places on earth where it’s like a time capsule for nature, for human culture, for biodiversity, for climate services, for everything. And then, you know, I think people get overwhelmed when you say, “Okay, we have to save the environment. We have to save the ocean.”

This is one watershed. It’s 300,000 acres and we’re already at 130,000. We’ve shown we can do it. The loggers are happy to turn into rangers. People all over the world have become Jungle Keepers supporters. We have several thousand people that every month give us between five and a thousand dollars, and that keeps the rangers going, that employs the local people. So it’s not just drawing a line and making a park and saying, “Everybody stay out.” No, you have the Nomole, you have the indigenous people, you have a future for the indigenous people where their kids don’t have to worry about eating monkeys. They can be park rangers.

And I get blowback from people right away where I say, “And people can even come see it through the treehouse.” And people go, “Oh, are you going to bring tourists into the wildest place on earth?” And it’s like, man, look at that jungle. There’s 300,000 acres of that, and we’re talking about two blades of grass on a football field that we access so people can see it, which makes a huge difference. And so the fact that we can share it with people… Look, since the first time I came here and spoke to you, the amount to which you’ve made it possible for us to protect this place, the amount of spider monkeys and jaguars and giant anteaters and those ancient millennium trees that you’ve made it possible to protect is monstrous. And so—

Thank you, brother. It’s been—

No, thank you.

—it’s been an honor of a lifetime to be able to watch you. I tell this to a lot of people, there’s certain people I’m glad exist in this world because you’ve educated me and millions of people about the beauty of the jungle and how important the fight to save the jungle is. So if you’re listening to this, you absolutely must go. Please donate or post about it, share it with friends at junglekeepers.org. You’re also doing a gala in New York at the end of January. So if you can, please go and donate to help save the jungle.

Yes, please do. Because our first conversation led to the first surge where people realized what Jungle Keepers was— —and then because we got this surge of support, we were able to expand our work, protect more acres. A lot of our major donors and small-scale donors came in because of that. So these are people that went, “Wait, if Lex thinks it’s a good idea, then we’ll do it.” I think that based on your trust they came in.

I guess also I should say it’s not enough to speak and communicate the importance of saving the rainforest. You actually have to have incredible people there making it happen. And we have talked, and we’ll talk more, about the dangers and the complexities involved on how to navigate everything. And one of the things, and the reason I’m really excited about what you’re doing, is I just got to meet the team, and it brings a smile to my face— —several of the people I know who are extremely competent. Stefan, somebody we’ve talked about—

Yes, he likes to take pictures of stuff, but primarily the thing he does incredibly well is run everything—organize everything to make sure that stuff happens and happens quickly and efficiently. These are the kinds of things that are required to make stuff like this happen in the complex environment that the jungle operates in, the sometimes lawless environment— —that the jungle operates in. So the team is incredible, which is why when you sort of connect the money, how does the money lead to the solution of the problem? It’s the team, and the team— —makes it happen.

I didn’t know that people like Stefan existed.

Yeah, me neither. When I met him— He was a beautiful, wonderful human being.

I’m, you know, again, I can use a machete to catch a fish. But his systems knowledge and his ability… I mean, his bandwidth is the size of a country. It has its own area code. Just like JJ opened the door of the Amazon and gave us that local indigenous perspective—I mean, yeah, okay, I told some stories about it, but Stefan came in and went, “Okay, you guys have good ideas, but you’re both jungle guys.”

“You’re not helping each other.” And running those systems, making the website, and making it possible to connect the people that care with the indigenous ranger program and make sure the rangers have shirts and cans of tuna and that there’s a person running the ranger team—I mean, these are things that I couldn’t dream of organizing. I can’t even make my bed. You know, I can’t even get that far.

Caveman want fish.

Caveman want fish.

Watching you hunt for fish with a machete is one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen. You were literally able to catch a fish with a machete. So that’s what you’re good at. And then Stefan is good at everything else.

Everything else. You remember the Most Interesting Man in the World? And they’re like, “You know, he once had an awkward moment just to see how it felt.” And it’s like, Stefan’s to-do list doesn’t exist because it’s already done. It’s just incredible.

Quick pause. Bathroom break.

Oh, 100%. I’m so happy about that. Yes, sir. Tribe’s diet: Monkeys, turtles, and turtle eggs

And we’re back. One thing I forgot to ask you is about the diet of the uncontacted tribes. You mentioned— —potentially monkeys and turtle— —eggs? So, what do we know about what they eat? What’s the source of protein? Do they eat monkeys?

Oh, yeah. Their primary sources of food, I would say, would be monkeys, turtles, turtle eggs, and small game like paka, the large rodent that’s like the size of a beagle. Capybaras. Stuff they can shoot. They don’t really fish. And we know these things because our indigenous trackers and our rangers find their camps, and so they’ll find some of those little thatch structures they make on the beaches and we see the bones. There’ll be tapir bones. There’ll be turtle shells, which seems like is their closest thing to a bowl. The day that we interacted with them, they did find a bowl. We saw them walking away with it in one of the farms, and then days later we found it destroyed. So, they didn’t seem like they saw much utility in the bowl.

It’s a temporary container.

It’s temporary. So, they kill it. They make a fire. They must be amazing at making fire. I don’t know how they do it out there.

It’s very difficult because everything is wet.

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

And it’s tough in the jungle.

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

So you think they cook the meat?

I mean, they have to be cooking their meat from a parasite standpoint, from everything. We know that— —they’re cooking their meat. We see it, that they’ve cooked it. You know, there’s not a lot of excess berries. Things like berries and nuts and fruits, that the monkeys and the birds are— —and the bats are getting to those first. As soon as… I mean, that’s what fruit does, right? A tomato is green until its seeds are mature and then it turns red to advertise, “Eat me,” so that you eat it and then your gut transports that to somewhere else and it gets free transportation. In the jungle, that happens so quick that we’re never getting produce.

In the book, you have a picture of a native girl on the Los Piedras- … Having monkey for lunch.

Yes.

It looks really strange. The monkey kind of looks a little bit like cannibalism because it looks like a small human. I don’t know what it is about monkeys. There’s a human- … element to them. In their eyes, in the form factor, but even in the warmth they bring to the interaction.

Yeah, I was babysitting her and she was six at the time, Dira, and her parents went out and we were left at camp. And they just said, “You know, keep an eye on her. Make sure nothing eats her.” And I said, “Sure.” And she was like, “Hey, I want lunch.” And I said, “Great. Well, what is there?” And she pulls out this monkey head and she was like, “It’s ready,” and she starts pulling at the ear. And she’s like, “I can’t get the ear. Can you help me?” So I pulled off the ear with my teeth- … and then I gave it to her, and then we just shared this monkey head back and forth.

And we’re sitting there and I took a few pictures of her as she’s eating. And I have this video where I go, “What’s your favorite food?” And she was like, “Monkey.” And I said, “Not cake?” And she was like, “Monkey.” And she was pulling its lips off and, like you said- … you see the teeth and the eyes and it’s like sort of grilled in static agony. And it looks like a tortured human and she was just enjoying it.

Let me look it up on Perplexity how many people in the world eat monkey. Does it taste good?

If it was prepared right, it would taste good, but they just throw it over the fire and then eat it. So, even if you took a perfectly good chicken and did that, it wouldn’t taste great.

There’s no reliable global count of how many people eat monkey meat, but available data suggests many millions of people regularly or occasionally consume primate bushmeat- … especially in parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia. I mean, she looks like that is her favorite meal- … is monkey.

Yeah. Yeah, we had a great time.

Who are we to judge?

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

She’s loving it. That’s awesome. That’s a good picture there.

And she’s adorable.

Yeah. Now that some time has passed, when you look back at that encounter, which I really do think is historic, with the uncontacted tribe—what do you think about? What lingers with you?

Honestly, I’m still processing it. I’ll still find myself just staring off, sort of remembering it or looking at the footage. But it felt like the voice of the jungle was speaking. These people are… there’s that separation between humans and nature where we go, “We have to protect nature,” you know? It’s like explaining what water is to a fish. We’re part of it. We depend on it. And these are people that depend on it 100%. And as we sit here surrounded by technology and concrete and civilization, they’re still out there right now. And the fact that we’ve been trying to protect their home without even really knowing that they were in it, because they’re so elusive, it gives you perspective on where we came from and how far we’ve come.

I look at simple things. You board an airplane or you take a picture and you go, “This is a miracle.” I think having that perspective of having interacted with them where you go, “How much work does it take to make this?” If you and I were standing in the jungle and somebody said, “You have to make this,” how many years before we came up with this? How many rubber trees, and where would we get the metal, and what would we use as dye, and how do we make the spring mechanism and figure out how to make it work? I don’t know. They are working with the bare essentials. So it’s an interesting reference point to start at in terms of how incredibly privileged we are.

The other thing is we have written text, we have so many different types of text, and we have code, and we have language, and we have music, and we can communicate in all these different ways. And they have spoken word. They have oral tradition, and that’s it. And so they’re operating the way our ancestors did, persisting in modern times. I think, for me, I come back to the world and it moves very fast when I see it because I’m still stuck on, you know, whether or not you and I can drink out of that puddle. You know? And thinking about that.

The big questions of life.

The big questions of life.

Yeah. You’re right from the perspective of the uncontacted tribe. Going from the technological world to the jungle, you realize the majesty, the magic of the biological system that is the jungle, that is nature. But from their perspective, also there is a majesty and magic to the technological world. The human-created technological world of the pen and the computer— … and the light bulb, that too is magical. So sometimes we— … don’t give enough credit to both: the magic of the technological world, all the incredible things humans have been able to build, and the magic of the natural world.

I think you and I and people that spend large amounts of time in the wilderness, especially somewhere as remote and fundamental as the Western Amazon, have a different perspective on it. Because I think that when you’re born in it, you don’t necessarily have the framework to appreciate how far we’ve come. You go, “Yeah, I got on the train today. I checked my phone. I FaceTimed my mom,” and you’re like, “This is all normal.” It’s like we found a way to take things out of the ground and mix them together into magic devices that can do anything. It’s mind-blowing.

There’s a deep optimism to that. And you actually write in the book, which I really like, I think somewhere in the beginning, quote: “Given all the death and destruction I’ve witnessed, it would be easy to slip into the popular anti-human narrative that we are a plague on the planet and there’s nothing that can be done, but my career in conservation has given me a glimpse into an alternate narrative. I’ve met people who are proving more and more that something can be done. I’m talking about real heroes, people who have dedicated their lives to redeeming the evil that is capable of being waged by the human soul, people who are guarding the flame amidst the storm, proving every day what so many have forgotten.

There is still hope.” And that speaks against the cynicism and maybe apathy and the view that humans are a destructive force in the world. That speaks to the fact that humans, with all the technological elements that we have created, can actually do a lot of good. I wrote in my notes here a quote from the great Jane Goodall: “The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” So caring about the world, having optimism for the world, having hope for the world is the way to help have an impact, help save it. But on that, I have to ask you about Jane. She passed away on October 1st. Some humans in this human civilization of ours can open our eyes to the beauty of the world, and she is one of the best of them. And she’s had an impact on your life. Maybe can you speak to the impact that she’s had?

I mean, when I grew up, being dyslexic, I couldn’t read for a very long time. And so my parents read to us every night, which was amazing considering how hard they were working. But they’d find the time to give us an hour of reading every night, whether it was Lord of the Rings or Sherlock Holmes or Jane Goodall. And so I grew up with Jane being this figurehead of conservation and of adventure and sort of a living historical figure, this legendary person. And so then one time, right around the time that I’d been going to the jungle for a few years, I got to go see Jane speak, I think it was at NYU. And sitting in the crowd, watched her, completely amazed.

And I had, at the time, my cousins had been telling me that I should write down my stories, the stories of taking care of an anteater and stories of catching anacondas. And they’re like, “Write, you know? These are such good stories.” And so I’d been writing them down and I just remember after the talk, she did at least an hour on stage and then hundreds of people lined up, and she sat there and each of those people wants a moment with this legend.

And so she has to take a picture, shake their hand, they say, “You mean so much to me.” She says, “Thank you.” And then they move on and they say, “We’ll send you the picture.” “Okay, great.” And so then I got my moment and we waited in line for a long time and I gave her this manila envelope with two chapters in it. One chapter was Lulu the Giant Anteater from Mother of God, and the other chapter was me, JJ and Pico out on the river catching anacondas, just talking about how amazing the jungle was. And I said, “I’d love it if you could endorse my book that doesn’t exist yet.” And I felt like such a loser doing that.

And I felt so stupid because I feel like everyone was probably asking something of her and it’s incredibly draining to talk to that many people, even if it is for a good reason. And 48 hours later, she got back and she said, “This is incredible. I would love to write a recommendation for your book as soon as you find a publisher.” And what happened with that is that Jane, the way I think of it is, she waved her very powerful magical wand in my direction, and she had the incredible compassion and presence to actually—I mean, after talking to that many people and being on the road 300 days a year and being Jane Goodall, this living legend scientist, to actually do something so mundane as look at some kid’s writing.

And of course when I went to publishers they said, “Jane who? Who said that they would endorse your book?” Because everyone had said no. Every publisher in New York had already said no. And then after that, HarperCollins took me on and they said, “Well, if Jane Goodall thinks it’s a good idea, then we think it’s a good idea.” And it became Mother of God and then because of that, Jungle Keepers, Dax, everything else stemmed from that. So had Jane not been the legend that she is truly in every moment, my whole career would never have happened, which also means that those thousands of heartbeats and thousands of acres in the Amazon wouldn’t be protected because we never would’ve started Jungle Keepers.

And she did that not because you’re special, she did that to everybody. And now just imagine the scale, the impact she’s had because of that. And guess what? You have a bit of that responsibility now as well. There’s young people that walk up to you in that way and you have that responsibility of seeing them, of giving them a chance, seeing the potential in every single human being that walks up to you.

It definitely… I would say that we could do four hours on just Jane, what she did for humanity, what she did for science, what she did for women, what she did for wildlife, the amount of other people that she inspired and gave careers to, everything she did for me. But to me, that presence of mind when you reach that level to not be worried about your own travel and your own schedule and busy with getting some rest, and that she actually looked at it, has informed how I operate. And indeed like you say, at this point as strange as it is, people will stop me on the street and say, “Hey, I watch your videos every night with my kids,” or someone will say, “How do I get your job?”

I’ve been watching you for years and I’d love to help conservation.” And so it’s made it so that I follow her example where you stop what you’re doing and you pay attention. Because you don’t know, that might be the next kid that’s out there saving a river, or the next person that makes an innovation that makes it possible to clean rivers, or whatever their dream is. But Jane was in the hope business. She always said it. That not losing hope was key to staying in the fight. And we live at a time when that apathy is a poison peddled by the darkness. They’re trying to make you feel disoriented and apathetic and scared.

And fighting back against that and having conviction and passion and fire and hope are the only way that we’re going to fight that. And she understood that, and she spent her whole life spreading it, guarding the flame against the storm, and tipping her candle to others to light them. I mean, that was her whole thing. Advice for young people

What advice would you give to young people on how to do that? Those young Pauls sitting there, and your life story’s just incredible in that way. You’ve taken a leap into adventure— …into the unknown. What would you recommend they do?

I think the thing that I try to communicate to them—and again, my inboxes are filled with people from Finland, Spain, Georgia, saying, “How do I get your job? How do I get out there and do it?”—and it really is just that: you throw yourself headfirst into adventure. You just do it. And I remember hearing people say that, like, “You know, if I can do it, you can do it.” And I remember how hollow that sounds because I’m like, “Yeah, you’re on a talk show or you just wrote a book.” These titans of their industries and innovators saying, “Oh, if I can do it, anybody can do it.” But now that we’re protecting all this rainforest and that I’ve lived with the animals and met the tribes, and it’s becoming this global movement—you know, I didn’t have a PhD.

There’s that quote that someone less qualified than you is living your dream life and has your dream job right now, and I am the poster child for that because I failed out of high school and started taking unmatriculated college classes and going to the jungle with my friend JJ and just doing it for the sheer love of it for years, almost a decade, before anything surfaced. And the other thing is there’s not even a path. There was no path ahead of us. There was no, “Okay, you go to school, you get trained in this, and you’re going to become this.” I went there and it was like, “You’re never going to be a conservation biologist because you don’t have the grades. You don’t have a PhD.”

You don’t have family money. You’re not going to be able to protect rainforests.” So I said, “All right, well then, selfishly, I just want to see it.” And then I ended up getting trained by the indigenous people, and like what happens so many times—you could use a restaurant example—where you might start washing dishes, but at least you’re in the restaurant, you know? And then at some point, the manager’s going to need you to help with restocking and so on. And at some point after a few years, you’re going to be helping the new guy, and at some point you might end up being the manager, and at some point you might end up in a position where you’re starting your own restaurant. That’s the only way to do that. You can’t just search it on a computer. You have to go sweat and bleed and do it.

And that said, especially if you fall in love with the journey that you take on, it is full of difficult periods. I think you said somewhere this just seems to be the nature of it. That there’s going to be pain, there’s going to be suffering along the way. You have a really nice post… …That I recommend people watch about just this. When people ask for advice, that the hardship, the suffering—

…and I’ve seen how much you care. I’ve seen it in your face when you see a tree being cut down or you see the fires. There’s real pain there in your heart and you have to carry that. And so the post is, “How honest can I be? What do I tell these kids who message me asking how they can do what I do? It’s not David versus Goliath. There’s no sword or sling that can hold back a dragon this big. You’re going against the current of global economic entropy and human apathy. Swimming against the current is tiring, a great way to drown. Every day, we don’t win, we lose, and when we do, worlds burn. The more you know, the more it bleeds. The heartbeats all stop when the flames come through. Constellations of species turn to ghosts, and we’re the only ones saving them.”

“Cupped our hands around a candle in the howling darkness. And people want to be inspired. Keep that social media going, keep it up. You’re doing great. They want to know we’re winning, and we’ve done a lot of winning, but not right now. We’re getting slaughtered. We’re at that part of the story. We’re almost at the end game. We can think as positively as we want. Thoughts and prayers won’t stop a chainsaw, and the motor that’s carrying us against the current towards the miraculous goal only works when there’s gasoline in it. As soon as that stops, we drown. We can take the warm light from all of those who help and not let it bother us that there are people who could buy a planet’s claim to care.” At some point you realize what’s really happening.”

“As a kid you’d rather be Aragorn. You don’t want to actually carry the ring, not when you learn what it’s going to cost, even if you make it. How can you explain to Sam why you can’t get on the boats? Whatever it takes, whatever it takes. It’s that time of year again. Here come the flames. Whatever it takes, it’s coming.” And people should watch the video that goes along with this. But that speaks to the pain, the difficulty, the challenge, the suffering involved— …when you’re faced with the possibility of destruction. And that’s the other side of the sword of caring for something deeply.

Yeah, we’ve watched a lot of forest burn. We’ve pulled a lot of animals out of the flames. I wrote that at a time where we were just getting hammered. Funding wasn’t coming in. There were miners. It was just months and months out in the jungle alone. It’s a Thom Yorke track that I’d just been listening to again and again, and it was just so low. There was a huge new invasion where they just burned the whole side of the river and it’s never going to come back. And it’s part of the forest that I loved and I knew the animals there and it’s gone. And so we have to live through that on a weekly basis, at least, a day-to-day basis.

And when you take on responsibility for something like this, you go to sleep thinking, “Yeah, if we don’t do it then worlds burn. If we don’t save it, then…” Every time you mention the sadness that surrounds a happy moment, well, it’s like, how am I supposed to go to a party and talk with people about anything? How am I supposed to even go to sleep when if we don’t succeed at what we’re trying to do, if we don’t outrace the chainsaws and the roads, then those trees die—those millennium trees—and we’re the only ones out there protecting them. And then when you see that black scorched earth with nothing left, it’s just ashes on the ground…

…the cacophony of life is silenced, and it’s just this horrible violent silence. It makes you sick. And so yeah, there’s a lot of weight that comes with that where we’re not theoretically doing something. We’re practically doing it.

So that’s the other side of the advice to young people.

Oh, yeah.

It’s not gonna be easy.

No. I mean, when they say, “How do I get your job?” It’s like, “Well, you don’t want my job. You don’t want the botflies, and you don’t want the dengue, and don’t even inquire what a normal life looks like.” I lived out of a backpack for 20 years. You know how many monkey faces I had to eat because there was no other food? Like, seriously. Just being alone on the boat in the river and how many days the motor didn’t work. And you sleep out there, and you get rained on because you don’t have any protection, and you have some leaves over your face. And then you go home, and everyone’s got a job, and everyone’s got kids, and everyone’s happy.

And they’re like, “What are you doing down there?” “I’m trying to save the rainforest.” They’re like, “Sure.” And now we’re at this point where I cared a whole lot for a long time. We’ve had rises, and then we’ve had falls, and we’ve had wins, and then we’ve had failures. And the last few years, we’ve had this rolling success of people finding out about our work and coming in. And we start to go, “Wow, if we protected 130,000 acres, we might actually be able to do this.” There’s that moment in 300 where they show Leonidas and they say, “Even the king allows himself a moment of hope that this might be okay” right before they get slaughtered.

And someone very dear to me recently said, “In celebration of where we’ve gotten to, if it happened in any harder of a way, it would have actually killed you. And if it had happened in an easier way, it wouldn’t have been so divine.” And that slapped me in the face because it was like, “Man, it has been so hard, but look where we are.” We might actually do this. Cartel, Narco-traffickers & assassination attempts

It just has to be that way. Speaking of which, another complexity in all of this—you write about in the afterward of the book about the narco-traffickers that have moved into the river basin. They are not the loggers that we’ve spoken about anymore. They’re growing coca for cocaine, and they’re building airstrips. So tell me how this came to be.

Like you said, our whole life on this river, when loggers come in, JJ and I would walk up to them and say, “Hey, what’s up?” and sit down with them and have a beer or share a meal and talk to them and ask who their father was and if we know them, and then hire them. And they’re friendly.

They are, in a way, brothers. They’re the same.

They come from the same people. They’re simple local people. They’re not evil. They’re just people who usually have a kid and a wife, and they’re looking for work. So they work with the chainsaw because that’s what they know. And they work for, you know, $30 a day if that, in very challenging, harsh environments. And so when we see clearings, I would always go with the drone and fly it over. We’d get some intel, and then we’d bring that to the police. Jungle Keepers supports the police at this point because the Peruvian government has a hard time with resources trying to manage Amazonia. And when you’re three days from civilization, getting cops out there is not the easiest thing.

So sometimes we’ll lend boats or gasoline or logistical support. And there was a moment in March, several hours upriver from home base. I’m with JJ on the boat, and I fly the drone. There’s this big new clearing, and I lower the drone. A few times, I’ve had people come out and wave at the drone or say, “Get away.” And we’re out in the middle of the river just sort of idling, and I lower the drone. I see these little huts, and we’re saying, “Okay, this is a big clearing.” I’m snapping images. There are visitors who had flown in on the boat with us, and I have my local team, and all of a sudden, people come running out of the houses.

And they run straight to their boats. Home is in the downriver direction. They get in their boats and start chasing us, and we start driving at full speed. We have a 60 horsepower; they had a 40. We’re doing this chase now, and our guests, who are potential funders, you know—at one point, the father looked at me and goes, “Hey, this whole running from the Pirates of the Caribbean thing… it’s getting scary.” “You’re scaring us.” He was like, “When are you going to put the drone down?” And I go, “I’m flying the drone at full speed to keep up with the boat.” And I just crash-landed the drone on the side of the river near a big tree. I just said, “Fuck it. We’ll get it later.”

And I was like, “This happens all the time. They get mad, they chase us. It’s no big deal.” And I smiled at him, and JJ’s smiling. He goes, “This is so bad.” And he’s smiling. And JJ looked at me, and the smile fell off him like a mask. He looked at me and was like, “This is not good.” And we kept going upriver and luckily, there was a camp of police that we’ve worked with quite a bit. I went to a friend of mine, and I remember we got off the boat. I shook his hand. He said, “What’s going on?” I said, “Look downriver, there’s a boat tearing upriver towards us.” And he did three things. He got the rest of the guys, they armed up, they got on the boat with guns. They put ski masks on. They got ready for combat. They told us to get down. He also said, “Hey, turn on the sat-link.

Call for support back home.” We turned our boat around. And as soon as the narcos—which we didn’t even realize were narcos chasing us; we thought we were looking at loggers—as soon as they saw the guns and they saw us face them, they turned their boat around and went back downriver. So we got escorted downriver, and I remember shaking my friend’s hand and saying, “Thank you for saving us today.” And telling the other guys they did a good job. We’d been brought home safe. Hours later, I said, “Good job. Thank you so much.” And they went back upriver, and then that night, I’m sitting at the station. And I get a phone call from Stefan.

And he goes, “Pick up the phone.” I go, “I’m in the middle of a conversation.” He goes, “Pick up the phone.” And my friend whose hand I had just shaken a few hours ago, they went back upriver, and as they were unloading their boat and washing off in the stream, the narcos did a drive-by and shot him straight in the chest with a shotgun. And so all of that enthusiasm—that we’re protecting the biodiversity, this is so great—it’s like that scene in the movie where there’s a montage of success and winning, then gunshot. I could still feel his hand in my hand. I just shook his hand. I said, “No. You’re not…”

I said, “Well, is he okay?” He said, “He took a shotgun straight to the chest. He’s dead.” I said, “Okay.” And so I had to go out to dinner and not show the guests anything, and just smile and laugh and talk to them about whatever and keep that in, which felt very difficult to do. And as you said, the threat level escalated and we didn’t know it.

The narcos had come in and started realizing that there’s so much wilderness here that they can operate and there’s no police. And then when we flew the drone, they got mad. So we communicated with the police and they said, “Oh yeah, these are narcos.” Now we realize this is part of the serious drug mafia. And then I had gone back, the incident that you’re referring to at the end of the book, I had gone back to New York to speak to donors to try and get this work to continue. You know how it works. We’re at the station and then you go to that little logging town, and then there’s a road.

And so our pickup truck had come in on the road and JJ was supposed to come down, get in the truck and drive back to the city. JJ was on the river and went, “I forgot I was supposed to get more stuff at the city. I’ll go tomorrow.” He went back up and he sent the boat driver down and told our driver, Percy, who was waiting with the pickup truck, “JJ’s not coming today. Go back and come back tomorrow.” Percy starts driving down the road and he sees a tree across the road—this is a single-lane road through the jungle. Men with guns come and stick pistols in through the open windows, gun against his head.

They pull him out and they go, “Where’s JJ and the mierda gringo volador?” He said, “Where’s that shithead gringo that flew the drone?” And if either of us had been in the car that day, they would have killed us. And we know that because they took his wallet, they took his phone—our driver, Percy. Thank God they didn’t hurt him, but they sent a message to us. They said, “We missed you this time, but we’ll get you next time. We’re going to get you.” And so when JJ called me, he was howling. He just had that adrenaline and that emotion that it almost happened. And so that changed everything.

Since then it’s not counting butterflies and taking ecological surveys; it’s that there’s a drug war being fought on our river. And now when these roads come in, we can’t just go out and meet these people anymore because they are actively looking to shoot us. They know our names. The police intercepted a phone from someone they arrested, and in the WhatsApp chat, it said, “If you see JJ or the gringo, anyone in our network, please kill them. You’ll be rewarded.” So we both have a hit out on us and life on the river has changed. We can’t…

You know, I can’t just go out walking around and swimming and driving my boat. You have to be looking over your shoulder at all times. You can get as trained as you want with a pistol and sleep with it under your pillow, but the way these people work, they’ll catch you when you’re least expecting it. They’ll wait till you’re at a cafe in town. They’ll wait till your motor doesn’t work on the side of the river. It’ll just be a quick one and they’ll go. And so that feeling on top of the weight of protecting the ecosystem and the animals, it’s like now we’re actively being hunted when we’re there.

And this is very directed at you and JJ? So they really don’t care about the others. They understand. Are you afraid? What’s it been like living with the real fear of being murdered at any moment?

I wish I could say I handled it better than I’ve been handling it. I wonder how people in war zones do it. I wonder how some of my soldier friends that I have immense respect for did it when they were deployed. Because for me, once this happened, with every phone call now I think, “Did something happen to JJ?”

Every time I go to sleep, my dreams are that I’m being shot. It really threw me. It really affected me. When J.J. called me, he was just shouting. I don’t even remember what he was saying. He was just shouting, “They almost got us. They almost got us.” He was so terrified and angry. There was a day not that long ago that I was swimming in the river, right in front of the stairs at the station, and a boat came around the bend. I remember thinking, “Do I run? Do I go underwater? Do I hide? What the hell do I do?” I didn’t have a gun near me.

The security people were up the stairs. It’s like, you go, “Holy shit.” And it’s not the danger of, you know, if I jump on an anaconda, it might kill me, or if I climb this, I might fall. These are people who want to kill you. And on top of it, when you see what your friend looks like after three days of floating in a river—what a body looks like of a person you used to know—that’s very viscerally terrifying. There’s the tragedy of that person who lost his life, who was younger than I was. He was a kid in his 20s. It’s very hard to do anything because… I mean, right now, my hands are sweating. It just affects me.

Even in the daylight, if I can go, “You know, it’s fine. This is part of the thing. This is the adventure, people deal with this all over the world.” You can talk yourself tough, and then in those quiet moments, that 4:00 AM thing, you wake up and you go, “Fuck. Why am I sweating? Why did I just have those dreams? Why is my heart racing?” It sinks its way into your subconscious, and it’s just not what we signed up for. We wanted to just protect this beautiful place and this is a whole new threat. We’re not trained for this.

We’re not police or military and we’ve now seen violence on a scale that we were very unprepared for. Just two days ago, I was on my way to you and my phone rang at nine o’clock at night and it was J.J. My heart was jackhammering. I had to pull over because I was going, “What news now? Did we lose another bunch of acres? Is it a new road? Did somebody die?” It really scatters you.

In some sense, it’s a twist that you didn’t ask for and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the fight you’re fighting, which is protecting the rainforest. But because of it being pristine and quiet and away from civilization, it also becomes a place where you can have airstrips. It becomes lawless in a certain way because it’s so far away from civilization.

Yeah. It’s the only place that they can operate with impunity. There’s no police out there. And so they saw us helping the police and they went, “Cut the head off the snake.”

And that… you know, Chico Mendes, Dorothy Stang—the list of environmental defenders that are assassinated in the Amazon every year is huge. There’s endless examples of it. It’s staggering. I forget the exact numbers, but every year we lose people. There’ll be local leaders who are trying to stop an oil company or a drug cartel, and they just shoot them because they know that one person who’s able to rally that support, who has that voice—if you just shoot them, usually it’ll end the thing and then they can go back to doing whatever the hell they want. And so right now, we’re working very closely with the Peruvian government.

People assume that a Latin American government is automatically corrupt, but what we found is that these are really good people that want to help their citizens. And the police have been working very hard to stop the narcos, to protect the local indigenous people because with the narcos comes human trafficking. With a team of male narcos out in the woods making drugs, they want prostitutes. And how do they get prostitutes? They go steal girls from indigenous communities that don’t know any better. And then there’s reports that the narcos have made contact with the uncontacted tribes. Of course, they’re going to shoot machine guns at them. They’re not going to have a shotgun where it’s a fair fight.

They’re going to mow them down and the uncontacted tribes are going to have no idea. That’s why I posted a video of me in the rain saying, “This is endgame,” because there was a new road coming off the north of our territory above the ancient forest. They had jumped over because we stopped it at the ancient forest. They’ve gone above the ancient forest. Now they’re trying to cut down to a new area. And so it looks like this. …Trans-Amazonian… Stefan made this map, of course. But you see the area that we’re trying to protect—loosely, so that we don’t give away anything—the area that we are protecting. So, the light green is the 130,000 acres—

…and then this metastasizing network of roads just reaching out and trying to get in. And so they’re trying to come in from the north where that arrow is, they’re trying to come down. And so the police are fighting them along this— …and it’s a full-on drug war right now. Stopping that, securing this northern boundary… and again, just the power of what we have. When I posted this, I asked Stefan to show people the road and where it’s going to go. We posted this video and said, “We have to protect this 100,000 acres right now.” And all up here is uncontacted tribe territory. And just from that one post, we got $150,000 in like 48 hours and we bought this concession. We stopped that road. But now they’re up here—

…and they’re trying to come down. This is the thing, again, you said it’s great. Yes, you get to be an adventurer and you get to live in the jungle, sure. But it’s like there’s this Mission: Impossible thing where you might get lucky enough to pull off your psychotic mission. You know, jump your motorcycle off the train and parachute down and stop the bomb before it goes off. Great. How many of those do you get? And we’re having to do it every month. These amazing people that are supporting the rangers allow us to patrol and protect this because once we have this land protected, the interesting thing is that the police can go into any of the light green areas. If anybody’s there, they just arrest them.

They’re on Jungle Keepers’ land, they’re out. And eventually, that land will become national park if we’re successful. The problem with the land that’s not is it’s a gray area. It’s the middle of the Amazon; are they allowed to be here? Do they really have cocaine? Because they’ll plant papaya for acres and a little bit of cocaine behind it. They’re sneaky. And so they have to build a case and it takes time, and then the road comes in… and in that time, then they’ll knock off a police officer. If we were just able to get this tomorrow, the whole problem gets solved. We could give the police two more boats, and then they could do all the patrolling they need.

So the mission is clear.

The mission is very clear, and the problem is that right now we’ve been playing defense and sustaining losses. Either we need to inspire enough people that the donor program goes through the roof, and instead of having several thousand donors we have 50,000 donors and we raise—we need $20 million to save the rest of the corridor. We’d raise $20 million overnight with enough people. Or we need one of these people who has the resources to come in like Batman and just go, “I want the park named after me and I’m just going to give you the $20 million.” And then we do it tomorrow, and then we make a documentary about how we saved a river and the tribe and the monkeys. But right now, we’re…

Yeah, right now we’re begging on the side of the road for enough change to buy bullets so that we can stay alive.

So these narcos, they’re… there’s a kind of distributed network where a bunch of them are pretending to be farmers. They’re holding onto the land and then maybe they start planting cocaine on the land— …slowly, and they build the airstrips. Are they trying to stay under the canopy— …with the airstrip?

It’s brilliant. First, what they do is they subsidize the poorest people and they say, “Go up this river, turn left at the tree and just start there.” And they’re like, “Here’s a few grand.” And these people are like, “I never had a few grand before.” They’re like, “Buy gasoline. Here’s a chainsaw. Go clear some land.” They send these people up there, and then when they show up a year later and these people have made an illegal farm out in the jungle, they go, “Hey, we need a safe house. Remember that time we gave you the gasoline and now you live here? You’re going to work for us now.” And so they’re kind of a friend of the people like that, and they have safe houses all over the jungle. And then when the bosses come to collect what they’re growing out there…

I mean, the police busted a narco operation that was in the middle of the jungle. I mean, you know, hiking to the ancient forest— …just days into the jungle. These people are going on foot with sacks and stuff. And the way they do their airstrips is you think the canopy of the rainforest is 150 feet tall, 160 feet tall. And if you clear the interior of the landing strip, the trees are still meeting overhead. And so you can’t fly over and see down—

…which is the same reason we didn’t know about the road that was going to the ancient forest, because overhead the trees are meeting, so you’re not gonna see it on satellite and you’re not gonna see it from a plane. And these bush pilots fly in and they’ll just duck in under the canopy, land their plane, load up, and then they fly out. I mean, expert pilots.

So it’s impossible to detect.

It’s almost impossible to detect. We’re working with people now. You know, it’s this arms race. There are drone programs. I talked to someone that has a different type of drone, a 16-foot drone that uses the thermals to climb up and has solar panels on the wings and flies for two weeks at a time. It’s like a glider- …that recharges itself. And it’ll keep constant imagery so we’ll get almost up-to-the-moment data on disturbances in the canopy. And it’s like, well, that’ll be a first-hand alert system, but then we gotta get the police out there which, as you know, is a two-day expedition by boat, and it’s the only way. And so the local police force there may be dedicated, but putting people on a multi-day expedition to go get shot at in the jungle is nobody’s idea of a good time.

You understand, have you researched into this whole other world of drug trafficking, cocaine trafficking? How big is the operation here, looking at Perplexity— …multi-thousand ton, multi-billion dollar global industry?

I mean, globally it’s a monster.

Colombia, Peru, Bolivia. And they move north and east through the Americas, the Caribbean, the Atlantic to reach major consumer markets. Yeah, this is a machine fueled by a lot of money and a lot of brutality. The number of cocaine users worldwide is about 25 million people.

Users. Climbing the giant tree

Users. So there’s a market. And when there’s a market, you’re going to find a way. Quick pause, bathroom break. All right, and we’re back. And me as somebody who is afraid of heights, and I’ve had a chance to interact with you a bunch—you’re in some sense fearless and I’ve watched you climb a lot of trees. You’ve helped me climb a tree. And there’s this wonderful part of the book where you talk about finding the tallest tree in the forest you knew at the time, and that was something that you passed and thought was impossible to climb. And you talk about climbing it. Take us through the experience of that. And that leads you to seeing the Mist River in the rainforest as the sun rises.

I was wondering if you could talk through the story of that, both for at least for me, but even for you at that time, the terrifying process of climbing a tree like that for the first time with J.J. at the bottom cheering you on, and what it felt like to see the Mist River.

That tree, you’ve met that tree. She’s a good one. Her base is at least as big as this room, and she’s probably about 160-something feet tall. And so when you’re looking at these giant buttress roots going up, which I’d been doing for 18 years at that point, I always said, “Man, if I could just climb it.” And I’d never had the rope skills, you know, and I’d developed as a rock climber. I was working on strength, and I trained for it. It’s like most things. You can’t just do it. I’d gone and climbed up 30 feet and gone, “No way.” The trunk of the tree goes vertical for about 70 feet before branches even come out, so there’s just this one big vine. And J.J.

and I did it at, I want to say like 4:00 in the morning, like really early. The howler monkeys had just started. And you start climbing with the rope up this one vine, and you have to… it’s not a technical climb. It’s a strength climb. You have to gorilla up this vine, and it’s all back strength. And so I did it no shirt, no shoes, straight up, and J.J. had the belay device. And so every like 30 feet, I would put in a piece of webbing and a carabiner. So then you go up another 30 feet and you put a piece of webbing and a carabiner, and you don’t know what you’re gonna find. And you’re going up in the dark.

And so when you say it’s a lot of strength that’s involved, there’s very few places to rest. You’re essentially just lifting the whole time. So it’s extremely exhausting.

Extremely exhausting. Like, I really trained for a long time, and there is no rest. The only rest you get hurts. You’ll have to cling to the tree and your feet are smeared against the bark and you’re holding on with your toes, if anything. And if you fall—you know, if you’re climbing up, and this is basically trad climbing—if you’re climbing up and you put a safety, which is a piece of rope with a carabiner, and you put my rope through that, again, as you’re doing that, it’s dangerous ’cause if you fall, you fall. Then I do that and then you climb up. Right before you put the next one, you’re gonna fall double. So if you climb 30 feet, you fall 60 feet.

And so your head’s gonna smack against the side of the tree. As you’re climbing, you don’t know if you’re gonna reach into a wasp nest or if there’s gonna be a venomous snake.

And there’s, by the way, in those trees, a lot of those.

A lot of those. And it took me over an hour just to get to the branches the first time, and it’s just, again, full exertion, everything I had. And then you get to the branches above you, and each of the branches is the size of a mature oak tree. They’re just these huge branches, thick as a minivan, and you’re climbing up this straight tree that’s like the World Trade Center. It’s just huge and then I had to traverse around the tree on vines, and then finally I get up into the crown of this tree. And then from there, I called down to J.J. and I just see this little speck of light 85 feet below me. And then I climbed up to about 120 feet and I sat there.

And you’re doing all this still in darkness.

We’re doing all this in the pre-dawn light. And so when I got up there, now the howler monkeys are going and the jungle’s starting to vibrate and you can hear the first macaws starting to chirp and everything’s starting to turn on. And in the east, the sun is coming over the jungle. When the first rays get line of sight to the canopy, it starts lifting the mist off the canopy. All of that moisture starts coming up, and I’m sitting on this branch at 100-something feet above the ground with dark jungle below me, and all of a sudden I see the river. I see the Mist River I’d always heard about.

They say that there’s a river above the Amazon, an invisible river that has more moisture and that more water is flowing above the Amazon than is flowing in the Amazon. And I’d heard this my whole life and you think, “Okay, the fact that there’s a molten core of the Earth or that black holes theoretically exist.” It’s just like one of those things you’re never gonna see. And in this moment on this tree, sweating and just ripped apart and bleeding, I was sitting up there and I saw the Mist River and it was flowing over the canopy in the golden rays of the morning and the macaws start taking flight and there was monkeys below me that were looking up. And you could tell they were confused.

They were looking at me going, “What is that?” And I just had this absolutely incredible moment. It felt like you’re seeing God. I wanted to share it with everyone. I felt guilty afterwards for having had a moment like that. But it felt like I had taken this insane risk, risked falling out of the tree or getting strung up on the ropes, and of course it’s just me and J.J., so if something goes wrong, no one’s gonna help you. And being out there on that branch felt suicidal ’cause even then, if you fall, it’s a giant swing back to the tree.

But the beauty that I saw up there was so intense that it sucked the air right out of my lungs. I had tears in my eyes and I’m just watching this incredible process flow over the Earth, this legendary thing that I’d heard about, that scientists described, and now I’m seeing it with my own eyes. It felt like the gift of the tree.

And you write, “Now, in the branches of the greatest tree in the jungle, I watched as the Mist River caught the morning rays, illuminating golden currents, swirling as it rushed over the canopy like a stream from heaven. In the troughs and basins in lower areas, the river was deep blue. But then, as it flowed up and over the taller trees, slow rapids washing over the canopy, the Mist River became ignited, electrified in the gold magnificence of the sunlight. Scores of birds flew up, in and out of the churning currents. The life and breath of the Amazon was flowing from north to south along the basins of the Las Piedras over the jungle. My God. My God.” I thought of everyone I loved, of every creature contained in the leafy distance.

The jungle itself was like a great being, a monstrous leviathan of warm green might. I wanted to call down to JJ and tell him to find a way up. I wanted my mother to see it. I wanted the world to see it. The light filled my eyes, and I found myself wiping away tears.” You know, I should take the small tangent of saying the obvious, but the thing that needs to be said is you’re a fucking great writer.

Thank you. I mean it, come on, I’m just describing what happened, but…

All right. You mentioned macaws as part of the process of the jungle waking up. I read that when you first start in the jungle, that’s kind of your job, studying those. And me as a fan of monogamy and birds… So macaws are beautiful, but they’re also monogamous creatures. They scream at each other quite loudly. What are some interesting things about them? Among which, by the way, you write how important the ironwoods are to— …their wellbeing, to their life.

Yeah, I mean, when I went down there, that’s—like I said, for young people, if you wanna get out there, go do it. I agreed to stay at the station and do like six hours of macaw research every morning. So you’d wake up before dawn and go sit and just stare at the side of the river. And the macaws would show up—

…and like you said, they all scream and bicker at each other. It’s just how they talk. It’s very, very loud and very, very harsh. But they do love each other. You can actually hear when you walk through the forest, I know what the sound of macaws giving affection is. They make a certain kind of sound when they’re preening each other’s feathers and taking care of each other and just nuzzling. And then there’s a different call altogether when they’re yelling at other macaws or saying, “Let’s go.” And you start to learn macaw language.

What have you learned about relationships and successful marriage from listening to macaws screaming at each other in those nuanced ways you’re talking about?

Well, I guess…

Never mind, you can skip that question.

It’s interesting to see two animals sticking by each other’s side while they’re raising a chick. And at the bottom of the stairs at the station, there is a macaw nest in an ironwood. The relationship that you mentioned is that in the jungle, there’s a limited amount of macaw real estate. And those are all ancient ironwood trees, at least 500 years or more. So they have to be thick. This, again, car thickness or bigger. And when a branch falls off, it creates a hollow and the macaws use that to reproduce. And because there’s only so many nest sites in the forest, only about 17 to 20% of the macaw population reproduces in a given year. So they have a slow replacement rate. And macaws are one of the things that people come to the jungle to see.

And so along with gold mining and logging and all these extractive things, in our region, ecotourism has been great. It’s given the local people jobs as guides, cooks, chefs, and carpenters. And so macaws are a huge part of that because it’s one of the last places where you can see these flying rainbows over the canopy. Or when you’re on a branch from one of these trees and the macaws fly under you. And again, they’ll fly by; you just hear the wind in their feathers. And they just look at you over their shoulder, like, “What?” and just keep going. And then they’ll join up with other macaws and they fly across the horizon.

And it gives you this sense like you’re seeing something from the dinosaur times. It just looks like wild jungle and there’s nothing human in sight. And there’s just this savage canopy to the horizon and just these beautiful birds flying over. They’re just magical. Giant anaconda

You have this Instagram post with an anaconda around your neck. There’s a million questions. Maybe you can talk about that experience, but also, how did you not die?

So as you know, we’ve been studying the habits of Eunectes murinus for quite a while. The lowland green anaconda is the largest, heaviest snake on earth. And I’ve been practicing a lot for a long time, and this is the biggest one we’ve ever physically caught. This was just under 20 feet—it was 19 feet something. And you can see she’s in the middle of shedding. And the other interesting thing with her is that she had blue eyes because her scales over her eyes turn blue right before it comes off of her head. And so I’ve never caught a blue-eyed anaconda before. But if you look at the size of my head and the size of my hands, you start to imagine that thing’s head is bigger than a Great Dane’s.

It’s huge. And so the power on that—when we tried to lift her to measure her, we wanted to bring her up out of the stream and get her over to the side so we could straighten her out and measure her. We’re just trying to take some simple data points and then release her. And she, at one point, she just decided to flex her body, and you just see 10 people fly this way, and then she’s flexing the other way and 10 people fly this way. And every time that mouth would open, she would just reach back and she’d just be like, “Just let me do it.” And you know that if she gets purchase—

Once they get purchase, they wrap you so quick and they’ll just crush the life out of you like you’re a bag of chips. And if you’ve ever seen a mouse in a mousetrap, when the mousetrap goes down and the eyes come out? Anyone that’s owned snakes and fed them mice knows this, that sometimes if they catch it right, the guts will either come out the back end or the front end. So I’d imagine that the same thing will happen with a snake that’s that big. That’s bigger than I am around.

So they have a process. When you say purchase, they want a bite just to hold and then they— It’s good. So…

But again, all she wants is to be let go. In her defense, this massive snake—we named her Millie for the data entry—she just wanted to go on her way down the stream. The comments on this are hysterical. People are like, “This is the worst example of white people shit I’ve ever seen.” I mean, Snoop Dogg shared it. So one guy goes, “Congratulations, you’ve touched enough grass. Go back inside.”

Yeah, somebody said, “Interesting use of free will.” And I saw Killpopper007 commented— And maybe you can tell me if this is correct. “Anacondas are ambush predators. If you approach them, they will usually try to flee and will not register you as food. There’s other reasons too.” This is in response to how Paul possibly did not die from this. “There’s other reasons too, but this is the main reason. They’re pretty much apex at that size, so their fear isn’t as prominent. He was calm, so the snake was calm. It’s insane to do—” “…and still risky, but he might actually be the most qualified anaconda handler on Planet Earth. Paul is one interesting cat.” Hugging emoji. Is that accurate?

Yes. At that size, they’re apex, so they’re really not thinking about defense. They’re just like, “Get off me.” If I was to hurt her, like if I was to touch you in the arm with a needle, you’d react. If I was to do anything that hurt her, which I’m not doing, she would turn around and bite me to say, “Go away.” But they also don’t want to bite because their recurved teeth make it very difficult to detach. And also, they’re putting their head at the source of the danger. It’s not a good calculation. And so these giants—and I’ve had the privilege of interacting with four or five anacondas in the 20 to 26-foot range—all of them have been very Leviathan-like. They just don’t want to move. They just want to keep going. He’s 100% right on all of that stuff.

I’ve caught 90-something anacondas at this point, and many of them have been massive. Then there’s the one that me and JJ didn’t get at the Floating Forest because it was bigger than—

…bigger than we could tackle, bigger than my hands. I couldn’t touch fingers. But every single one of them has chosen flight over fight. Only the little babies and the smaller males get snappy. They’ll come back at you like a normal snake, and if you grab their tail, they’ll try to just bite you and then go. But these big females, you know, they’re like dragons. They’re like these big, legendary things that live in swamps, and the only reason they’ve gotten that big is because they have a reliable prey source in a secluded place away from humans, and they’ve been there for decades just pulling things down to hell and eating them. And the other thing—I mean, look, I have a team with me. You know? So…

So there’s people holding the—

Yeah. I mean, let’s be real here. I would never do this. If I was out in the jungle by myself at night, doing this would be suicide, 100%, because for every second there that I’m going, “Oh, I’m in the water and she’s over my neck,” if JJ wasn’t there to jump in and unwrap her— …then I die. 100%.

Because she’s continuously wrapping.

She’s continuously on her back saying, “Come in here—”

Come in here.

“…and let me arm bar you. Let me squeeze the guts out of you.” She’s just going, “Let it happen.”

And moving slowly.

Moving really slow.

Conjuring.

With that assurance of power where she doesn’t need to try and tap you quick. She’s going to get you eventually.

Although, to push back on something you just said, having known you long enough, let’s be honest. You’re saying, “I wouldn’t be insane enough to do it.” I think you would be. I mean, there’s a line of insanity, and you, my friend, walk that line masterfully so far. I think there’s a sense when you’re able to sense the animal, whether it’s crocodiles, caiman, or anacondas, and maybe radiate a sense of calm. I’ve seen you be able to go into some dangerous, from my perspective, situations, and make it seem like it’s not dangerous at all. And maybe when you become one with the ecosystem, you’re not a threat to it, and maybe that’s why you can survive? I haven’t been able to make sense of it, really.

Look, I would say this. In the case of elephants, if we ever end up in Africa together, I can get incredibly close to elephants because I’ve spent enough time with them where, so far, it’s always been a mock charge. And you can be one with the elephant and learn their language enough that you respect their boundaries and you also show them that this better be serious because you’re either going to have to kill me, or you’re going to have to just turn around and go back to eating. And you can have that exchange with them. And with smaller snakes, I’ll be careful and whatever else.

I can tell you with this that when you have both of your hands around an anaconda’s neck, I mean, I’ve been known to surprise myself with the decisions I make, but this alone would lead to death, 100%. It’s like laying down in front of an 18-wheeler with it in neutral. It’s going to roll over you. This is going to turn into anaconda handcuffs with this thickness, and then that is going to wrap you, and then six more of those are going to go around your body and you will get squeezed and you will turn into goop. And she will not… just like that guy said, she probably is in defense mode and not food mode, so she’ll probably just neutralize the threat and then go back to sleep.

I have to ask you about the floating forest. And you write about Santiago, once again, beautifully in the book, of the time when he told you the stories and when your mind and eyes were still fresh and maybe skeptical and more leaning towards the Western world point of view versus the jungle point of view. “Santiago’s eyes were glowing in the darkness. He watched the orange ember spark upward to join the celestial river of stars that arched across the night sky as if the memories were written there. He squinted, his face as wrinkled and weathered as an old map of the world.”

“Vast experience whispered in the firelight, as ephemeral as the breath that spoke the words, but powerful enough to latch on and sink down into some deep part of me.” This is Pico saying, “Papa, tell me about the anaconda on the blackwater stream.” And he tells a story of that. And he talks about it being big and having horns.

And you write once again masterfully about you at that time having doubts. It sounds like bullshit, but now more and more of the things you’ve seen of the jungle and the things you sense you have not seen yet, all of those stories seem to be true. The one he was referring to may be 36 feet long, this big. He says that, “The floating forest is the place you need to go, Gringo, if you want to be liberated of your doubts and skepticism.” So tell me about the anacondas you’ve encountered in the floating forest.

Well, the thing he’s describing there is that he’s saying they found an anaconda that had horns. And, in that moment, we were all hanging out by the side of the river and I said, “That’s enough.” I stood up. I was like, “Come on, there’s no anaconda that has horns.” If I’ve learned anything in 20 years of living with the indigenous people in the Amazon, it is that they’re not wrong. You know, if they say there’s a tribe of naked people with arrows out there, they’re right. And they know what an anaconda looks like. So if he says he saw an anaconda with horns, he saw something that ain’t a normal anaconda. A smaller version of this played out recently where one of my…

One of the people that works at the treehouse, he came and he said, “I found a snake and it was in the water tank. And it had green spikes on it.” And I said, “There’s no snake that has green spikes. Congratulations, you’re an idiot.” I made fun of him.

And I said, “I know all the snake species that are here. None of them have spikes.” He said, “No, it had long spikes. The snake is this big and had spikes this long on it.” I said, “There’s no snake with spikes.” Until finally he came and he got me in the night and he goes, “The snake with spikes is there.” And I said, “Well, I’ll get out of bed for that. Let’s go.” I said, “And I guarantee it’s not going to be there when we get there.” And we got to the water tank and I shined my flashlight down and sure as shit, there’s a snake in there and it’s got thousands of green spikes coming off of it.

And the spikes are coming completely perpendicular out from its body. For a second, I really was having this out-of-body experience. And then the snake saw us, got scared and swam, and all of the spikes collapsed onto its body and became smooth. And then I realized the snake had been living in the stagnant water for a while and developed algae that was growing off of it. So when it was sitting still, all the algae would settle out. And so if you look straight down on it, it’s a water snake that has algae growing on it. And so it does look like a snake with spikes. He’s not wrong. It was. It was a water snake. It was some sort of Helicops. But there’s always an answer like that.

Amazing, yeah.

Where they’re not wrong. So when they tell you something like, “There’s an anaconda with horns,” and multiple people have seen it— …you make an expedition there. You know, like if somebody said there’s giant ground sloths in this one valley, I wouldn’t be like, “They’re extinct.” I’d be like, “Where?” You know, you start to listen. I mean, after the tribe walked out of the forest… You could tell me, that day, if a Tyrannosaurus rex walked out behind them, I would’ve been like, “Makes sense.”

Let’s go to the floating forest. Do you ever think about what creatures are in there? I just had a conversation with Michael Levin at Tufts University. He’s this biologist- … who creates biological life forms in the lab, but he also studies all kinds of weird, what he calls unconventional intelligences on earth. And he speaks about that from a perspective of just understanding the incredible intricacies and weirdnesses of biological systems. So, you know, the soup of organisms that’s there- …in the floating forest is probably incredible. You ever think about what kind of weirdness is there?

Yeah. I mean, along with giant snakes are animals that are existing in an ecosystem that’s isolated, right? And so the tepuis… You know, like in the movie Up, those Venezuelan cliff jungles where it’s like the straight… Like Angel Falls? And up there you have this allopatric speciation occurring where these isolated communities are departing from whatever’s down there.

So on the floating forest, you have this very unique ecosystem where there’s animals living on grassy islands, there’s animals living in the tops of palm trees. And so in that nightmare soup that exists beneath the rafts, there’s probably insects and… I mean, I’ve seen lizards there that we have been unable to identify. There’s things there in the… I mean, I can’t imagine. I don’t think the decay is going to happen. There’s probably not a lot of oxygen in that water. And so, I brought a few scientists there and they’ve all just been like, “This is…”

Yeah. How do you even

Yeah. How did this form? We’ve brought hydrologists there and they’re like, “How the hell did this thing form?” And then, trying to study what creatures live under that is amazing.

But the big anacondas, it’s interesting because they truly are the apex, so they’re unbothered. They’re not really using- …their power for anything.

No, and I’m sure if I bit her, she’d turn around and kill me.

Yeah, but in a bored kind of way. Like it wouldn’t even… It would just slowly kill you.

But I wonder if once she killed you, if she’d be like-

Just take a bite?

I mean, if she’d… I mean, bite? They swallow, right? So- …once you collapse your shoulders, it’s like if you killed a perfectly good hamburger and it was like in your hands dead, you’d be like- “Maybe I’ll try it.”

I mean, they need the calories.

Yeah, and then take a six-month nap.

Yeah. They’re truly incredible, majestic creatures though.

Yeah. I love this picture. Just look at the size. I want you one day to feel them, because the wild ones are not like the captive ones. The captive ones are soft from sitting in a cage their whole lives. These guys have been flexing every day. So it’s like you’re hitting steel cables. It’s just wild.

And even if it’s just being chill, you can probably get a hint of the power it’s capable of, right?

The one good thing about those really big ones is that when they do strike, it’s like being in a fight with a big guy. That haymaker comes from way back here and you’re like- …”Oh, good. I’m going to duck.” And you get down, because they open their mouth and they start accelerating. And it’s pretty easy to either get out of the way or get it right before it hits you in the face— … usually. Again, if you ever mess that up, just like the haymaker from the big guy, it’s over.

Your level of knowledge and comfort with snakes is incredible. I think they—

Play with them a lot.

… sense that. I mean, I’ve just seen you with snakes and they must sense in you the camaraderie. I don’t know. You have a way of speaking to animals and about animals like there’s zero danger. Well, from my outsider perspective, it seems like a lot of them are full of danger if you’re not communicating to them correctly.

With snakes, I think it’s more of a “the highway is dangerous, but you can drive safely” thing. I know what I’m doing, so I’m working with a snake that can’t envenomate me and is small, so I can allow it to freak out. And then if I can get it into my hands and warm it up and it goes, “Ooh, it’s nice in here.” And of course, like you said, I’m not scared and so the snake is going… They are very sensitive to that and so he’s going, “Okay, this isn’t so bad.” You can chill him out. But I don’t think snakes have any camaraderie. I think that whales, monkeys, elephants—I think that they can sense. They can say, “Okay, this person’s trying to help me get out of this net. I’m gonna relax and not kill them.” I think you have that dynamic then very much so. Rescuing a spider monkey

Speaking of somebody that does have camaraderie, there’s this incredible video on your Instagram that people should go watch where this spider monkey was drowning and you jumped in to rescue her.

Sure. So we’re coming downriver. It’s seven o’clock in the morning so I’m cold—I’m always cold. I’m sitting on the boat and JJ’s like, “Look, spider monkey.” And I go, “Great, spider monkey in the river,” like that’s normal. And JJ’s like, “No, she’s having trouble.” And I was like, “Why is she having trouble? They swim all the time.”

And he goes, “No, she—” he goes, “You should help.” And so the boat comes around. Then sure enough, what you can’t see in the video is that the river was so full that there’s these little whirlpools and currents and she was trying to get to the side. And again, all the animal righteous people are very quick to be like, “Let nature take its course, you know? Let the monkey drown,” or, “She doesn’t need help. You’re interfering.” Sure, sure, sure. If you were actually there, you would know something, and that is that she did need help and she was drowning. Her head kept going under. And so I saw that JJ was right.

And so we pull around, I took off whatever I could in the moment, jumped in with the paddle because now here again, I trust monkeys but I don’t want her to bite me. She is gonna be scared so I thought, “There’s two ways I can do this. I can grab her by the neck and ‘animal control’ her—grab her by the neck and the tail and take her out of the river, which is gonna be scary for her.” Instead I thought, “I know spider monkeys so well. I’ve raised so many of them.” And when you raise them, they curl up to your neck and they’ll…

Like if you have an orphan spider monkey whose mother got shot by poachers and you’re taking care of her before we bring them to the animal rehabilitation experts, they’ll curl up on your neck and they’ll just talk to you in your ear. And so I feel like I know a little bit of spider monkey—broken spider monkey—and so I pull up next to her and I give her the paddle. And we’re in this rushing river and we’re moving at 10 miles an hour downstream, and I tried to give her the paddle and she smacks it away. She was like—

… “No. Get away from me. I don’t know what you are.” And then she keeps swimming. She goes under again. I give her the paddle. No, and then she puts a hand around the paddle. In that moment that you had paused on, she looked back at me and she registered like, “Oh, this is another animal, with a face.”

For people just listening, you need to go watch the video. You guys are just looking at each other, and she’s looking at you. It’s so cool.

She looked right at me, but then she went, “No.” She was like, “Whatever you are, no.” She was like, “I’d rather die in the river. I’m so scared and I’m drowning.” She looked at me and she got scared and she jumped back in. And then I lifted her up, and I started talking in spider monkey. And then, the next moment, you see it. She just goes, “Sure.” And she wraps her tail… You see her tail is around the edge of the paddle. And she puts her hand around it, and then I lifted her. Because I’m taller than she is, I lifted her out of the river. And so now, instead of manhandling her like a raccoon you’re catching by the neck—

she’s holding on in her spider monkey way to the paddle, and she looks back over her shoulder. She looks at me, and I’m sitting there talking to her in spider monkey. And she looks at me, and you hear her. She goes… I can’t do the sound she makes, but she makes this spider monkey sound like, “Guh!” And she goes, “Fine.” And then she’s looking off the front end of the paddle as she’s looking at the jungle, and she looks back at me and she’s like… You could just tell. She’s like, “I have no idea what’s happening.”

But she accepted the help. And the difference is because I spoke her language in this case. And I know that would be one of those stories that people would nail me on every time if it wasn’t on camera. You can see the moment that she makes direct eye contact with me and goes, “Okay.” And then as soon as we get to shore, she jumps off and runs off into the forest, but it was—

It’s so… I mean, to me, just watching the video, it’s so amazing. Because she’s looking at you. Like, real… You can see that there’s an actual connection. That there’s like communication, like a social… You know, the way humans, when you’re maybe saving a human being that’s drowning or something like this. There’s that connection. It was beautiful to see, man. And then I read a little bit that spider monkeys are very intelligent, but they’re especially socially intelligent. So they have social connections with each other. They understand what that means. They understand what another entity means. So you speaking in a broken language… Probably is really important and a powerful way to indicate that, “Wow, you’re in network.” Like a foreigner, but—

It’s like you’re in a foreign country and someone goes, “Helping, helping.” Like, “Helping.” And you go, “Okay, sure.” Like, you know, “You’re not robbing me, you’re helping,” right? But no, they’re incredibly… And I’m telling you, I’ve had orphan spider monkeys so many times. And they wrap their tail around your neck and they hug you. And you realize that connection that they have with their mothers when they hold onto them in the canopy… When the loggers shoot the mother and then I’m taking care of this baby, they hold onto you. And they need that love and that connection more than they need food. If you put food or you put the warmth of a body, they’ll choose the connection— —over the sustenance.

Yeah, they really value the touching, that connection.

Very tactile. They’re very loving. They wrap their long spider monkey arms around each other. They’re very much like us. They hold their babies. When it rains, all the spider monkeys will get together and they’ll huddle up, and they’ll pull leaves down and they’ll all huddle up together. When it’s cold out, they get close. It’s very cute.

Yeah, that’s true for a lot of… I mean, they’re distant relatives, but that’s true for a lot of our relatives. The apes, the chimps, all of them, they have this intricate… They’re different. Sometimes more violent, sometimes more loving. But social interactions, it’s cool. It’s cool that way. Dangerous animal encounters

Yeah, I mean, you expect it from them. They’re practically us. To me, it’s when other animals show it. You know, the times that I’ve been on a trail and a jaguar has walked by and just been like, “Mm, ‘sup?” Keep walking. And it’s like, “Eh, it’s kind of cool of you not to eat me. I appreciate it.”

Has that happened to you?

Yeah. I thought somebody was walking on the trail behind me and I was setting a camera trap. And I put my finger up and I was going to go, “Could you walk any louder?” And I had my finger up and I’m crouched because I was setting a camera trap. A jaguar walked by and he literally was just like, shoom, shoom, shoom, just kicking leaves, just having fun, mouth open. And he just walked by and he looked at me and just went, “‘Sup?” Never broke stride. But like— —dead-ass eye contact with the bottom teeth out and that jaguar look of just like, “Hey.” I was like, “Okay.” Now I’m gonna have a full meltdown. Your system, you start sweating.

You’re like, “Whoa.” Because they’re also so beautiful. When you actually see a jaguar, and it’s like bright yellow and the teeth and all the muscles… It’s, you know…

What do you think you communicated to the jaguar that it didn’t kill you?

No, nothing. The jaguar was making the decisions. I didn’t do anything that like saved my life. He was just going somewhere. And because he’s the king there, he just went, “Uh.”

Yeah, probably also not threatened.

Not threatened at all.

I don’t know. But I think there is something to you. See, you’re just taking for granted the things that you’re putting out into the world. You’re probably radiating calm. Or not—

Or not…

…but non-threat.

Certainly non-threat. I also smell like an animal when I’m in the jungle, right? I shower in the river. I don’t use deodorant or shampoo or any of that stuff. So I don’t smell… You know, you can just imagine to animals that have a smell that’s four times as good as ours, that just your deodorant, just your conditioner— …just whatever other products, the detergent on your clothes— We smell like Times Square. We smell like a fire alarm to them.

You know, they’re like, “What is this thing? It smells very foreign and scary.” Everything’s scary. Speaking of scary, the jaguar was kind of friendly. He was like, “‘Sup?” It’s almost like he’d seen me before on the trail, so he was like, “Oh, it’s just you.” The one time I stood on the forest floor in India with a wild tiger and nobody else was there, the thing that the tiger did that was so unnerving… And again, a tiger’s back is so much bigger than you think. It’s like four jaguars. They’re so big. She wouldn’t look at me, and it was terrifying. She would look over there, she’d look like that, and never eye contact.

But it was like, “You’re as important to me as a stick.” And, you know, when you see two fighters square up and it’s all about the eye contact, trust me, you look through a person. You pretend they’re not even there. That tiger insulted me on such a profound and disarming level that I never forgot it. It was just like, “You matter as much as a sparrow. You’re just not one of the things that I care about.” She just was looking around and carried on doing it. And she was like, “I’m gonna walk this way.” And I was just like, “Holy shit, I’m gonna run.” You know, it’s just profound insignificance from this god of an animal with paws the size of dinner plates. And I was like, “Man, if she does, I don’t want her to look at me because if she looks at me, I’m gonna probably…”

That’s the end.

You know, that’s the end.

Yeah, it just shows how much more powerful she is. That’s probably the most terrifying animal on earth. Yeah, tigers—

The rock-paper-scissors of land predators. I think like polar bear and tiger gotta be the most scary.

Yeah, polar bear.

Polar bear’s pretty scary.

Yeah, you don’t fuck with a polar bear.

I don’t think they’re as fast as tigers, but I don’t think you’re gonna go fast on the ice and… But I mean, with a tiger, you can’t outrun it. If you climb a tree, they climb better than you. If you get in the car, they could smash through the door. If a tiger decides it wants you, pretty much nothing… Even if you had a gun, even if you had like a nine millimeter, it ain’t gonna stop a tiger that wants you.

In the jungle, have you ever felt in danger? Putting the humans aside, were there animals… We’ve talked about how humans are really the source of danger. You often speak about animals as a source of beauty and wonder— —and elegance and grace and all these things which they are. But I’m sure you’ve felt danger.

Yeah. I mean, I’m very aware that a hornet’s nest can kill you.

Oh, so the little guys.

The little guys suck. You know, the… I always think like when we were going through the jungle- …one machete whack, and again, people don’t realize how dense it is. You try to run, you get hung up on vines, you trip, you fall onto one of those trees with the black spikes. And then while you’re laying there dealing with all that, they’re just stinging you and your body— …goes into anaphylactic shock and you die instantly. That can very quickly just take you out.

You’re right. I mean, speaking of spikes, the biggest danger is not even the spikes. I mean, the spikes just—because it creates open wounds and then that can lead slowly—

…to infection. So it’s really that— …is the biggest danger.

Yeah. In the Amazon, again, I’ve never heard of a human-directed violent jaguar in our region. They just don’t attack people. I’d say mosquitoes are the thing that come after you. The snakes just want to be left alone. Even the venomous snakes. Again, the bushmaster, I grabbed an 11-foot bushmaster by the tail and he turned around, he lifted up to about this high off the ground. And if you could translate what he said, it was just, “Don’t make me do it.” It just said, “Make my day.”

See, but that’s the thing. You speak snake language.

And then I put the tail down.

You speak snake.

I went, “Okay.” I was like, “I’m sufficiently scared.” So the problem happens when you don’t know what you’re doing. So I’ll give you— …an example. You want a dangerous animal story, I’ll give you one. I was walking one time and I was trying to be responsible. It always happens when I’m trying to be responsible— …I get into trouble. I’m trying to be safe and I’m on the side of a stream and there’s elephants on the other side… I’m in India. There’s a deep, like a 12-foot thing, and then a stream and then on the other side there’s elephants. And I’m walking and I’m like, “I’m going to sit in a tree and I’m going to enjoy these elephants.” I’m going to make notes in my book like Jane Goodall.”

Then I came up against a cement wall and it was the back of a male elephant. And in India, it’s a male elephant that’s been harassed and had fire thrown at it and God knows what else. And if I translate what he said, he turned around and he just went, “What the fuck?” Like, he just looked at me like, “How dare you?” And then he just smacks apart the tree, turns around, and then that elephant was trying to kill me. That was not a mock charge. I threw off my backpack, zigzagged through the woods. He broke apart trees. If I had a GoPro on my back to show you what I saw—just the shrapnel and devastation of this thing just bashing through trees. And again, every bush that I encounter is a possible trip.

Every vine is a possible hangup. And then if they get you, he’ll step on you and crush you. And so I threw myself off the edge of this cliff, rolled down into the stream, and the elephant got to the edge of the cliff and almost fell on me. He got to the edge of the cliff and did one of these and then came back down on his hind feet. Picked up a stick, threw it at me. And the stick just smacked down next to me in the stream, and I remember I gave him the finger because it was like, “I’m alive.” And then he just stormed off into the jungle.

I mean, there’s nothing like an elephant.

There’s nothing like an elephant anywhere. I loved listening—I was so excited when I put on your podcast with the dinosaur guy— because he was like, “When a baby is born,” he was like, “it learns, you know, elephant, giraffe, T-Rex.” And I was like, “Holy shit.” You know? Along with like banana, water— sky is blue, and somehow these are initial things in your first few months on Earth. These are the characters you’re introduced to. Like, how the hell did T-Rex get there? They don’t even exist anymore. It’s like— It was just such a fun… and I could hear you smiling through the mic as I’m listening to it, and I was like, “Oh, this is gonna be a good one.”

Yeah. I mean, the dinosaur world is incredible. But like, the fact that you have such a predator evolve with such a gigantic jaw, so much destructive power is weird.

And then he broke my heart because he was talking about how the T-Rex and Stegosaurus—he’s like, “All the books have them together.” And he’s like— “They’re nowhere near each other.” “They did not exist anywhere near each other,” and I was like…

I want them to battle with each other.

Yes.

Speaking of elephants, I feel like we’ll be up for an adventure at some point. After all this chaos is over, do you think back in the jungle? Africa? India?

I think I would love to show you a herd of truly wild elephants in the African jungle. I think going on a boat trip through the Amazon, not a hiking one— —where we’re going through some really… there’s areas where you can get permits to go through areas where no one’s allowed to go. They’re completely protected areas, and you can just go for a week through areas where the animals have no idea what a human is. And so you can move through it, and it would be a little bit more of an enjoyable experience, not a survival situation. Go with J.J. in a boat and just travel through the Amazon. “Hey, maybe we protect this river.” And then the river’s mapped from north to south, and we just raft down with boat support. You know?

It’s really incredible to see how it’s all connected. I mean, the river is the thread that connects the whole story. And so it’s nice— —to see how it all is connected. And that’s why us starting in the mountains is also really nice, to see where it begins. But it keeps going. The story keeps going.

It keeps going. We did start in the mountains. An epic first day together. Writing, journaling, and great writer inspirations

And hopefully, people get a chance to see that video. So I gotta ask you about the writing. I mentioned you’re— —an incredible writer. What’s your writing process like for this book, Jungle Keeper, for Mother of God, for future books you’re writing? Are you like a Stephen King? Do you have a drinking thing where you go to some dark places in the basement? Do you write every single day? Do you take little notes here and there? Like, your notebook has a bunch of doodles— —a bunch of writing. What’s your process like?

I try to journal every day for a number of reasons. It’s accountability. It helps me keep track of… It’s fun to see your hopes and dreams. It’s fun to record the mundane moments that we all forget about, and that might be, like, cooking in the kitchen with your mother. That might be a fun walk you had with your dog. Little things that you think you’re going to remember everything, but you just don’t. And so I have piles of notebooks in my room. When something happens, I write it down. If a cool story happens, I will write it down, or if I find a leaf from an extinct tree I will make an etching of it. But I just…

Anything that happens that I find remarkable in any way, either for my own personal memory or for writing, I’ll write it down. And then when I go back to it later, one, I have a very good memory, and then two, the facts are there. And so when something happens like you rescue a spider monkey or something remarkable in life, you get to spend time with someone that you haven’t in a long time and you get that feeling of, “Oh, that’s why I’m such good friends with them.” You write these things down, and then it’s always there. And so I feel like whenever I don’t journal, I’m missing out on keeping my life and my memories. So yeah.

I don’t do that Stephen King thing. That quote about how “amateurs wait for inspiration, and the professionals, we go to work every day,” and he’s like, “10 pages a day,” or whatever it is. I don’t do that. I write when I feel like it. I’ll start thinking, “Oh, this is a perfect way to start this scene,” because at the moment this happened, I felt it so intensely. If we’re bringing people in and out, I’ll just be in a car or boat, and I’ll start thinking about it and I’ll go, “This is…” You’ve just got to carpe diem. And I’ll go, “Okay, where did that happen again?” and I’ll go to that page. And I’ll go, “Okay, so what exactly… …Happened.” Then you get the laptop, and yeah. So it’s brain to paper to laptop, always paper in between.

Well, how do you go from disparate notes to the final thing? Because it’s difficult to convey the experience through words, and you do that well. So, do you edit a lot? Do you iterate?

That’s where Stephen King was right. Because I look at writing like sculpting. You have to have something to sculpt. And so when you’re thinking of a story… Again, I love listening to great storytellers. And I actually love listening to bad stories, just like I like watching bad movies to see what they did wrong. When you listen to someone that starts a story and they have you hooked from the second they start, and then you’re like, “Wait, but how did that happen? And why was that happening? What happened next?” and they keep you going and they drop the information perfectly. And so every now and then, you figure that out in that moment of inspiration. So then I have my facts written down here.

And then I’ll do an outline on a page or something. But then I have to get it all out of me with a pen. Then I can move to… and I’ll almost just close my eyes and write the story out. You’re literally making your clay, making the shape of the thing. And then editing is the giving it details.

So, you do take passes like-

Oh, my God, yes.

Oh, editing. Yeah.

I mean, dozens and dozens. That’s where writing sucks. When you’re finishing a book… I’ll never do that again. So what I’m doing now with this last book, there’s so much that it covered.

And I was in the jungle, and it’d be like hiking for 10 hours a day, dealing with narco-traffickers, all this stuff, and then I’d have to edit at night. And it was like, “This is no way to live.” So now what I’m doing is I’m writing chapters as I feel like writing chapters. When something amazing or remarkable happens, I go, “This is going to be its own chapter.” I write it, edit it, and then I send it to my sister who is an expert editor and has lived more in literature than most people live in real life. And she’ll let me know if it’s good or bad, or needs to be tweaked, or moved along. When I get it back from her, it’s marked up. And now what I’m going to do is I’m just going to put those aside.

And then, the next time I want to write a book, it’s not starting from scratch on 300,000 words, it’s just here, and it’s ready. Much easier.

What kind of books do you think you might write in the future?

Well, there’s Mother of God, and now there’s Jungle Keeper. And then I’m already working on Endgame. Because there’s so much that has happened. I think I told you when you were there, but right before you came, me and JJ went to the back end, behind our river—

—to this horrible part of the Amazon that’s 10 times more lawless than where we are. And instead of having no people, there are people. And you want to talk about Amazonian No Country for Old Men? It’s the oil companies, and the missionaries, and the newly contacted tribe. There’s a people called the Nahua people, and they’re recently contacted, and they’ve been ripped out of the forest. And they’re standing there with their little bows and arrows. They’re tiny people. The normales are tall, the Nahua are small. And we just saw brutality in this horrific, horrible… It’s like Sicario. It’s just absolute lawlessness.

I remember the moment JJ looked at me and he said—and we both think of ourselves as tough, I think, until we get in these certain situations—he looked at me and he went, “We’re not safe.” And we looked at the people around us, and we’re at this side of the river port eight days up this river, and you could tell that everyone that was looking at us was making a calculation about how inconvenient it would be to kill us at this moment and how much money they could get. They were like: camera, watch, clothing, backpack.

And they were like, “That’s a nice backpack.” You could tell they were just shopping. JJ and me were like, “Where are we putting the tent tonight?” I was like, “We’re not staying here.” And then I was like, “Well, maybe we should stay here.” I didn’t know what to do. And then one of the Nahua people came over to JJ and was asking for food, and he made the mistake of explaining money to them. They’d never had money before.

And so he gave them a piece of money, a couple coins. And he was like, “Oh, if you just go over there, there’s a man that’ll sell you something and then you can eat it.” And the guy was like, “Bow and arrow?” And JJ was like, “No, no. Give him this and he’ll give you food,” and it worked. And then JJ got swarmed by like 60 of these tribals; they all had bows and arrows, hands out, and JJ was running with all these half-naked people behind him. That whole saga right there is… that chapter’s going to be called River of the Dolphin Fuckers because everyone we met on the river kept telling us—

I’d have my camera with me and I’d go, “Are there dolphins here?” And they’d go, “Yeah, there’s dolphins. And if you fuck one, be careful because they’ll pull you under.” I went, “Okay, weirdo,” to the first guy. And then we got to like eight hours further upriver, met the next guy and I had my camera out, and I’m like, “Hey, are there any dolphins here?” And he goes, “Yeah. If you fuck any, be careful because they’ll grab on and pull you under.” And I was like, “What?” And then like four more people told me the same thing. So I was like, “Okay.” You know?

The lesson we learned in the jungle: you know, horned anacondas, believe them.

Believe them. So apparently on that river, they were all trying to be good Samaritans and warn me about the clear and present dangers involved with amorous dolphin encounters.

So stylistically, I mean, that is a bit Cormac McCarthy.

Ooh, he would have loved it.

Are there writers you draw inspiration from like that? I mean, you’re very close to him in terms of—

It’s too big of a compliment.

—the style you plug into every once in a while. You jump around stylistically, actually.

I do. It depends, because sometimes I want to sink in and flex a little bit, which I don’t think people really enjoy, but I enjoy it. You know, just use all those flowery words— —and make these beautiful metaphors. But what I’m finding more and more is that modern readers aren’t really looking for that. They want an easy read. In my style of storytelling, people really enjoy and tend to thank me for more of an Anthony Bourdain style where you’re like, “So we found ourselves on the side of this river and we knew we were in danger. The reason we were in danger…” and you just start telling the story. Forget the… maybe once every two pages you can throw in one of those beautiful little zingers, but no one wants to watch you flex.

But also sometimes you go even more than… I don’t think Anthony Bourdain did like Hemingway-like minimal, like— —word, period— —word, like that. That’s another way to flex that I really like that you do sometimes, which is just— —less, and just power in the spacing, the silences. The unsaid is what does the driving.

I mean, that’s what’s so arresting about it. You read For Whom the Bell Tolls, and you know, “The air was crisp, and the water was sweet, and the wine was good, and the afternoon was warm.” And you’re like, “I know what that’s like.” These are not complicated sentences, but when he puts them together into a paragraph, you go, “Oh, yeah. I want to drink wine out of leather and lie by the side of that stream.” It sounds so beautiful. And so sometimes, I mean, just look at that. Look at that fire cracking on the horizon there. And it’s like sometimes the only way is just these simple statements, you know?

Writing’s beautiful. I love writing; I love reading it. Have you interacted with LLMs much? You know, AI systems like ChatGPT? There’s a bit of a scary and a sad aspect to the fact that they can generate language extremely well. But something is missing, and it’s very hard to put your finger on it.

My question to you is, I can pick out with stunning accuracy when someone sends me a message and they’ve passed it through ChatGPT— —I know. Somehow I could tell. I don’t know how, but I could tell. We’re at the point with images where we almost can’t tell anymore. I don’t know if that’s going to go away. Like you said, there’s something… one of the things that F. Scott Fitzgerald does is describe these incredibly human moments with such crystalline accuracy that you go, “It must have taken you a month. You must have studied life so much to string those words together.” In one book, he writes about someone screaming with such abandonment that at the highest register, her voice wobbled and cracked.

And you’re like, “Oh my God, I know what that sounds like.” And I wonder if it’s because you can say, “Write me The Jungle Book but make it sound like Cormac McCarthy wrote it.” And it’ll be like, “The jungle was dark and stern, and the boy was…” It’ll do it, and it’s amazing. My question to you is, at least right now, what are we picking up on in something as simple as a text message?

It is very difficult to define. But it’s important to keep thinking about because— … like, what makes us human?

You reassured me recently because I called you and I said, “I come out of the jungle and all anybody wants to talk about is AI.” And everyone’s like… It’s like people are walking themselves into the Matrix and asking to be hooked. Everyone’s just obsessed with this topic. And you were like, “Man, human art and human literature is going to actually become so valuable as this other thing happens.” And I expected the opposite answer. I thought you were going to be like, “Yeah, man, this really is. We’re taking off and everything’s going to change.” And you were like, “Man, real artists are going to become more appreciated.”

As more and more compelling and effective bots appear on the internet— … we’re going to value that less and less, I think. And we’re going to value in-person interaction more and more. And so, you know, artists showing art at galleries versus on the internet— … meeting in person. And, actually, it’s going to force people to be more authentic and real and raw with each other. That’s going to be the valuable resource.

I mean, I think already, AI aside, in today’s world, everyone’s so… I mean, movies have become so polished. There’s no weird, quirky stuff. There’s no risky stuff anymore. It’s all very curated. I’ve almost stopped watching movies. And I used to love movies. But it’s fun when they take risks, when they’re messy, when they’re real.

Yeah. I think Hollywood, the Hollywood stars, and the Hollywood movie-making process have become less and less popular because of that. So I can’t wait for movies to be reinvented—

Oh, I can’t wait

… like independent film. Just raw, edgy, dangerous, all that kind of stuff.

And all the actors we like are in TV shows on various streaming platforms. It’s like they’ve all just gone home. They’re not there. I was literally like, “Man, I miss movies. What happened?” I’m re-watching all the old movies that I like, and I was like, “Where is everybody?” What are they doing? It’s like they all have a TV series on Hulu or something, you know? It’s like, “Damn.”

Yeah. I think it’ll come. The raw, the dangerous, the edgy.

What we just described is almost perfect for… There’s a scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams makes them open their books. And the first page of the poetry book is like, “How do you identify a good poem?” He’s like, “A good poem can be…” and he makes a graph. He’s like, “By the subject of the poem, and then the accuracy with which it is described, you can tell whether or not it’s a good poem.” And he reads this, and the whole class is sitting there bored. And he’s like, “Now rip that page out of your book.” And they rip the page out. And then he’s like, “Now stand up. Describe something.” And he makes them bleat it and scream it. It’s almost exactly what we’re describing right now.

It’s like, yeah, you can turn it into a graph if you need to, but it’s something way messier than that.

Yeah. And Robin Williams, the person—

God.

…is a perfect example of a complicated, beautiful human. I miss him. And whenever I see clips of him come up, it’s just— I still to this day can’t make sense that a person like that can take their own life—somebody who’s brought so much joy to the world. It scares me, man. It scares me. I’m scared of my own mind in that way, you know? That he could be at the top of the world…

Mm-hmm. But he had an illness.

Yeah, that’s what I understand. Dude, life is a rollercoaster.

I’m telling you.

And you’re living through it.

As scary as that… like, that you can go down the Robin Williams hole, I’ll give you this. My very close friend, Gleb, has a story. He was in New York City as a kid and he saw Robin Williams walking down the street. He went up to him and said, “Oh my God, it’s Robin Williams.” And Robin Williams was like, “Yeah.” And he goes, “Can I have an autograph?” And he goes, “Do you have any paper?” And my friend was like, “No, I’m eleven.” And Robin Williams was like, “Go get some paper.” And Robin Williams’ manager was with him and he was like, “Robin, we don’t have time. We gotta get up there.” And he was like, “Hold on. I told the kid I’d give him a thing.”

He’ll be back.” And my friend heard this as he’s thinking, “Just please stay, please stay.” Like his whole life depended on this. And he ran into a diner, grabbed a napkin, and ran back out into the street. It took him a few minutes, and he said Robin Williams was sitting there, and the irate manager was there being like, “Come on, let’s go.” Robin had waited there and signed the napkin for him, and actually did it with a smile and a wink.

Yeah, man. You can bring a lot of joy to the world. Never forget that. All those little interactions. I love it. I love it.

That was another one of Jane’s amazing quotes that I couldn’t reproduce, but it’s just that you don’t realize the degree to which the things you do each day matter— …even if it’s just to the people around you. To the people around you, you are their entire life experience— …if they’re your kids, your parents, your partner. So yeah, the things you do. And if you can manage to put that extra energy where you put a little magic on it, where it is fun—showing up home with something, or playing with the kids in a way that surprises them. I had a good friend of mine.

This guy Vinnie, he told me—I called him and said, “What are you doing?” He said, “Oh, I have a whole plan set up. It’s supposed to be really good stars tonight. I’m putting my kids to bed. I’m putting my daughter to bed. I’m gonna wake her up in the middle of the night and I’m gonna have a candle. She’s never seen it. And I’m gonna take her up to the roof to go stargazing.” He’s like, “But I want her to sleep.” And he’s like, “You know, remember when you were a kid and you would wake up?” And it’s like he was curating a magical experience for her to see the stars, making warm tea, and all this. Man, you can just make it so great.

Jane Goodall’s the reason you met this guy.

That’s right.

You’ve continuously spoken really highly of him, and he gave me this book that he has recently written, Echoes from Eden. Signed it.

Yeah. Dax, A, saved my life, and B, is the example of what everybody wishes. Dax made an amazing company, amassed an amazing fortune, and then said, “I’m gonna use it for good.”

He’s given a lot of resources, a lot of love, a lot of effort to helping the Amazon rainforest and the environment in general. And he’s one of the only guys I know who has a sexier beard than you.

Yeah, he’s got me beat big time. That thing is—

He wrote, “Thank you, brother, for your love of the wild. This book is about the heroes fighting on the front line for nature. Together we can protect Earth’s last wild places. Speak soon, Dax.”

He supported all these initiatives. He went to the Amazon with Jane. He supported Jungle Keepers. He’s supported Sea Shepherd. And so he really went out and said, “Okay, what are the environmental projects that are doing the most good? And where do I want to put my resources?” And everyone always whines about that, like, “How come these guys don’t?” And it’s like he did, and he got a lot done. Then he went and visited all those projects—sea turtles, Indonesian orangutans, working with Jane. So that book is sort of a State of the Union on where conservation is at, with a lot of knowledge about how all the different strategies…

It’s so different protecting sea turtle eggs versus trying to save a river in the Amazon versus Jane’s global message of hope. And then he has a guy in there who’s trying to save a specific part of I think Sumatra, and it’s just amazing stuff.

The Congo.

The Congo. And then he actually took the time to go to these places and see the operations on the ground.

And are you still working with him?

Yeah. Well, the way it happened in my life was the one time I quit conservation was right around the time COVID hit and I was going through a divorce. I was 32 years old, and I had no job, no nothing. JJ’s mom had COVID. Don Ignacio, the shaman, had COVID. Pico’s leg was coming off. It was like nothing was working. Nobody could go anywhere. And I called Mohsin and I was like, “I quit.” I was like, “We’re never going back to the jungle.” The loggers just went out and were tearing down everything. I just said, “I’ve got nothing.” In that absolute black depression, I called him and I said, “I quit.”

I’m gonna go get a job. I guess I’ve just been like a jungle Peter Pan, and it’s time to grow up.” I was really embarrassed at the time that I did that. And then I spent like four days just laying in bed with no idea what to do. The only thing I can do is this. And I had talked to Dax months earlier, told him my plan for protecting the river, for making a ranger team, and he’d been looking over the budgets and spreadsheets and seeing if this was real. He was still forming Age of Union. And then four days after I quit, the phone rings and it’s Dax. And he goes, “Hey, I looked over the budget by the way. I’d like to make a 10-year commitment to Jungle Keepers. Let’s go.”

He had no idea what I was going through, and he was just like, “Let’s go.” Going from that depressed to that inspired in a single conversation… you could get the bends from that.

Yeah, and it’s not just the money. It’s having somebody who believes in you.

No, it’s that he believes we can do it. Money means tuna cans and gasoline and being able to buy shoes, you know? We never had those things before. We were just living in the jungle watching our bodies decay. And he was like, “No, I know how to run a company. I can tell what you guys need to run an organization.” And he did that and has stuck by us. He came not that long ago to the Amazon, and we— And we took him around, and he looked around and he went, “I’ve never seen people…” Because when we started, he said, “You guys remind me of a startup. You’re a mess.” And that was really right before Stephon had come in.

And so now, he’s seeing ranger teams and boats going up and down. We have complex systems and a donor program, and all these things are working well. We’re actually making progress and we have annual reports and all this data. And he’s like, “People have donor fatigue, where they donate money and they don’t know where it’s going. Here, they can see what’s happening.” And so having someone like Dax in your corner is a miracle, really. In the book, it’s gonna sound… again, a lot of the things that happened to me in my life sound like bad writing.

You know in the movie when they’ve got the gun against their head and they’re on the ground, and you go, “They’re not getting out of this one.” And then someone bursts through the door and saves them. That’s just happened too many times to me. It sounds like bad writing, but it’s a really good life.

Since you mentioned Stefan one more time— …one of the things I forgot to mention, one of my happiest moments in life, and I had many of them in the jungle with you, is just talking late at night after ayahuasca, funny enough— …chatting with Stefan and Dan and you, and giggling and just talking about life and everything. And Dan is a guy I have to give a shout-out to. You should go follow him on Instagram. Life with Dan. He’s an incredible wildlife photographer. I’ve seen him. He’s worked quite a lot with you. He has a love of nature, a love of the wilderness, a love of beauty, and is extremely good at taking pictures, but just goes to the edges with you. He’s the only guy I’ve seen with two giant cameras able to follow you into the darkness.

Well, Dan… First of all, that picture I showed you where I’m in the tree, because I told you the story about with JJ where I climbed the giant tree. Well, this is years later, I climbed it with Dan. Dan was there, and so he flew the drone up and got me in the tree. But what Dan’s a really good example of is, like you were saying, what would you say to the kids? Dan listened to our first podcast while living in Singapore, and he’s a young filmmaker.

He signed himself up—again, just get out there—to come on a Tamandua Expeditions with my company, and he showed up. Sure enough, their boat broke down while I was off doing Jungle Keepers stuff, and someone was like, “Yo, their boat broke down.” So we show up and I haul their boat and he comes up to me and goes, “I’m such a big fan. I just wanted to say hi.” I said, “Well, great. Hello. Let’s get you back on the river.” And then someone came up to me and they said, “You know, he’s a really good photographer.” I said, “Everybody’s a good photographer today. That’s great. Amazing.”

We have Stefan and Mohsin.” I said, “What else do we need?” And then someone I trust was like, “Hey, listen, look at his stuff. It’s not normal.” And then I watched a few of his videos and I went, “Holy shit.” And I went, “Would you ever think of coming down for a few weeks to film?” And at the time, he was like, “No way.” He was so amazed. And then like now we’re bros. And we film together all the time. But he put himself in the position where he has the skill, the insane skill. I mean, some of his things, he’s doing tracking shots of a white-winged sparrow over the water where he’s in the boat with an 800-millimeter lens— Getting these insane shots. I’ve never seen a talent like him with video.

But wildlife photography and documentary filmmaking in general, it’s not just about the competence of being able to pull off a difficult shot. It’s the patience required and the discipline to just sit there and wait. I mean, when we went out into the jungle, he waited.

Yeah. No, I mean, even looking on this page, that shot of the— …of the emerald tree boa there, he got up before dawn to wait for the sideways light because he had a vision of lighting the snake from the side, and then the macaws coming off the clay lick. How many days at the clay lick till he got the explosion of macaws? And I’m up in the tree and he’s on the walkie-talkie. And then also your lenses are gonna fog. You have to be able to hike and do everything everybody else is doing, and your job. I mean, the dude is…

You attract a lot of incredible people because the mission is clear and there’s just a vibrancy and energy to the whole thing. It’s exciting. That’s why the best people come to work with you, come to hang out with you.

It’s become an amazing team. I look around at the people and I go, “How did this happen?”

But it is getting more intense and dangerous and so on. I have to ask you the thing we’ve talked about. What do you think you’ll do when you’re getting older? This is pretty intense. This is pretty insane. Where do you see yourself years from now?

I want to protect this river. We have to protect this river in the next year and a half or else we’ll lose the chance. First book, I got to the Amazon and it was wild. Second book, we built this amazing organization and we got so close. It’ll be like those movies, like Blow, where it’s like, “For a time it was amazing,” and then at the end it’s not so great.

By the way, great movie.

Great movie. But I’m writing this story as it happens and the endgame might be written by somebody else. Or we just got really close and then it all fell apart. But we’re 130,000 acres of the way. If we make it to 300,000, I think enough people are going to learn about this. It’s going to tidal wave. We’re going to make an amazing documentary about how we protected the wildest place on earth. And then I would love to have a few kids, get a PhD, teach other conservationists around the world how to do this to save really wild places, keep inspiring people, keep writing books, and keep going on expeditions. I don’t have any problems with that.

I can’t do this much longer because the pressure of wondering if it’s going to be okay—I’ve used all of it that I can. My Lord of the Rings analogy of carrying the ring, it’s like you can only do that for so long. And so I’m actually very excited to… I need to know that it’s safe. I mean, that monkey that I rescued out of the river, the toucan, Lucas, who comes back to visit us. We just saw a giant anteater not that long ago with Dax in the jungle. I know these animals and I’m responsible for protecting their home. It would be so amazing to bring people to the treehouse and show them this amazing place and put out documentaries. So I have no problem imagining a transition period. I’d like to transition out of Blood Diamond and go to more of the professor role after this.

You mean like an Indiana Jones type of professor?

Yeah. Running from the tribes. As long as it doesn’t go supernatural at the end, I’ll be very happy. That always kind of let me down.

Well, thank you for giving basically everything you’ve got towards this mission. And thank you for being who you are. It’s been the honor of a lifetime to be able to call you a friend and to have this conversation, brother. This is the third time we’ve spoken. I think we’ll talk at least 10 more times, and I think I speak for everybody in saying thank you, and please don’t die trying to save the rainforest.

I have to say thank you to you because our first conversation changed everything. It really did. It brought so many more people onto the mission. I think it also lifted me up because, as we often acknowledge, this can weigh you down. I often do get weighed down and I lose hope myself. And then I get lifted up by moments like that where someone I’m a huge fan of and who I respect so much reaches out and goes, “Do you want to come to Austin and do this podcast I do?” And I respond, “The Lex Fridman podcast?” But you’ve really changed the narrative and allowed this to be a reality.

And everybody, go pre-order Jungle Keeper, the book, available everywhere. And if you can, donate on junglekeepers.org. This is an important mission, an ultra-competent team, and this is such a beautiful part of the world that I really hope we protect. So thank you for talking today, and now let’s go eat.

Thank you, brother.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosolie. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, or you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And once more, let me say thank you for everything. Thank you for your support. Thank you for the love. And thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time. This entry was posted in transcripts on January 13, 2026 by

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Host of Lex Fridman Podcast. Research Scientist at MIT, working on human-AI interaction, robotics, and machine learning. View all posts by Lex Fridman →